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Lee Harvey Oswald has been variously portrayed by Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, and Don DeLillo as emblematic of the 1960s. All these authors have presented their writing as historical evidence of their existence, and it may be Oswald turned to violence as a way to create an historical identity.

The poor working-class protagonist Carrie Meeber in Theodore Dreiser's 'Sister Carrie,' is insatiable in her material wants, as her monetary success propells her to achieve more benefits and makes her a perpetual consumer. Carrie's rise from an impoverished existence to a successful Broadway heroine and her subsequent realization of the temporal nature of human wants is symbolic of the ills of consumerism.

Three Russian and three American novellas are compared in pairs, forming a cross-cultural triptych. All of the novellas are concerned with the quest for truth and share as well a focus on everyday objects such as hats, newspapers and hooks. The novellas are Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,' Saul Bellow's 'Seize the Day,' Lydia Chukovskaya's 'Sofia Petrovna,' Meridel Le Sueur's 'The Girl,' Natalya Baranskaya's 'A Week Like Any Other' and Arlene Heyman's 'Artifact.'

Advocates teaching ethnic fiction in survey courses of American literature. Uses a personal reading list of ethnic fiction in support of such a rationale. (RL)

The Vietnam War fiction opened a way into tangled historic territory, the territory of war inhabited by literature. 'Sand in the Wind', written by Robert Roth secures a unique way of engaging safely with the Vietnam War and the losses it entailed.

Anne Edwards, The Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell (New Haven and New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1983). Gone With The Wind as Book and Film, ed. Richard […]

I George P. Elliott's fictional world is so fully peopled with men and women of education, intellectuality, and moral will, so completely circumstanced with streets and houses (beautiful and old, [...]

American Jewish writers Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska demonstrate contrasting attitudes toward their adoption of the US as their homeland in two stories. Antin, in her story 'The Promised Land,' views her American citizenship as totally giving her the right to figuratively possess America and its heritage. On the other hand, Yezierka's tale 'The Free Vacation House' tells of the absurd claims to possession that are absolutely denied.