Literature and Its Writers: A Compact Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama Book

Table of Contents Preface for Instructors

Introduction: Connecting with Literature
Student Essay: Raymond Carver’s “Creative Writing
101”

Part One: Fiction

1. What Is a Short Story?
Grace Paley, Samuel
Commentary: Edgar Allan Poe

2. The Elements of Fiction: A Storyteller’s Means Plot • Character • Setting • Point of View • Voice and Style • Theme Commentaries: Anton Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, Frank O’Connor, David S. Reynolds

3. The Art of the Story: Reading, Thinking,
and Writing about Short Fiction Reading Short Fiction
Guidelines for Reading Short Fiction
Sample Close Reading Critical Thinking about Short Fiction Writing about Short Fiction
Sample Essay: Paley’s Point of View in Samuel
Commentaries: Ralph Ellison, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, J. Hillis Miller, Grace Paley
Related Section: Part Four: Writing about Literature

4. Stories and Storytellers
Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
Commentary: Sherman Alexie Isabelle Allende, An Act of Vengeance
Commentary: Isabelle Allende Margaret Atwood, Happy Endings
James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues
Commentary: James Baldwin Toni Cade Bambara, The Lesson
Russell Banks, Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Rowboat
Connections: Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants; David Foster Wallace, Good People
Aimee Bender, The Rememberer
Connection: Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Raymond Carver, Cathedral
Commentary: Raymond Carver Lan Samantha Chang, Water Names
Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Pet Dog
Connection: Joyce Carol Oates, The Lady With the Pet Dog
Commentaries: Anton Chekhov; Richard Ford Kate Chopin, Desiree’s Baby; The Story of an Hour
Commentary: Kate Chopin Junot Diaz, How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl,
Whitegirl, or Halfie
Ralph Ellison, Battle Royal
Commentary: Ralph Ellison Louise Erdrich, The Red Convertible
William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily
Commentary: William Faulkner Richard Ford, Leaving for Kenosha
Commentary: Richard Ford Gabriel García Márquez, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
Commentaries: Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
Sandra M. Gilbert, and Susan Gubar Susan Glaspell, A Jury of Her Peers
Connections: Susan Glaspell, Trifles; Lynn Nottage, POOF!
Commentary: Leonard Mustazza Nadine Gordimer, Some Are Born to Sweet Delight
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown
Commentarie: Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants
Connections: Russell Banks, Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Rowboat;
David Foster Wallace, Good People
Amy Hempel, Church Cancels Cow
Zora Neale Hurston, Spunk
Commentaries: Zora Neale Hurston; Alice Walker Shirley Jackson, The Lottery
Commentary: Shirley Jackson Ha Jin, A Bad Joke
Edward P. Jones, Bad Neighbors
Commentary: Wyatt Mason James Joyce. Araby
Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist; Jackals and Arabs; The Metamorphosis
Conversations: Gustav Janouch; John Updike;
R. Crumb and David Zane Mairowitz; John Gardner Jamaica Kincaid, Girl
Commentary: Jamaica Kincaid Jumpha Lahiri, A Real Durwan
Commentary: Jhumpa Lahiri D.H. Lawrence, The Rocking-Horse Winner
Related Commentary: D. H. Lawrence Jack London, To Build a Fire
Guy de Maupassant, The Necklace
Commentary: Kate Chopin Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener
Commentaries: Herman Melville, J. Hillis Miller Lorrie Moore, How to Become a Writer
Alice Munro, Dance of the Happy Shades
Joyce Carol Oates, The Lady with the Pet Dog; Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
Connection: Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Pet Dog
Conversations: Joyce Carol Oates, Don Moser; Matthew C. Brennan Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Commentary: Bobbie Ann Mason Flannery O’Connor, Good Country People; A Good Man is Hard to Find
Conversations: Flannery O’Connor; Sally Fitzgerald Tillie Olsen, I Stand Here Ironing
Edgar Allan Poe, The Cask of Amontillado; The Fall of the House of Usher
Conversations: Edgar Allan Poe; D.H.
Lawrence; Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; J. Gerald Kennedy; David S.
Reynolds Annie Proulx, Job History
Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman
Commentary: Paula Gunn Allen Helen Simpson, Homework
John Steinbeck, The Chrysanthemums
Amy Tan, Two Kinds
Commentary: Amy Tan John Updike, A&P
Commentary: John Updike Helena Maria Viramontes, The Moths
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Harrison Bergeron
Alice Walker, Everyday Use
Commentary: Alice Walker David Foster Wallace, Good People
Connections: Russell Banks, Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Rowboat;
Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants
Brad Watson, Seeing Eye
Commentary: Brad Watson Eudora Welty, A Worn Path
Commentary: Eudora Welty William Carlos Williams, The Use of Force
Tobias Wolff, Say Yes
Hisaye Yamamoto, The Brown House

5. Commentaries on Stories and Storytellers
Sherman Alexie, Superman and Me
Paula Gunn Allen, Whirlwind Man Steals Yellow Woman
Isabelle Allende. Short Stories by Latin American Women
James Baldwin, Autobiographical Notes
Raymond Carver, On Writing; Creative Writing 101
Anton Chekhov, Technique in Writing the Short Story
Kate Chopin, How I Stumbled upon Maupassant
Ralph Ellison, The Influence of Folklore on Battle Royal William Faulkner, The Meaning of A Rose for Emily Richard Ford, On Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, A Feminist Reading of Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Undergoing the Cure for Nervous Prostration
Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me
Shirley Jackson, The Morning of June 28, 1948 and The Lottery Jhumpa Lahiri, On Writing Fiction

Bobbie Ann Mason, On Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried Wyatt Mason On Edward P. Jones’s Fiction
Herman Melville, Blackness in Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown J. Hillis Miller, Who Is He? Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener Grace Paley, A Conversation with Ann Charters
Elaine Showalter, On Glaspell's A Jury of Her Peers

Amy Tan, In the Canon, for All the Wrong Reasons
Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston: A Cautionary Tale and a Partisan View
Brad Watson, On Southern Fiction
Eudora Welty, Is Phoenix Jackson’s Grandson Really Dead?

6. Conversations on Stories and Storytellers On Meaning and Intention in Franz Kafka’s Stories
Gustav Janouch, Kafka’s View of The Metamorphosis John Updike, Kafka and The Metamorphosis R. Crumb and David Zane Mairowitz, A Hunger Artist
John Gardner, On Myths and Literary Fairy Tales
On Revisions of Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates, Smooth Talk: Short Story Into Film
Don Moser, The Pied Piper of Tuscon
Matthew C. Brennan, Plotting Against Chekhov:
Joyce Carol Oates and The Lady with the Dog
On Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction
Flannery O’Connor, From Letters, 1954-55; Writing Short Stories;

The Element of Suspense in A Good Man Is Hard to Find Sally Fitzgerald, Southern Sources of A Good Man Is Hard to Find
On Critical Views of Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories
Edgar Allan Poe; The Importance of the Single Effect in a Prose Tale
D.H. Lawrence, On The Fall of the House of Usher and The Cask of Amontillado Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, ANew Critical Reading

of The Fall of the House of Usher J. Gerald Kennedy, On The Fall of the House of Usher David S. Reynolds, Poe’s Art of Transformation in The Cask of Amontillado

Part Two: Poetry

7. What Is a Poem?
Muriel Rukeyser, The Sixth Night: Waking
Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica
Marianne Moore, Poetry
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Constantly Risking Absurdity
Ann Merebroker, A Mere Glimpse
Nina Penfold, My Poems
Ted Kooser, Selecting a Reader
Alice Walker, I Said to Poetry
Commentary: Louise Glück

8. The Elements of Poetry: A Poet’s Means
Emily Dickinson, A word is dead
Words and Their Sound
Alliteration and Assonance
Walt Whitman, A Farm Picture
Onomatopoeia Rhyme
A.E. Housman, Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Gwendolyn Brooks, Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood
A Range of Rhyme
Robert Frost, A Time to Talk
Stevie Smith, Not Waving but Drowning
Poems for Further Reading
Sir Thomas Wyatt, They Flee from Me
Ben Jonson, On My First Son
Robert Herrick, To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
Christina Rossetti, Song
Dorothy Parker, Indian Summer
Theodore Roethke, My Papa’s Waltz
Elizabeth Jennings, One Flesh
Song and Rhyme
Lou Reed, Chelsea Girls
Bruce Springsteen, The River
Rhythm Accent and Meter Blank Verse
The Pattern Poem
George Herbert, Easter Wings
Commentary: T.S. Eliot, Richard Howard

9. The Elements of Poetry: A Poet’s Meanings
Tone
Edwin Arlington Robinson, Miniver Cheevy
Edwin Arlington Robinson, Richard Cory
Words and Their Meaning
Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky
Denotative and Connotative Meaning Diction Syntax Imagery
John Keats, To Autumn
Elizabeth Bishop, The Bight
Simile and Metaphor
Galway Kinnell, The Road Between Here and There
Figurative and Literal Language Symbol Figures of Speech
Rolf Aggestam, Lightning Bolt
Poems for Further Reading
Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress
William Wordsworth, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
George Gordon, Lord Byron, She Walks in Beauty
Emily Bronte, If grief for grief
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
Commentaries: Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Mark Strand

10. The Types of Poetry: A Poet’s Forms Types of Verse
Elinor Wylie, Village Mystery
Narrative Poetry
The Ballad
Barbara Allan
Ballads for Further Reading
The Daemon Lover
Robert Duncan, The Ballad of Mrs. Noah
Dudley Randall, The Ballad of Birmingham

Robert Creeley, Ballad of the Despairing Husband
Lyric Poetry
H.D., Mid-day
e.e. cummings, (O sweet spontaneous)
Carolyn Kizer, For Jan, in Bar Maria
Li-Young Lee, Eating Alone
Lorna Dee Cervantes, The Body as Braille
Hilda Morley, I Remember
The Ode
John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind
The Elegy
Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
Margaret Gibson, October Elegy
The Sonnet
William Shakespeare, That time of year thou mayst in me behold
Sonnets for Further Reading
Francesco Petrarca, Love’s Inconsistency
John Donne, Death, be not proud
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, How Do I Love Thee?
Countee Cullen, Yet Do I Marvel
Rita Dove, Sonnet in Primary Colors
Billy Collins, American Sonnet
The Epigram and the Aphorism
Dorothy Parker, News Item
Dorothy Parker, From A Pig’s Eye View of Literature Wendy Cope, Two Cures for Love
The Limerick
Dylan Thomas, The last time I slept with the Queen
Wendy Cope, The fine English poet, John Donne
J.S. Walker, On T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock”
Richard Leighton Green, Apropos Coleridge’s
“Kubla Khan”
A. Cinna, On Hamlet
Commentaries: Rita Dove, Erica Jong

11. The Types of Poetry: Other Poetic Forms
Elizabeth Bishop, Sestina
Judith Barrington, Villanelles for a Drowned Parent, VI
Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Open Form
Sharon Olds, The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb
The Prose Poem
Robert Bly, Welcoming a Child in the Limantour Dunes
Marcia Southwick, A Star Is Born in the Eagle Nebula
Robert Hass, A Story about the Body
Haiku
Matsuo Basho, Ripening barley
Matsuo Basho, Day by day
Matsuo Basho, Having no talent
Tanaguchi Buson, The sea in springtime
Koboyashi Issa, Children imitating cormorants
Masaoka Shiki, The ocean freshly green
Richard Wright, I would like a bell
Richard Wright, A soft wind at dawn
Ronald Baatz, as though the whole earth
Ronald Baatz, our beautiful old love
Imagism
Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro
T.E. Hulme, Images
H.D., Oread
William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow
Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Dramatic Poetry
The Dramatic Monologue
Robert Browning, My Last Duchess
Poems for Further Reading
Nick Carbo, American Adobo
Marisa de los Santos, Because I Love You
Naomi Shihab Nye, Making a Fist
Margaret Atwood, Siren Song
Wislawa Szymborska, True Love
Commentaries: Ezra Pound, Mark Strand

12. Poet to Poet
John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
Quotation Paraphrase Allusion
Samuel Charters, A Man Dancing Alone on an Island in Greece
Imitation Parody
Leigh Hunt, Jenny Kissed Me
T.S. Kerrigan, Elvis Kissed Me
Address and Tribute
Ezra Pound, A Pact
Allen Ginsberg, A Supermarket in California
Maxine Kumin, Mother of Everyone
Galway Kinnell, Oatmeal
Commentaries: Marilyn Chin, T.S. Eliot,
Samuel Charters

13. The Art of the Poem: Reading, Thinking,
and Writing about Poetry Reading Poetry
Anonymous, Western Wind
e.e. cummings, since feeling is first
Guidelines for Reading Poetry

Sample Close Reading

Linda Pastan, To a Daughter Leaving Home
Critical Thinking about Poetry Writing about Poetry
Sample Essay: A Moving Lyric: Pastan’s "To A Daughter Leaving Home"
Related Sections: Part Four, Writing about Literature

14. Poets Speaking Out Poetry of Protest and Social Concern
Nikki Giovanni, Adulthood
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, The World Is a Beautiful Place
Denise Levertov, Mid-American Tragedy
Carolyn Forché, The Colonel
Joan Jobe Smith, Feminist Arm Candy for the Mafia and Sinatra
Fred Voss, I Once Needed a Chance Too
Charles Bukowski, Beach Boys
Faces of War
Stephen Crane, War is Kind
Thomas Hardy, The Man He Killed
Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est
Stephen Vincent Benet, 1935
Randall Jarrell, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
Ed Webster, From San Joaquin Valley Poems:
1969
Yusef Komunyakaa, Facing It
Black Consciousness, Black Voices
Phillis Wheatley, On Being Brought from Africa to America
Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sympathy
James Weldon Johnson, Sunset in the Tropics
Etheridge Knight, The Idea of Ancestry
Amiri Baraka, Legacy
Audre Lorde, Hanging Fire
Lucille Clifton, to ms. ann
Women’s Consciousness, Women’s Voices
Muriel Rukeyser, Myth
Mina Loy, One O’Clock at Night
Louise Glück, First Memory
Alicia Suskin Ostriker, The Change
Marilyn Chin, How I Got that Name
The Living Earth
From a Zuni Invocation

Primo Levi, Almanac
Kenneth Rexroth, Heart of Herakles
Gary Snyder, Straight-Creek—Great Burn
Mary Oliver, Mussels
Mark Strand, Shooting Whales
John Clellon Holmes, Fayetteville Dawn (1)

15. Conversations on Modern Traditions in Poetry Poets of the Harlem Renaissance
Alain Locke, From The New Negro Langston Hughes, From The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain James Weldon Johnson, The Creation
Angelina Weld Grimke, The Black Finger
Angelina Weld Grimke, Tenebris
Claude McKay, If We Must Die
Claude McKay, The Lynching
Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Countee Cullen, From Heritage Countee Cullen, Incident
Arna Bontemps, A Black Man Talks of Reaping
The Beat Poets
John Clellon Holmes, From This Is the Beat Generation Allen Ginsberg, From Kaddish Gregory Corso, I am 25
Bob Kaufman, From Jail Poems d.a. levy, perhaps #5
Diane DiPrima, Revolutionary Letter #57
Frank O’Hara, The Day Lady Died
Richard Brautigan, It’s Raining in Love
Gary Snyder, What I Have Learned
Joanne Kyger, October 29, 1963, Wednesday
Philip Whalen, I Give Up
Poetry of the Chaps and Zines
Dennis Donoghue, The Issue Is Not the Dearth of Poets or Poems
Gerald Locklin, The Small Presses and Little Magazines: A Few Reflections
Ann Menebroker, Repossessed
Ann Menebroker, The Second Flood and then the Fire
Ann Menebroker, Love
Tom Kryss, Of Dry Strings and River Beds
Tom Kryss, What Harmonica?
Tom Kryss, Night Storm
Joan Jobe Smith, The Carol Burnett Show
Joan Jobe Smith, Dancing in the Frying Pan
Ronald Baatz, The Oldest Songs
Ronald Baatz, Only for the Old and Fragile
Gerald Locklin, A Loser

Gerald Locklin, So It Goes

Gerald Locklin, Second Hand Television
Charles Bukowski, writer’s block
Charles Bukowski, huge ear rings
Difficult Poems
Charles Bernstein, The Difficult Poem
Charles Olson, Projective Verse
Charles Olson, Le Bonheur
Denise Levertov, From Matins Amy Clampitt, Beach Glass
Les Murray, An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow
Jorie Graham, I Watched a Snake
Connection: Emily Dickinson, A narrow fellow in the grass.

16. Poems and Poets
Matthew Arnold

Dover Beach
Commentary: James Dickey.
W.H. Auden,

Musée des Beaux Arts Stop All the Clocks Lay your sleeping head, my love
Elizabeth Bishop

The Fish One Art
Commentary: Brett C. Millier.
William Blake

From Songs of Innocence: Introduction
The Lamb Holy Thursday The Little Boy Lost The Little Boy Found From Songs of Experience: Introduction
The Sick Rose The Tyger London A Poison Tree The Garden of Love
Anne Bradstreet

To My Dear and Loving Husband Before the Birth of One of Her Children In Memory of my Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, who deceased August, 1665, being a Year and a Half Old