| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Edgar Allan Poe | American author/poet. (1809-1849) Strong admirer of Shelley. D.H. Lawrence was fond of him. Leader of the American Romantics. A progenitor of Gothic fiction in the United States. |
| The Murders on the Rue Morgue | E.A. Poe. One of the 1st detective stories, and the 1st locked room mystery. Auguste Dupin investigates a series of murders, whose victims are brutally killed in apparently inaccessible rooms along a street in Paris. The 'OurangOutang' did it. |
| Annabel Lee | Poe's last poem. A man mourning a dead lover. 6 stanzas, 3 with 6 lines and 3 with 8, with the rhyme pattern differing slightly in each one. The woman dies because 'the angels' envied the couple's great love. (And neither the angels in Heaven above/Nor the demons down under the sea/Can ever dissever my soul from the soul/Of the beautiful ----..../ |
| Auguste Dupin | 'The Purloined Letter,' 'The Mystery of Marie Roget,' 'The Murders on the Rue Morgue'... stories by Poe, all featuring... |
| Uncle Tom's Cabin | Harriet Beecher Stowe. Shelby family, Eliza, Tom Loker, Cassy, Mr. Haley, St. Clares, Eva, Simon Legree, Emmeline, George. |
| H.L. Mencken | Journalist, satirist and social critic, known as the 'Sage of Baltimore' and the 'American Nietzsche.' Often regarded as one of the most influential American writers of the early 20th century. Influenced heavily by Twain and Swift. |
| The American Language | H.L. Mencken's 1919 book about changes Americans has made to the English language. "...the queer words which go into the making of 'United Statese.'" Mencken wanted to 'Americanisms' against the English, whom he increasingly detested. |
| Kate Chopin | American. (1850-1904) (novella) 'The Awakening,' (short story) 'The Story of an Hour.' |
| The Awakening | Novella by Kate Chopin. Edna Pontellier, wife and mother from New Orleans, has a semi-affair with Robert Lebrun. When Lebrun refuses to stay with her, and her husband makes an effort to get her back, she exhausts herself swimming, and drowns. |
| Story of an Hour | Short story by Kate Chopin. Mrs. Millard, a woman with heart trouble, whose husband has apparently died in a train accident. When Josephine and Richard break the news to her, she starts whispering, "Free! Body and soul free!" Mr. Millard reappears, just as his wife dies "of joy that kills." |
| Stephen Crane | 'Red Badge of Courage,' 1895. 'Maggie: A Girl of the Streets,' 'The Open Boat and Other Tales,' 'Whilomville Stories.' He befriended Joseph Conrad and Henry James, and died of tuberculosis at 28. |
| Maggie: A Girl of the Streets | Tragic novel by Crane. Maggie, Jimmie, Pete the bartender. Naive girl, vicious matriarch, drunken brawling, neighborhood scandal, disgrace. |
| The Blue Hotel | Stephen Crane. A place in Nebraska near the railroad tracks. The tale of a Swede, who, upon arriving, thinks that he is in the old West and comports himself as such, which causes conflict, ultimately leading to the Swede's death in a bar-fight. |
| The Blue Hotel | "He might have been in a deserted village. We picture the world as thick with conquering and elate humanity, but here, with the bugles of the tempest pealing, it was hard to imagine a peopled earth.... The conceit of man was explained by this storm to be the very engine of life. One was a coxcomb not to die in it. However, the Swede found a saloon." |
| Theodore Dreiser | (1871-1945) American naturalist author known for dealing with the gritty reality of life. 'Sister Carrie,' 'An American Tragedy.' |
| Sister Carrie | Theodore Dreiser. (1900) Caroline Meeber is a country girl who moves to Chicago, where she pursues the American Dream by embarking on a life of sin, rather than working in a sweatshop and living in a squalid apartment. Druet (the man who hires her first), Hurstwood (the man who marries her and then commits suicide after she abandons him). |
| An American Tragedy | Theodore Dreiser. (1925) Clyde Griffiths, whose troubles with women and the law take him from his religious upbringing in Kansas city, to the town of Lycurgus, New York. Materialistic Hortense Briggs, farm girl Roberta Alden (who drowns), aristocratic Sondra Finchley. Clyde is found guilty of murdering Roberta, and sentenced to death. Abortion, societal ills. |
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