• Early Fiction text pg101• Although other writers in the US had some

success before him, Washington Irving was the first to be popular enough to make a living from his writing.

• His most famous stories are two short-stories which fit into the gothic genre.

• ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ are both stories that modern Americans would probably be familiar with, even if they hadn’t actually read the books.

• Rip Van Winkle is the story of a lazy man who has a nagging wife.

• One day he goes out into the woods to get away from her, and after meeting some strange ghosts, he falls asleep under a tree.

• When he wakes up, he goes home only to find that twenty years have passed while he was asleep, and his annoying wife is dead.

• The other story, ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, is about a man who disappears from his village, and the villagers think that he has been killed by the ‘Headless Horseman’.

• The ‘Headless Horseman’ is a legend in the village about a soldier who had his head shot off by a cannon, and who haunts the scene of the battle.

• The legend of the Headless Horseman had been around before Washington Irving’s story, but he made it famous, and it is a well known idea even today.

• The term ‘gothic’ used to describe this sort of literature comes originally from Europe.

• During the early centuries AD, there was a tribe in the region of Germany, and they were called the Goths.

• They were considered Barbarians by some of the other Europeans, and so certain types of buildings and styles of construction came to be called Gothic by those who thought that they were ugly and without style.

• The style was dark and gloomy and was also used to describe the dark and gloomy literature which was set in these sorts of places.

• Ghost stories and supernatural tales, combined with melodrama and sentimentality, were typical of this genre.

• The reader was supposed to enjoy feeling scared.

• James Fenimore Cooper was a writer of the same period, but his works were more about historical subjects and sea stories.

• His most famous work is ‘The Last of the Mohicans’, a story set during the French and Indian wars.

• Transcendentalists Text pg 101-102• In the mid-1800s, a group of new ideas about

religion, philosophy, culture and literature developed in the New England area.

• It emphasised the spiritual aspect of human life, but encouraged people to find it through their own feelings, rather than from organised religion.

• To transcend something is to rise above it, and the transcendentalists thought that people could rise above everyday life to find spiritual happiness.

• The most famous transcendentalists were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

• Emerson was a writer, especially of essays, and the founder of transcendantalism.

• He wrote essays and gave lectures around the US and in Europe, explaining his ideas.

• He was also strongly in support of the abolition of slavery.

• Henry David Thoreau was a close friend of Emerson, and became just as famous with his writings about his personal experiences related to his philosophy.

• Thoreau’s best remembered work is ‘Walden, or Life in the Woods’, which documents his time spent living beside Walden pond.

• He built his own house and tried to live a very simple life, spending only a tiny amount of money, and living off what nature provided.

• He was near a town, but only bought things that he could not grow or make on his own, and in a year of living at Walden, only spent $28.

• He also refused to pay tax to the government, because of slavery and war that he did not support.

• Power of Imagination text pg 102-103• Edgar Allan Poe took the gothic style and

became a master of it. • He is known mostly for his short stories and

his poetry, particularly the gothic stories of death and gloom.

• He was also one of the first great writers of detective fiction, introducing the character of C. Auguste Dupin, although his creation was never as famous as Sherlock Holmes.

• Poe’s choice of topics, death and madness, is probably due to his life.

• His father abandoned the family when he was a child, and his mother died soon after.

• When he was 26 he married his 13 year old cousin.• He had problems with alcohol, and was poor for most

of his life, struggling to support himself and keep writing.

• His drinking got worse after the death of his wife, and he died at the age of 40.

• He was found on the street with a fever, and wearing somebody else’s clothes, but he was too sick to give an explanation before he died.

• watch the raven

• Nathaniel Hawthorne was a writer during the same time, of short stories and novels.

• For the first part of his career, he wrote mainly short stories, but The Scarlet Letter is what he is remembered for.

• It is the story of a woman who cheats on her husband while he is away and gives birth to a daughter.

• The people of the town where she lives decide to throw her out because of her crime, and she has to move away.

• Hawthorne’s books study human nature and sin.

• Herman Melville wrote the story of Moby Dick, about a man who joins a whaling boat.

• The captain of the ship is Ahab, and he goes crazy, trying to catch a certain white whale.

• The whale, called Moby Dick, was responsible for him losing his leg, and he wants revenge.

• The whale ends up sinking the ship, and killing most of those on board, with only the narrator surviving to tell the story.

• The story is based on a true story of a sperm whale which attacked a ship and sank it.

• New Visions of America text pg103-104• O Captain! My Captain!• by: Walt Whitman (1819-1892)•

• O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won,The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;But O heart! heart! heart!O the bleeding drops of red,Where on the deck my Captain lies,Fallen cold and dead.

• • O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;

Rise up--for you the flag is flung--for you the bugle trills,For you bouquets and ribbon'd wreaths--for you the shores a-crowding,For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;Here Captain! dear father!This arm beneath your head!It is some dream that on the deck,You've fallen cold and dead.

• • My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,The ship is anchor'd safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;Exult O shores, and ring O bells!But I with mournful tread,Walk the deck my Captain lies,Fallen cold and dead.

• Regionalism text pg104-106• Samuel Langhorne Clemens was one of one of

America’s greatest writers, but he is much better known by his pen name Mark Twain.

• He led a very interesting life, and he got the name Mark Twain from one of his jobs, that of a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River.

• “Mark Twain” is what the person measuring the depth of the water would call out, and meant that the water was deep enough (two fathoms) for the steamboat to pass.

• Mark Twain also worked as a printer (his first job), a journalist, a writer, a miner and an inventor.

• His writing was also quite varied, but by far his most famous works were ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’, and ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’.

• Both are about the adventures of young boys on the Mississippi River, although ‘Huckleberry Finn’ is more of a serious work, whereas ‘Tom Sawyer’ is more an adventure story.

• These novels were full of the colloquial language of the time.

• Huckleberry Finn is told in the first person, and because Huckleberry is an uneducated child, the whole book is full of slang and ways of speaking that were popular in that area of the US at that time.

• YOU don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly -- Tom's Aunt Polly, she is -- and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

• Now the way that the book winds up is this: Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars apiece -- all gold. It was an awful sight of money when it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher he took it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece all the year round -- more than a body could tell what to do with.

• Emily Dickinson was a poet who became famous only after her death.

• In life, she was very quiet and reclusive, spending most of her adult life away from other people.

• She wrote a huge amount of poetry, however, almost 1800 poems.

• Mostly they were quite short, and used different styles to the usual, and many were concerned particularly with death.

• Because I could not stop for Death,He kindly stopped for me;The carriage held but just ourselvesAnd Immortality. We slowly drove, he knew no haste, And I had put awayMy labor, and my leisure too,For his civility.

• We passed the school, where children stroveAt recess, in the ring;We passed the fields of gazing grain,We passed the setting sun.

• Or rather, he passed us;The dews grew quivering and chill,For only gossamer my gown,My tippet only tulle.

• We paused before a house that seemedA swelling of the ground;The roof was scarcely visible,The cornice but a mound.

• Since then 'tis centuries, and yet eachFeels shorter than the dayI first surmised the horses' headsWere toward eternity.

• Text pg109 • Ernest Hemingway was another famous

American writer who started out as a journalist.

• After finishing high school, he got his first job working for a local newspaper.

• He only had the job for about six months, after which he joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver in World War I.

• He was still only 18 at the time, and was sent to Italy.

• While stationed at the Italian Front, Hemingway was wounded by mortar fire, but still managed to carry an injured Italian soldier to safety.

• He returned to the US for a while, taking a job with another newspaper, then moved to Paris to work as a foreign correspondent.

• In Paris he came into contact with many other famous writers, and wrote mainly short stories, as well as writing for the newspaper.

• While he was there, he started work on his first novel.

• During the Spanish Civil War and WWII he was a war correspondent, writing stories from the scene of the battles.

• In WWII he not only reported on the war, but actually participated, and at one stage led a group of French Resistance fighters outside Paris.

• He was married four times, and died by committing suicide.

• He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and a Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

• The Pulitzer Prize is a US award for works of Journalism, literature and music.

• Hemingway’s writing style was famous for using simple and plain language to form complex and descriptive ideas.

• ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ - Ernest Hemingway.

• The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun.

• Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went to Madrid.

• Exercise: Write a descriptive paragraph about some scene that you remember well, that you can imagine a picture of. Use simple language, but describe the small details of the scene that you imagine or see in your mind.

• Show your writing to your partner, and each can correct and give suggestions to the other person.

• Robert Frost was a poet who wrote about America very vividly, setting his poems mainly in the New England area of the US.

• His poems were particularly concerned with exploring social and philosophical ideas, mainly using the countryside as a setting.

• ‘The Road Not Taken’ – Robert Frost• Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveler, long I stoodAnd looked down one as far as I couldTo where it bent in the undergrowth;

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• Then took the other, as just as fair,And having perhaps the better claim,Because it was grassy and wanted wear;Though as for that the passing thereHad worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally layIn leaves no step had trodden black.Oh, I kept the first for another day!Yet knowing how way leads on to way,I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sighSomewhere ages and ages hence:Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference

• Joseph Heller was famous mainly for one novel ‘Catch 22’.

• It was a story about a group of US Air Force pilots and crew stationed on an island in Italy during WWII.

• The book was so popular and influential, that the term ‘catch 22’ is used in everyday speech by people across different western countries who may not even have heard of the novel or its author.

• The story is very humourous, but at the same time very cynical.

• The main character is more afraid of his bosses than he is of the enemy soldiers, because he thinks that they will get him killed.

• The story focuses on different characters at different times in the story, and moves backwards and forwards through time, telling events from different points of view.

• The term ‘catch 22’ in the story refers to a military rule which is used to justify their actions.

• If a pilot or crewmember is crazy, they are not allowed to fly missions.

• In order to get out of the mission, they just have to request it.

• But if they request to get out of missions, that proves that they are not crazy, because being afraid of going on missions is reasonable.

• This means that no-one can get out of flying their missions.

• These days, a catch 22 situation is one in which there is no way to achieve something, because by trying to get it, the rules make sure you can’t get it..

• A simple example is getting your first job.• Many jobs require experience, but if you

haven’t had a job before, you don’t have any experience.

• But you can’t get experience until you find a job, which may be impossible without experience.

• Other books that I like by American authors:• ‘One Flew Over a Cuckoo’s Nest’ – Ken Kesey• ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ – Harper Lee• ‘Catcher in the Rye’ – J. D. Salinger