The American Dream
American Dream is the belief that anyone can achieve success and prosperity through this, regardless of their background.
What is hard work (and determination)?
When the Walls family "skedaddles" it means that they do this?
What is leave town?
In Dunbar's poem, the mask that "grins and lies" hides these two facial features.
What are our cheeks and our eyes?
In Stopping By The Woods On a Snowy Evening, the woods are described as these two things, which must also be present during testing.
This is the philosophy that intuition should be used over logic, and that people should generally be independent and self-sufficient.
What is transcendentalism?
In One Block Can Make a Difference, this city is where the Palacio family began to build their wealth.
What is Brooklyn?
Jeannette sees her mother doing this at the start of the book, which she finds deplorable!
What is digging through the dumpster for food?
The townspeople in "Richard Cory" wished they could trade places with him because he was richer than this figure of royalty.
What is a king? ("richer than a king")
Frost's most famous poem was this one, where he contemplates what would have happened if he had taken a different path.
What is The Road Not Taken?
Both Emerson and Thoreau attended this Ivy league college.
What is Harvard?
Critics of the American Dream argue it ignores barriers like these two systemic factors that affect equal opportunity.
What are class/poverty and race/discrimination?
What is stop drinking?
Despite his wealth and grace, Richard Cory shocks the town by doing this "one calm summer night."
What is going home and putting a bullet through his head?
Robert Frost wrote this type of literature, mostly.
What is poetry?
Of the two men, he wrote "Self-Reliance."
What is Emerson?
This green-tinted symbol from American literature has come to represent the American Dream — forever pursued, never quite reached.
What is the green light (at the end of Daisy's dock in The Great Gatsby)?
This is Rex's nickname for Jeannette.
What is Mountain Goat?
Written in 1896, "We Wear the Mask" speaks to the experience of this group of Americans forced to hide their pain behind false cheerfulness.
Who are Black/African Americans (in the post-slavery, Jim Crow era)?
Robert Frost won this top prize for this contribution to literature.
What is the Pulitzer Prize?
Thoreau wrote this reflection piece as he spend two years living in the wilderness of Massachusetts.
What is Walden?
The American Dream can mean different things to different people but the concept people most identify with is this, where how much you have really means you've made it.
What is financial wealth?
The Glass Castle is a this type of dwelling, which the Walls hope to live in one day.
Both poems share this central theme: the difference between a person's public appearance and this.
What is their private/inner suffering (internal reality)?
Frost suffered from this mental health dilemma, which many people do; there's no shame in it!
What is depression?
These are also known as concise expressions of ideas or principles.
What are aphorisms?