MID 20TH CENTURY (1940 -1970)

English & U.S. History Paper11th Grade

2011

“Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the

terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a

storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March

of 1935.”

•Historical Connections: Equal rights

JAMES BALDWINGO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN

“Manchild in the Promised Land is indeed one of the most remarkable autobiographies of

our time. This thinly fictionalized account of Claude Brown's childhood as a hardened,

streetwise criminal trying to survive the toughest streets of Harlem has been heralded as

the definitive account of everyday life for the first

generation of African Americans raised in the Northern ghettos of

the 1940s and 1950s. ”

•Historical Connections: Black urban life, 1960s Civil rights

CLAUDE BROWNMANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND

“On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.”

•Historical Connections: New journalism, Crime writing

TRUMAN CAPOTEIN COLD BLOOD: A TRUE ACCOUNT OF A MULTIPLE MURDER & ITS CONSEQUENCES

“Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental

and human dangers of indiscriminate use of pesticides, spurring revolutionary changes

in the laws affecting our air, land, and water.”

•Historical Connections: Environmental movement

RACHEL CARSONSILENT SPRING

“By turns shocking and lyrical, unblinking and raw, the

searingly honest memoirs of Eldridge Cleaver are a

testament to his unique place in American history. Cleaver writes

in Soul on Ice, "I'm perfectly aware that I'm in prison, that I'm a Negro, that I've been a rapist,

and that I have a Higher Uneducation." What Cleaver

shows us, on the pages of this now classic autobiography, is

how much he was a man.”

• Historical Connections: 1960s, African American experience

ELDRIDGE CLEAVERSOUL ON ICE

“The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to

New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence

and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.”

•Historical Connections: African American experience

RALPH ELLISONINVISIBLE MAN

“Landmark, groundbreaking, classic ”these adjectives barely describe the earthshaking and

long-lasting effects of Betty Friedan's The Feminine

Mystique. This is the book that defined "the problem that has no name," that launched the Second Wave of the feminist

movement, and has been awakening women and men with its insights into social relations, which still remain

fresh, ever since.”

•Historical Connections: Feminist movement

BETTY FRIEDANTHE FEMININE MYSTIQUE

“In 1959, Griffin headed to New Orleans, darkened his skin and

immersed himself in black society, then traveled to several states until he could no longer stand the racism, segregation

and degrading living conditions.”

•Historical Connections: Civil rights, African American experience Deep South

BLACK LIKE MEJOHN HOWARD GRIFFIN

“Hiroshima is the story of six human beings who lived through

the greatest single manmade disaster in history. With what

Bruce Bliven called "the simplicity of genius," John

Hersey tells what these six -- a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest -- were doing at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945,

when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever

dropped on a city.”

•Historical Connections: World War II, Atomic bomb

JOHN HERSEYHIROSHIMA

“This story of two boys' friendship at an exclusive New

Hampshire prep school as it parallels the inescapable and

escalating atmosphere of World War II, is intense and engaging

to the last word.”

•Historical Connections: Pre-World War II

JOHN KNOWLESA SEPARATE PEACE

“On the Road's publication in 1957 was a wake-up call to the American public that not all its

youth were modeled after characters on Ozzie and Harriet:

it portrayed Ivy League-educated white kids who

smoked dope, hitchhiked, and frequented black jazz joints and

Mexican whorehouses. It was the harbinger of the radical

changes that would soon sweep society in the 1960s.”

•Historical Connections: Beat Generation, 1960s

JACK KEROUACON THE ROAD

“With their help, Hopalong fights to save the Rocking R, only

to  find himself the target of a ruthless gunman in a  life-and-

death struggle for frontier justice.”

•Historical Connections: Western life

LOUIS L’AMOURTHE TRAIL TO SEVEN PINES

“Harper Lee's classic novel of a lawyer in the Deep South

defending a black man charged with the rape of a white girl.”

•Historical Connections: 1950s, Racism

HARPER LEETO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

“The Bell Jar tells the story of a gifted young woman's mental breakdown beginning during a summer internship as a junior editor at a magazine in New York City in the early 1950s.”

•Historical Connections: Alienation in American, Post

World War II

SYLVIA PLATHTHE BELL JAR

“Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-

year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school.”

•Historical Connections: Post World War II, Public views of the

1960s

J.D. SALINGERTHE CATCHER IN THE RYE

“Slaughterhous-Five is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-

bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we

search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.”

•Historical Connections: Issues of World War II veterans

KURT VONNEGUTSLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE

“ Reflects the poverty and hopelessness of life in the inner

city and what it means to be black in America.”

•Historical Connections: Jim Crow laws

RICHARD WRIGHTNATIVE SON

“Wright's upbringing in the Jim Crow South.”

•Historical Connections: Jim Crow laws

RICHARD WRIGHTBLACK BOY: A RECORD OF CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH