American Lit: Late 1800s to Early 1900s Quiz

Answer: Mark Twain

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835. When he died ten years into the twentieth century, he had become such an important writer and speaker that he had achieved the status of a national celebrity as well as an institution in American literature and culture.

The Nobel Prize winning William Faulkner once remarked that Twain is "the father of American literature". In addition to writing significant novels, such as "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", and "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", he was also the master of short story writing, as "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" demonstrates. Furthermore, he wrote many non-fiction pieces of great literary importance to American culture.

He published the travel book "The Innocents Abroad" in 1869 about an 1867 tour of Europe and "the Holy Land" with other Americans. "Roughing It", published in 1872, was concerned with his experiences in the Nevada Territory as a miner on the Comstock Lode.

He had travelled out West with his brother Orion, who had been named secretary to the governor of the Nevada Territory. Twain also published his famous "Life on the Mississippi" in 1883 about his much earlier experiences as a river boat pilot on the Mississippi River. He also dabbled in literary criticism with such essays like "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses", which he published in 1895; these were famous for his satirical derisiveness.

Answer: Bret Harte

Bret Harte's stories were so well loved that by 1870 he was internationally famous; he cashed in on this reputation by becoming a highly paid journalist on the East Coast and later held several diplomatic posts overseas. In his last years, he settled in London, where he was considered somewhat of a celebrity because of his stories about the American West. Harte met Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) during the 1860s while they were both in California, and they developed a friendship.

However, four years after Harte's death in 1902, Clemens wrote that Harte was an "insincere" writer who romanticized various details about his Western characters, and he criticized Harte for not repaying borrowed money and for abandoning his wife and children financially (while Harte and his wife were married for forty years, they lived together for only sixteen).

Answer: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is a famous American short story, and it has had an impact on American culture ever since its publication. One can see its influences not only in later fiction but in television and film; consider episodes of "The Twilight Zone", for example. The story is one that says more about the reader him or herself than it does about the character Peyton Farquhar. There are more than enough clues during Farquhar's fantasy for the reader to know that what he or she is reading is not really happening; however, because the reader usually feels the injustice of Farquhar's death penalty, the reader ignores these clues as he or she hopes for Farquhar's escape. What then does this say about the effect of our feelings on our perception of reality?

Ambrose Bierce was born in Ohio in 1842, the last of nine children. He served in the Union Army during the Civil War and achieved the rank of lieutenant. After the war, he lived in San Francisco for a while where he became friends with Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and Bret Harte. In 1913, he went to Mexico and disappeared without a trace. No one knows what became of him or when he died, but some speculate that he was killed during the Mexican Revolution. In addition to achieving fame with short stories like "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and "Chickamauga", he also published "The Devil's Dictionary", which is a satire of American society and culture. Bierce was known for his harsh criticism and was sometimes referred to as "Bitter Bierce". On the other hand, he is greatly admired by many writers; for example, Kurt Vonnegut considered "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" to be the greatest American short story ever written.

Answer: Henry James

Henry James lived from 1843 to 1916 and was part of a very important American family. His father, Henry James, Sr., was an important theologian; his brother, William James, was a groundbreaking psychologist and philosopher; and his sister, Alice James, is remembered as an insightful diarist. Henry James, Jr., was publishing reviews and fiction in the "Atlantic Monthly" by the time he was twenty-one years old; he also spent a significant amount of time in Europe, particularly in Italy, France, and Great Britain, where he settled permanently in 1876. In the 1900s he became a legal citizen of Great Britain because of the United States' hesitancy to enter the Great War. James then began working with war relief efforts and received the British Order of Merit.

In the world of literature, James insisted that good writing demonstrate an interesting picture of real everyday life. However, he was also greatly intrigued by the question of what each one of us considers reality; thus, his fiction often involves the creation of a rich and deep psychology for many of his characters so that readers are forced to explore, along with James, the effects of consciousness and perception on reality. James' experimentation served as a forerunner to modernists' focus on the subjectivity of truth and to their use of stream of consciousness.

Other novels by James include "The Portrait of the Lady" and "The Bostonians". He also wrote a great deal of short fiction and novellas, including "The Real Thing", "The Turn of the Screw", "Daisy Miller", and "The Beast in the Jungle".

Answer: Kate Chopin

Kate Chopin (1850-1904) was born Katherine O'Flaherty. Her father died when she was four years old, and she was raised by her mother and aunt, two very strong-willed, independent women. At a young age, she began to demonstrate her own independence through such actions as smoking in company and walking along the streets by herself, a couple of actions not acceptable for women in her society at that time.

She attended St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart and became very well read in English and French authors beyond her school assignments.

After her husband died, probably of malaria, she resorted to writing to provide an income for herself and her six children. She frequently wrote about the tension resulting from the conflict between a woman's needs, wants, and desires and the rules placed on women in a male-dominated society that controlled not only a woman's role in that society but also her inner life and thoughts.

The rich development of her characters psychologically was most definitely setting the stage for modernist exploration of characterization in the early twentieth century. "The Awakening", published in 1899, was radically groundbreaking but perhaps too much ahead of its time; the book was highly condemned and treated with hostility by many.

However, she could accomplish much in shorter works as well. Her short piece of fiction "The Story of an Hour" explores the feelings of a woman who believes she has lost her husband in a railroad accident; she at first attempts to fight back her joy, but the excitement of finally being free of the restrictions of her marriage is too much for her to resist.

Answer: "A New England Nun" and Other Stories

Freeman lived from 1852 to 1930, and she was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, outside of Boston. When her father's business failed due to the economic Panic of 1876, she and her family moved into the home of a minister, and Freeman, who was a Wilkins at that time, began to sell poems and stories to leading magazines to help support herself and her family. By the mid 1880s, she had become a popular writer, and her 1891 "'A New England Nun' and Other Stories" solidified her reputation. She also wrote plays as well as novels, such as "Pembroke" and "The Shoulders of Atlas". In 1926, she was awarded the W. D. Howells medal for fiction and was elected as a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, two honors rarely allowed women at this time.

Besides being celebrated as a regionalist writer who preserved an image of New England rural and small town life, she is also praised for her portrayal of women as strong-minded, independent individuals through her female characters. Louisa, the main character in "A New England Nun", has waited fourteen years for her fiance to return from Australia, where he has gone to make his fortune. During that time she learns to live independently and is quite content with her life and how she chooses to live it. When he suddenly returns and decides to honor his vow to her, despite his really being in love with another woman, Louisa takes the initiative and breaks the engagement. The next day, the reader is told, "[S]he felt like a queen who, after fearing lest her domain be wrested away from her, sees it firmly insured in her possession". The last line of the story is, "Louisa sat, prayerfully numbering her days, like an uncloistered nun". She counts the days ahead of her the way a nun would count the beads on a rosary, and the resulting image leaves the reader with a picture of an independent woman who is considered holy for her courage.

Answer: W. E. B. DuBois

The ideas expressed by Booker T. Washington in "Up From Slavery" and W. E. B. DuBois in "The Souls of Black Folk" sparked a long and fiery debate among individuals within the black community and had a tremendous impact on leaders within the United States at large.

Washington's exact year of birth is uncertain, but he himself eventually decided it was 1856; he died in 1915. He was born into slavery, despite his father's being a white man, because his mother was a slave. His early life was filled with deprivation and daily struggle, but through a devotion to education and hard work, he eventually was offered the position of first principal of what was to become the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In 1895, following his delivery of his "Atlanta Compromise" speech at the Atlanta Exposition, he emerged as a national figure who exercised such influence over the course of race relations in the United States that historians often refer to the years between 1895 and 1915 as the "Era of Booker T. Washington". His position was in no small part due to his extraordinary rhetorical skill in both the written and spoken language.

DuBois lived from 1868 to 1963. He was born into different circumstances than was Washington, as DuBois was born a free man in Massachusetts. He had a happy childhood and received an excellent education that took him to Fisk, Harvard, and then the University of Berlin. For a while DuBois was content to focus on his academic approach to the problems African Americans were experiencing; however, he became more of an activist when, on his way to make an appeal to reason in the case of a black man accused of rape and murder, he learned that a lynch mob had dismembered and burned the accused and then displayed his knuckles at a local grocery store. In 1903, when he published "The Souls of Black Folk", he explicitly rejected Washington's position to settle for an existence without immediately recognized rights, and this defiance of the leader of the black movement was perceived as an act of war. DuBois became the leader of the Niagara Movement, which aggressively demanded the same civil rights for black Americans that white Americans were enjoying.

Answer: Charles W. Chesnutt

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to bi-racial parents, who were referred to as "free blacks" in their society at that time. Chesnutt's father served in the Union army during the American Civil War and then moved the family to North Carolina, his parents' original home, following the war. "The Goophered Grapevine" was his first published story and the first story written by a black author to be published by the "Atlantic Monthly". However, American readers believed him to be a white writer from 1887 until 1899, when he revealed to the public at large that he was "a person of color". The frame story technique of his first story was somewhat to blame for this, as explained in the question. Most readers made the assumption that most blacks were uneducated if not illiterate, and this was a reasonable assumption considering the injustice of how slaves were deliberately and legally prevented from learning to read and write. When readers read the opening and closing parts of "The Goophered Grapevine", they could not imagine that a black person could write that well; furthermore, why would a black man write a story from the first person perspective and pretend to be a white man? Finally, the farfetched tall tale that Uncle Julius tells about a slave who eats the grapes from a cursed vine and begins to experience the waxing and waning of his physical health as the vine passes through the cycle of seasons seemed just like the kind of tale that Uncle Remus would tell in the stories by Joel Chandler Harris, who was white. Many readers assumed that the author of "The Goophered Grapevine" was a white writer attempting to imitate Harris's style. In the end, Chesnutt's strategy was so successful that many black writers began to make use of this frame story technique.

Chesnutt also composed novels, such as "The House behind the Cedars" in 1900 and "The Marrow of Tradition" in 1901, and in 1928 he was awarded the Spingarn Medal. Chesnutt used his writing and his popularity to lead a crusade against racism and the attack on interracial marriage.

Answer: William Dean Howells

W. D. Howells (1837 - 1920) was born one of eight children and gained most of his education through working in the printer's office in a series of newspapers his father owned in Ohio. His first significant book was a campaign biography he wrote for Abraham Lincoln, who rewarded Howells with a consulship in Italy after he was elected President of the United States. Upon his return to the States, Howells began working for the "Atlantic Monthly" and soon became one its most historically significant editors. As an editor publishing other writers' material, he was instrumental in the successful careers of many of the writers mentioned in this quiz, such as Mark Twain and Henry James, who were both close friends of his, as well as Edith Wharton, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Frank Norris, and Stephen Crane. He also served for thirteen years as the first president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He was one of the foremost supporters of the literary movement known as "realism", and his essay "Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading: An Impersonal Explanation" defined the movement and the criteria for "good" literature, which was to present a picture of everyday real life, emphasize characterization over plot development, maintain an objective narrative point of view, and avoid romantic tendencies. His story "Editha" not only represents realist fiction but also attacks and ridicules the romantic view of war.

Answer: Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton, nee Jones, (1862-1937) was born in New York City into a patriarchal, wealthy, and cultured family. She was educated by tutors and governesses while she and her family lived mostly in Europe. She wed Edward Wharton in 1885 and lived for twenty-eight years in a very unhappy marriage, finally divorcing him in 1913 for adultery. From 1911 until her death, she lived in France, where she is buried in the American Cemetery in Versailles. Much of her fiction fits as a bridge between realism and modernism and focuses on upper-class individuals who are bored and unhappy with their empty and unfulfilling lives and are seeking purpose, often unsuccessfully. Alida Slade in "Roman Fever" is bored with her wealthy life that offers her little to do and few challenges; thus, she fills her time with the inner drama that evolves from her petty jealousy of the woman who is supposed to be a friend since childhood.

Some of Wharton's novels include not only "The Age of Innocence" but also "The Custom of the Country", "The House of Mirth", and "Ethan Frome".

Answer: McTeague

Erich von Stroheim produced and directed "Greed" in 1924 and was considered a critical and financial failure after its release; however, now many believe it to be one of the greatest films ever made. It was originally eight hours long and reduced to two and a half by MGM; many of the pieces of the original film are now lost, but enough have been recovered to put together a four-hour film. An earlier film adaptation of the novel was released in 1916 and was titled "McTeague". William Bolcom adapted the novel into an opera called "McTeague" in 1992.

Frank Norris, the author of the original story, lived from 1870 to 1902, when he died of complications from a ruptured appendix. He was a naturalist writer comparable to Emile Zola, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser. His written views on naturalism and the writing of fiction were very influential during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he is celebrated not only for the novel "McTeague" but also "The Octopus", "The Pit", and "Vandover and the Brute".

Answer: Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was born the last child of fourteen children and the son of a Methodist minister. He is, of course, best known for his novel "The Red Badge of Courage", but is also recognized as a masterful short story writer; some of his shorter pieces include "The Open Boat", "The Blue Hotel", and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky".

While hired to report on the revolution in Cuba against Spanish rule, his ship sank at sea, and he and three other men were left adrift in a small boat and, somehow, managed to survive. He converted his experience into one of America's most well-known short stories, "The Open Boat". It captures the typical naturalist view of a harsh and difficult world with no benevolent supervising power or being.

Crane met Cora Howorth in Jacksonville, Florida, on his way to Cuba, and they lived together as common-law spouses for three years until he died of tuberculosis complications.

Crane is also recognized as an influential poet who created a streamlined, straightforward style to create a neutral and indifferent tone to accompany his naturalist themes. Consider the following: "A man said to the universe: / 'Sir, I exist!' / 'However,' replied the universe, / 'The fact has not created in me / A sense of obligation.'" He published two books of poems: "The Black Riders and Other Lines" and "War Is Kind".

Answer: Jack London

Jack London (1876-1916) began working at age thirteen to support himself through a variety of occupations, from a job as a cannery worker, a seaman, a mill worker, and a coal shoveler to an oyster pirate who raided corporate oyster beds. After he got to Washington, D.C., with the remainder of Kelly's Army, he eventually traveled to New York, where he was arrested for vagrancy in the Niagara area.

When he eventually returned to California, he ran for mayor of Oakland on the Socialist ticket and devoted himself to studying Marx, Nietzsche, and Darwin. During the winter of 1897 and 1898, he went to the Klondike to search for gold.

After he returned from these adventures, he became a dedicated writer committing himself to at least 1,000 words per day.

He used his experiences to write not only several stories like "To Build a Fire" but also to write such classic novels as "The Call of the Wild" (1903), "The Sea Wolf" (1904), and "White Fang" (1906). One can certainly see the influences of Nietzsche and Darwin as well as the naturalist literary movement in his fiction. "To Build a Fire" depicts a picture of a world based on the principles of "tooth and claw", a world devoid of compassion or a benevolent omnipotent power.

The main character of the story, who remains nameless to further convey how the individual does not matter, surrenders himself to freezing to death because the human body is too frail to survive the harsh conditions of this world, and his dog, which he has exploited and attempted to kill for his own benefit, abandons him to his death. So much for man's best friend.

Answer: Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was born in Dayton, Ohio, the son of former slaves. He was writing poetry by age six, reciting it publicly by age nine, and publishing it by age sixteen. In 1893, he met Frederick Douglass in Chicago during the Columbian Exposition; Douglass was so impressed by Dunbar and his abilities that he hired Dunbar as a clerk to work for him as U.S. minister to Haiti and Commissioner of the Haitian Exhibition. In 1895, Dunbar published his best known book of poems, "Lyrics of the Lowly Life", which contains the poem "Sympathy". As was declared in the question above, Dunbar was influential because of his presentation of traditional dialect, customs, and other cultural elements without apology. Another poem from "Lyrics of the Lowly Life" entitled "When Malindy Sings" provides a good example: "G'way an' quit dat noise, Miss Lucy-- / Put dat music book away; / What's de used to keep on tryin'? / Ef you practice twell you're gray, / You cain't sta't no notes a-flyin' / Lak de ones dat rants and rings / F'om de kitchen to de big woods / When Malindy sings".

Dunbar died young because of complications from tuberculosis and alcoholism; he was prescribed whiskey by his doctor to help him with his tuberculosis.

Maya Angelou borrowed the line from Dunbar's poem "Sympathy" to create the title of her autobiographical book "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings!".

Answer: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is often thought of by those who have never read the book as a children's book, but it is anything but that. It is filled with violence, racism, and the corruption of adult human beings. The story is told through the eyes of an innocent child so that the corruption of American society can be reported without the narrator's seeming hypocritical or untrustworthy.

As the readers travel down the Mississippi River (symbolically the center or heart of the United States) with Huck and Jim, they see how vile, crude, ignorant, hypocritical, brutal, and cold human beings are.

When Huck is on the river or camping in the surrounding wilderness, he experiences peace, beauty, spirituality, and self-fulfillment. However, every time that he goes ashore into so-called civilization, he experiences chaos, ugliness, corruption, and restrictions that will not allow him to be the pure person that he is or allow him to follow his heart.