Topic: The Great Gatsby

Description: The Great Gatsby is a novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz age, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan. The book is a criticism of the Roaring 20's, examining trends like excess wealth and social disparity, famously criticizing the ideal of the "American Dream."

Topic: The Crucible

Description: 

Topic: Fahrenheit 451

Description: Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel by American writer Ray Bradbury. It introduces a new world in which control of the masses by the media, overpopulation, and censorship has taken over the general population in a future American society where books have been outlawed and "firemen" burn any that are found. 

The Great Gatsby
Author	F. Scott Fitzgerald
Cover artist	Francis Cugat
Language	English
Genre	Tragedy
Published	April 10, 1925
Publisher	Charles Scribner's Sons
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardcover & paperback)
Preceded by	The Beautiful and Damned (1922) 
Followed by	Tender Is the Night (1934) 
Text	The Great Gatsby at Wikisource
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.

The novel was inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island's North Shore in 1922. Following a move to the French Riviera, Fitzgerald completed a rough draft of the novel in 1924. He submitted it to editor Maxwell Perkins, who persuaded Fitzgerald to revise the work over the following winter. After making revisions, Fitzgerald was satisfied with the text, but remained ambivalent about the book's title and considered several alternatives. Painter Francis Cugat's dust jacket art, named Celestial Eyes, greatly impressed Fitzgerald, and he incorporated its imagery into the novel.

After its publication by Scribner's in April 1925, The Great Gatsby received generally favorable reviews, though some literary critics believed it did not equal Fitzgerald's previous efforts. Compared to his earlier novels, This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922), the novel was a commercial disappointment. It sold fewer than 20,000 copies by October, and Fitzgerald's hopes of a monetary windfall from the novel were unrealized. When the author died in 1940, he believed himself to be a failure and his work forgotten.

During World War II, the novel experienced an abrupt surge in popularity when the Council on Books in Wartime distributed free copies to American soldiers serving overseas. This new-found popularity launched a critical and scholarly re-examination, and the work soon became a core part of most American high school curricula and a part of American popular culture. Numerous stage and film adaptations followed in the subsequent decades.

Gatsby continues to attract popular and scholarly attention. Scholars emphasize the novel's treatment of social class, inherited versus self-made wealth, gender, race, and environmentalism, and its cynical attitude towards the American Dream. The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be a literary masterpiece and a contender for the title of the Great American Novel.

Historical and biographical context

F. Scott Fitzgerald's romance and life-long obsession with socialite Ginevra King informed the plot of the novel. King was fêted in the press as among Chicago's most desirable debutantes and inspired the character of Daisy Buchanan.
Set on the prosperous Long Island of 1922, The Great Gatsby provides a critical social history of Prohibition-era America during the Jazz Age.[a] F. Scott Fitzgerald's fictional narrative fully renders that period—known for its jazz music,[2] economic prosperity,[3] flapper culture,[4] libertine mores,[3] rebellious youth,[5] and ubiquitous speakeasies. Fitzgerald uses many of these 1920s societal developments to tell his story, from simple details like petting in automobiles to broader themes such as bootlegging as the illicit source of Gatsby's fortune.[6][7]

Fitzgerald conveys the hedonism of Jazz Age society by placing a relatable plotline within the historical context of the most raucous and flashiest era in American history.[3][8] In Fitzgerald's eyes, the era represented a morally permissive time when Americans of all ages became disillusioned with prevailing social norms and obsessed with pleasure-seeking.[9] Fitzgerald himself had a certain ambivalence towards the Jazz Age, an era whose themes he would later regard as reflective of events in his own life.[10]

The Great Gatsby reflects various events in Fitzgerald's youth.[11] He was a young Midwesterner from Minnesota. Like the novel's narrator who went to Yale, he was educated at an Ivy League school, Princeton.[12] There the 18-year-old Fitzgerald met Ginevra King, a 16-year-old socialite with whom he fell deeply in love.[13][14] Although Ginevra was madly in love with him,[15] her upper-class family openly discouraged his courtship of their daughter because of his lower-class status, and her father purportedly told him that "poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls".[16]

Rejected by Ginevra's family as a suitor because of his lack of financial prospects, a suicidal Fitzgerald enlisted in the United States Army amid World War I and was commissioned as a second lieutenant.[17][18] While awaiting deployment to the Western front where he hoped to die in combat,[18] he was stationed at Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama, where he met Zelda Sayre, a vivacious 17-year-old Southern belle.[19] After learning that Ginevra had married wealthy Chicago businessman William "Bill" Mitchell, Fitzgerald asked Zelda to marry him.[20] Zelda agreed but postponed their marriage until he became financially successful.[21][22] Fitzgerald is thus similar to Jay Gatsby in that he became engaged while a military officer stationed far from home and then sought immense wealth in order to provide for the lifestyle to which his fiancée had become accustomed.[b][26][27]

After his success as a short-story writer and as a novelist, Fitzgerald married Zelda in New York City, and the newly-wed couple soon relocated to Long Island.[28] Despite enjoying the exclusive Long Island milieu, Fitzgerald quietly disapproved of the extravagant parties,[29] and the wealthy persons he encountered often disappointed him.[30] While striving to emulate the rich, he found their privileged lifestyle to be morally disquieting.[31][32] Although Fitzgerald—like Gatsby—had always admired the rich, he nonetheless possessed a smoldering resentment towards them.[32]

Plot summary
George Wilson and his wife Myrtle live in the "valley of ashes", a refuse dump (shown in the above photograph) historically located in New York City during the 1920s. Today, the area is Flushing Meadows–Corona Park.
George Wilson and his wife Myrtle live in the "valley of ashes", a refuse dump (shown in the above photograph) historically located in New York City during the 1920s. Today, the area is Flushing Meadows–Corona Park.
In spring 1922, Nick Carraway—a Yale alumnus from the Midwest and a World War I veteran—journeys to New York City to obtain employment as a bond salesman. He rents a bungalow in the Long Island village of West Egg, next to a luxurious estate inhabited by Jay Gatsby, an enigmatic multi-millionaire who hosts dazzling soirées yet does not partake in them.

One evening, Nick dines with a distant cousin, Daisy Buchanan, in the old money town of East Egg. Daisy is married to Tom Buchanan, formerly a Yale football star whom Nick knew during his college days. The couple has recently relocated from Chicago to a mansion directly across the bay from Gatsby's estate. There, Nick encounters Jordan Baker, an insolent flapper and golf champion who is a childhood friend of Daisy's. Jordan confides to Nick that Tom keeps a mistress, Myrtle Wilson, who brazenly telephones him at his home and who lives in the "valley of ashes", a sprawling refuse dump.[33] That evening, Nick sees Gatsby standing alone on his lawn, staring at a green light across the bay.

Days later, Nick reluctantly accompanies a drunken and agitated Tom to New York City by train. En route, they stop at a garage inhabited by mechanic George Wilson and his wife Myrtle. Myrtle joins them, and the trio proceed to a small New York apartment that Tom has rented for trysts with her. Guests arrive and a party ensues, which ends with Tom slapping Myrtle and breaking her nose after she mentions Daisy.

One morning, Nick receives a formal invitation to a party at Gatsby's mansion. Once there, Nick is embarrassed that he recognizes no one and begins drinking heavily until he encounters Jordan. While chatting with her, he is approached by a man who introduces himself as Jay Gatsby and insists that both he and Nick served in the 3rd Infantry Division[c] during the war. Gatsby attempts to ingratiate himself with Nick and when Nick leaves the party, he notices Gatsby watching him.

Photograph of the Plaza Hotel
The confrontation between Gatsby and Tom occurs in the twenty-story Plaza Hotel, a château-like edifice with an architectural style inspired by the French Renaissance.
In late July, Nick and Gatsby have lunch at a speakeasy. Gatsby tries impressing Nick with tales of his war heroism and his Oxford days. Afterward, Nick meets Jordan again at the Plaza Hotel. Jordan reveals that Gatsby and Daisy met around 1917 when Gatsby was an officer in the American Expeditionary Forces. They fell in love, but when Gatsby was deployed overseas, Daisy reluctantly married Tom. Gatsby hopes that his newfound wealth and dazzling parties will make Daisy reconsider. Gatsby uses Nick to stage a reunion with Daisy, and the two embark upon an affair.

In September, Tom discovers the affair when Daisy carelessly addresses Gatsby with unabashed intimacy in front of him. Later, at a Plaza Hotel suite, Gatsby and Tom argue about the affair. Gatsby insists Daisy declare that she never loved Tom. Daisy claims she loves Tom and Gatsby, upsetting both. Tom reveals Gatsby is a swindler whose money comes from bootlegging alcohol. Upon hearing this, Daisy chooses to stay with Tom. Tom scornfully tells Gatsby to drive her home, knowing that Daisy will never leave him.

While returning to East Egg, Gatsby and Daisy drive by Wilson's garage and their car strikes Myrtle, killing her instantly. Later Gatsby reveals to Nick that Daisy was driving the car, but that he intends to take the blame for the accident to protect her. Nick urges Gatsby to flee to avoid prosecution, but he refuses. After Tom tells George that Gatsby owns the car that struck Myrtle, a distraught George assumes the owner of the vehicle must be Myrtle's lover. George fatally shoots Gatsby in his mansion's swimming pool, then kills himself.

Several days after Gatsby's murder, his father Henry Gatz arrives for the sparsely attended funeral. After Gatsby's death, Nick comes to hate New York and decides that Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, and he were all Midwesterners unsuited to Eastern life.[d] Nick encounters Tom and initially refuses to shake his hand. Tom admits he was the one who told George that Gatsby owned the vehicle that killed Myrtle. Before returning to the Midwest, Nick returns to Gatsby's mansion and stares across the bay at the green light emanating from the end of Daisy's dock.

Major characters
Nick Carraway – a Yale University alumnus from the Midwest, a World War I veteran, and a newly arrived resident of West Egg, age 29 (later 30) who serves as the first-person narrator. He is Gatsby's neighbor and a bond salesman. Nick is easy-going and optimistic, although this latter quality fades as the novel progresses. He ultimately returns to the Midwest after despairing of the decadence and indifference of the eastern United States.[35]
Jay Gatsby (originally James "Jimmy" Gatz) – a young, mysterious millionaire with shady business connections (later revealed to be a bootlegger), originally from North Dakota. During World War I, when he was a young military officer stationed at the United States Army's Camp Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, Gatsby encountered the love of his life, the debutante Daisy Buchanan. Later, after the war, he studied briefly at Trinity College, Oxford, in England.[36] According to Fitzgerald's wife Zelda, he partly based Gatsby on their enigmatic Long Island neighbor, Max Gerlach.[37] A military veteran, Gerlach became a self-made millionaire due to his bootlegging endeavors and was fond of using the phrase "old sport" in his letters to Fitzgerald.[38]
Daisy Buchanan – a shallow, self-absorbed, and young debutante and socialite from Louisville, Kentucky, identified as a flapper.[39] She is Nick's second cousin, once removed, and the wife of Tom Buchanan. Before marrying Tom, Daisy had a romantic relationship with Gatsby. Her choice between Gatsby and Tom is one of the novel's central conflicts. Fitzgerald's romance and life-long obsession with Ginevra King inspired the character of Daisy.[13][40][41]
Thomas "Tom" Buchanan – Daisy's husband, a millionaire who lives in East Egg. Tom is an imposing man of muscular build with a gruff voice and contemptuous demeanor.[42] He was a football star at Yale and is a white supremacist.[43] Among other literary models,[e] Tom has certain parallels with William "Bill" Mitchell, the Chicago businessman who married Ginevra King.[45] Tom and Mitchell were both Chicagoans with an interest in polo.[45] Also, like Ginevra's father Charles King, whom Fitzgerald resented, Tom is an imperious Yale man and polo player from Lake Forest, Illinois.[46]
Jordan Baker – an amateur golfer with a sarcastic streak and an aloof attitude, and Daisy's long-time friend. She is Nick Carraway's girlfriend for most of the novel, though they grow apart towards the end. She has a shady reputation because of rumors that she had cheated in a tournament, which harmed her reputation both socially and as a golfer. Fitzgerald based Jordan on Ginevra's friend Edith Cummings,[47] a premier amateur golfer known in the press as "The Fairway Flapper".[48] Unlike Jordan Baker, Cummings was never suspected of cheating.[49] The character's name is a play on two popular automobile brands, the Jordan Motor Car Company and the Baker Motor Vehicle, both of Cleveland, Ohio,[50] alluding to Jordan's "fast" reputation and the new freedom presented to American women, especially flappers, in the 1920s.[51][52][53]
George B. Wilson – a mechanic and owner of a garage. He is disliked by both his wife, Myrtle Wilson, and Tom Buchanan, who describes him as "so dumb he doesn't know he's alive".[54] At the end of the novel, George shoots Gatsby dead, wrongly believing he had been driving the car that killed Myrtle, and then kills himself.[55]
Myrtle Wilson – George's wife and Tom Buchanan's mistress. Myrtle, who possesses a fierce vitality,[56] is desperate to find refuge from her disappointing marriage.[57] She is accidentally killed by Gatsby's car, as she mistakenly thinks Tom is still driving it and runs after it.[58]
Writing and production

Fitzgerald began outlining his third novel in June 1922.[7] He longed to produce an exquisite work that was beautiful and intricately patterned,[59] but the troubled production of his stage play The Vegetable repeatedly interrupted his progress.[60] The play flopped, and Fitzgerald wrote magazine stories that winter to pay debts incurred by its production.[61] He viewed these stories as all worthless,[60] although included among them was "Winter Dreams", which Fitzgerald described as his first attempt at the Gatsby idea.[62] "The whole idea of Gatsby", he later explained to a friend, "is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it".[63]

After reading these reviews, Fitzgerald believed that many critics misunderstood the novel.[91] He despaired that "of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about".[152] In particular, Fitzgerald resented criticisms of the novel's plot as implausible since he had never intended for the story to be realistic.[91] Instead, he crafted the work to be a romanticized depiction that was largely scenic and symbolic.[153] According to his friend John Peale Bishop, Fitzgerald further resented the fact that critics failed to perceive the many parallels between the author's life and the character of Jay Gatsby; in particular, that both created a mythical version of themselves and attempted to live up to this legend.[154] Dispirited by critics failing to understand the novel, Fitzgerald remained hopeful that the novel would at least be a commercial success, perhaps selling as many as 75,000 copies.[155]

To Fitzgerald's great disappointment, Gatsby was a commercial failure in comparison with his previous efforts, This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922). By October, the book had sold fewer than 20,000 copies.[60] Although the novel went through two initial printings, many copies remained unsold years later.[156] Fitzgerald attributed the poor sales to the fact that women tended to be the primary audience for novels during this time, and Gatsby did not contain an admirable female character.[156] According to his ledger, he earned only $2,000 from the book.[157] Although Owen Davis' 1926 stage adaptation and the Paramount-issued silent film version brought in money for the author, Fitzgerald lamented that the novel fell far short of the success he had hoped for and would not bring him recognition as a serious novelist in the public eye.[60] With the onset of the Great Depression, The Great Gatsby was regarded as little more than a nostalgic period piece.[60] By the time Fitzgerald died in 1940, the novel had fallen into near obscurity.[158]

Critical analysis
Major themes
The American Dream
The American Dream, often represented by the Statue of Liberty signifying new opportunities in life, is a central theme underlying the novel.
Following the novel's revival, later critical writings on The Great Gatsby focused on Fitzgerald's disillusionment with the American Dream in the hedonistic Jazz Age,[180] a name for the era which Fitzgerald claimed to have coined.[181] In 1970, scholar Roger L. Pearson asserted that Fitzgerald's work—more so than other twentieth century novels—is especially linked with this conceptualization of the American dream.[182] Pearson traced the literary origins of this dream to Colonial America. The dream is the belief that every individual, regardless of their origins, may seek and achieve their desired goals, "be they political, monetary, or social. It is the literary expression of the concept of America: The land of opportunity".[182]

However, Pearson noted that Fitzgerald's particular treatment of this theme is devoid of the discernible optimism in the writings of earlier American authors.[182] He suggests Gatsby serves as a false prophet of the American dream, and pursuing the dream only results in dissatisfaction for those who chase it, owing to its unattainability.[183] In this analytical context, the green light on the Buchanans' dock (visible across Long Island Sound from Gatsby's house) is frequently interpreted as a symbol of Gatsby's unrealizable goal to win Daisy and, consequently, to achieve the American Dream.[158][184] Also, scholar Sarah Churchwell points out that adultery in the novel is linked to the loss of faith and broken promises, which symbolizes the corruption of the American Dream.[185]

Class permanence
Scholars and writers commonly ascribe Gatsby's inability to achieve the American Dream to entrenched class disparities in American society.[186] The novel underscores the limits of the American lower class to transcend their station of birth.[119] Scholar Sarah Churchwell contends that Fitzgerald's novel is a tale of class warfare in a status-obsessed country that refuses to acknowledge publicly it even has a class system.[119]

Although scholars posit different explanations for the continuation of class differences in the United States, there is a consensus regarding the novel's message in conveying its underlying permanence.[187] Although Gatsby's fundamental conflict occurs between entrenched sources of socio-economic power and upstarts like Gatsby who threaten their interests,[188] Fitzgerald's novel shows that a class permanence persists despite the country's capitalist economy that prizes innovation and adaptability.[188] Dianne Bechtel argues Fitzgerald plotted the novel to illustrate that class transcends wealth in America. Even if the poorer Americans become rich, they remain inferior to those Americans with "old money".[189] Consequently, Gatsby and other characters in the novel are trapped in a rigid American class system.[190]

Gender relations
Besides exploring the difficulties of achieving the American dream, The Great Gatsby explores societal gender expectations during the Jazz Age.[191] The character of Daisy Buchanan has been identified specifically as personifying the emerging cultural archetype of the flapper.[39] Flappers were typically young, modern women who bobbed their hair and wore short skirts.[192][193] They also drank alcohol and had premarital sex.[194][6]

Despite the newfound societal freedoms attained by flappers in the 1920s,[195] Fitzgerald's work critically examines the continued limitations upon women's agency during this period.[196] In this context, although early critics viewed the character of Daisy to be a "monster",[197] later scholars such as Leland S. Person Jr. asserted that Daisy's character exemplifies the marginalization of women in the elite social environment that Fitzgerald depicts.[198]

Writing in 1978, Person noted Daisy is more of a hapless victim than a manipulative victimizer.[199] She is the target first of Tom's callous domination and next of Gatsby's dehumanizing adoration.[199] She involuntarily becomes the holy grail at the center of Gatsby's unrealistic quest to be steadfast to a youthful concept of himself.[199] The ensuing contest of wills between Tom and Gatsby reduces Daisy to a trophy wife whose sole existence is to augment her possessor's socio-economic success.[200]

As an upper-class white woman living in East Egg during this time period, Daisy must adhere to societal expectations and gender norms such as actively fulfilling the roles of dutiful wife, nurturing mother, and charming socialite.[196] Many of Daisy's choices—ultimately culminating in the fatal car crash and misery for all those involved—can be partly attributed to her prescribed role as a "beautiful little fool" who is reliant on her husband for financial and societal security.[m][202] Her decision to remain with her husband, despite her feelings for Gatsby, is because of the security that her marriage to Tom Buchanan provides.[197]

Race and displacement
Fitzgerald's novel references a fictional book, Goddard's The Rise of the Colored Empires, which is a parody of The Rising Tide of Color (1920) by Lothrop Stoddard.
Many scholars have analyzed the novel's treatment of race and displacement; in particular, a perceived threat posed by newer immigrants to older Americans, triggering concerns over a loss of socio-economic status.[203] In one instance, Tom Buchanan—the novel's antagonist—claims that he, Nick, and Jordan are racially superior Nordics. Tom decries immigration and advocates white supremacy.[204] A fictional book alluded to by Tom is Stoddard's The Rise of the Colored Empires, which is a parody by Fitzgerald of Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color, a 1920s bestseller.[205] Stoddard warned that immigration would alter America's racial composition and destroy the country.[206]

Analyzing these elements, literary theorist Walter Benn Michaels contends that Fitzgerald's novel reflects a historical period in American literature characterized by fears over the influx of Southern and Eastern European immigrants whose "otherness" challenged Americans' sense of national identity.[207] Such anxieties were more salient in national discourse than the societal consequences of World War I,[208][209] and the defining question of the period was who constituted "a real American".[210]

In this context of immigration and displacement, Tom's hostility towards Gatsby, who is the embodiment of "latest America",[211] has been interpreted as partly embodying status anxieties of the time involving anti-immigrant sentiment.[211] Gatsby—whom Tom belittles as "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere"[212]—functions as a cipher because of his obscure origins, his unclear ethno-religious identity and his indeterminate class status.[213] Although his ethnicity is vague, his last name Gatz and his father's adherence to the Lutheran religion indicate his family are recent German immigrants.[214] This would preclude them from the coveted status of Old Stock Americans.[214] Consequently, Gatsby's socio-economic ascent is deemed a threat not only due to his status as nouveau riche, but because he is perceived as an outsider.[215]

Because of such themes, The Great Gatsby captures the perennial American experience as it is a story about change and those who resist it—whether such change comes in the form of a new wave of immigrants, the nouveau riche, or successful minorities.[188] Since Americans living in the 1920s to the present are largely defined by their fluctuating socio-economic circumstances and must navigate a society with entrenched racial and ethnic prejudices, Fitzgerald's depiction of resultant status anxieties and social conflict has been highlighted by scholars as still enduringly relevant nearly a hundred years after the novel's publication.[188][216]

Sexuality and identity
Questions regarding the sexuality of characters have been raised for decades and—augmented by biographical details about the author—have given rise to queer readings.[217] During his lifetime, Fitzgerald's sexuality became a subject of debate among his friends and acquaintances.[218][219][220] As a youth, Fitzgerald had a close relationship with Father Sigourney Fay,[221] a possibly gay Catholic priest,[222][223] and Fitzgerald later used his last name for the idealized romantic character of Daisy Fay.[224] After college, Fitzgerald cross-dressed during outings in Minnesota.[225] Years later, while drafting The Great Gatsby, rumors dogged Fitzgerald among the American expat community in Paris that he was gay.[219] Soon after, Fitzgerald's wife Zelda Fitzgerald likewise doubted his heterosexuality and asserted that he was a closeted homosexual.[226] She publicly belittled him with homophobic slurs,[227] and she alleged that Fitzgerald and fellow writer Ernest Hemingway engaged in homosexual relations.[228][229] These incidents strained the Fitzgeralds' marriage at the time of the novel's publication.[226]

Although Fitzgerald's sexuality is a subject of scholarly debate,[n] such biographical details lent credence to critical interpretations that his fictional characters are either gay or bisexual surrogates.[o][234][232] As early as 1945, critics such as Lionel Trilling noted that characters in The Great Gatsby, such as Jordan Baker, were implied to be "vaguely homosexual",[235][236] and, in 1960, writer Otto Friedrich commented upon the ease of examining the thwarted relations depicted in Fitzgerald's fiction through a queer lens.[237] In recent decades, scholarship has focused sharply on the sexuality of Nick Carraway.[238] In one instance in the novel, Carraway departs a drunken orgy with a "pale, feminine" man named Mr. McKee and—following suggestive ellipses—Nick next finds himself standing beside a bed while McKee sits between the sheets clad only in his underwear.[239][240] Such scenes have led scholars to describe Nick as possessing an overt queerness and prompted analyzes about his emotional attachment to Jay Gatsby.[241] For these reasons, the novel has been described as an exploration of sexual identity during a historical era typified by the societal transition towards modernity.[242][243]

Technology and environment
Technological and environmental criticisms of Gatsby seek to place the novel and its characters in a broader historical context.[244] In 1964, Leo Marx argued in The Machine in the Garden that Fitzgerald's work evinces a tension between a complex pastoral ideal of a bygone America and the societal transformations caused by industrialization and machine technology.[245] Specifically, the valley of the ashes, in between East and West Egg, represents a man-made wasteland which is a byproduct of the industrialization that has made Gatsby's booming lifestyle, including his automobile, possible.[246] Marx argues that Fitzgerald, via Nick, expresses a pastoral longing typical of other 1920s American writers like William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.[247] Although such writers cherish the pastoral ideal, they accept that technological progress has deprived this ideal of nearly all meaning.[248] In this context, Nick's repudiation of the eastern United States represents a futile attempt to withdraw into nature.[248] Yet, as Fitzgerald's work shows, any technological demarcation between the eastern and western United States has vanished,[d] and one cannot escape into a pastoral past.[248]

In 2018, scholar Kyle Keeler argued that the voracious pursuit of wealth as criticized in Fitzgerald's novel offers a warning about the perils of environmental destruction in pursuit of self-interest.[251] According to Kyle Keeler, Gatsby's quest for greater status manifests as self-centered, anthropocentric resource acquisition.[251] Inspired by the predatory mining practices of his fictional mentor Dan Cody, Gatsby participates in extensive deforestation amid World War I and then undertakes bootlegging activities reliant upon exploiting South American agriculture.[251] Gatsby conveniently ignores the wasteful devastation of the valley of ashes to pursue a consumerist lifestyle and exacerbates the wealth gap that became increasingly salient in 1920s America.[251] For these reasons, Keeler argues that—while Gatsby's socioeconomic ascent and self-transformation depend upon these very factors—each one is nonetheless partially responsible for the ongoing ecological crisis.[251]

Antisemitism
Fitzgerald based the character of Meyer Wolfsheim on Jazz Age racketeer Arnold Rothstein (pictured above) who was murdered in 1928.
The Great Gatsby has been accused of antisemitism because of its use of Jewish stereotypes.[252] One of the novel's supporting characters is Meyer Wolfsheim,[p] a Jewish friend and mentor of Gatsby. A corrupt profiteer who assists Gatsby's bootlegging operations and who fixed the 1919 World Series, he appears only twice in the novel, the second time refusing to attend Gatsby's funeral. Fitzgerald describes Wolfsheim as "a small, flat-nosed Jew", with "tiny eyes" and "two fine growths of hair" in his nostrils.[255] Evoking ethnic stereotypes regarding the Jewish nose, he describes Wolfsheim's nose as "expressive", "tragic", and able to "flash ... indignantly".[255] The fictional character of Wolfsheim is an allusion to real-life Jewish gambler Arnold Rothstein,[256] a notorious New York crime kingpin whom Fitzgerald met once in undetermined circumstances.[257] Rothstein was blamed for match fixing in the Black Sox Scandal that tainted the 1919 World Series.[258]

Wolfsheim has been interpreted as representing the Jewish miser stereotype. Richard Levy, author of Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution, claims that Wolfsheim serves to link Jewishness with corruption.[255] In a 1947 article for Commentary, Milton Hindus, an assistant professor of humanities at the University of Chicago, stated that while he believed the book was a superb literary achievement, Wolfsheim was its most abrasive character, and the work contains an antisemitic undertone.[259] However, Hindus argued the Jewish stereotypes displayed by Wolfsheim were typical of the time when the novel was written and set and that its antisemitism was of the "habitual, customary, 'harmless,' unpolitical variety".[260] A 2015 article by essayist Arthur Krystal agreed with Hindus' assessment that Fitzgerald's use of Jewish caricatures was not driven by malice and merely reflected commonly held beliefs of his time. He notes the accounts of Frances Kroll, a Jewish woman and secretary to Fitzgerald, who claimed that Fitzgerald was hurt by accusations of 

The Great Gatsby Historical Context: “Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American writer of novels and short stories, whose works have been seen as evocative of the Jazz Age, a term he himself allegedly coined. He is regarded as one of the greatest twentieth century writers. Fitzgerald was of the self-styled "Lost Generation," Americans born in the 1890s who came of age during World War I. He finished four novels, left a fifth unfinished, and wrote dozens of short stories that treat themes of youth, despair, and age.”

The Decline of the American Dream in the 1920s
On the surface, The Great Gatsby is a story of the thwarted love between a man and a woman. The main theme of the novel, however, encompasses a much larger, less romantic scope. Though all of its action takes place over a mere few months during the summer of 1922 and is set in a circumscribed geographical area in the vicinity of Long Island, New York, The Great Gatsby is a highly symbolic meditation on 1920s America as a whole, in particular the disintegration of the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess.

Fitzgerald portrays the 1920s as an era of decayed social and moral values, evidenced in its overarching cynicism, greed, and empty pursuit of pleasure. The reckless jubilance that led to decadent parties and wild jazz music—epitomized in The Great Gatsby by the opulent parties that Gatsby throws every Saturday night—resulted ultimately in the corruption of the American dream, as the unrestrained desire for money and pleasure surpassed more noble goals.

When World War I ended in 1918, the generation of young Americans who had fought the war became intensely disillusioned, as the brutal carnage that they had just faced made the Victorian social morality of early-twentieth-century America seem like stuffy, empty hypocrisy. The dizzying rise of the stock market in the aftermath of the war led to a sudden, sustained increase in the national wealth and a newfound materialism, as people began to spend and consume at unprecedented levels. A person from any social background could, potentially, make a fortune, but the American aristocracy—families with old wealth—scorned the newly rich industrialists and speculators. Additionally, the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, which banned the sale of alcohol, created a thriving underworld designed to satisfy the massive demand for bootleg liquor among rich and poor alike.

Fitzgerald positions the characters of The Great Gatsby as emblems of these social trends. Nick and Gatsby, both of whom fought in World War I, exhibit the newfound cosmopolitanism and cynicism that resulted from the war. The various social climbers and ambitious speculators who attend Gatsby’s parties evidence the greedy scramble for wealth. The clash between “old money” and “new money” manifests itself in the novel’s symbolic geography: East Egg represents the established aristocracy, West Egg the self-made rich. Meyer Wolfsheim and Gatsby’s fortune symbolize the rise of organized crime and bootlegging.

As Fitzgerald saw it (and as Nick explains in Chapter 9), the American dream was originally about discovery, individualism, and the pursuit of happiness. In the 1920s depicted in the novel, however, easy money and relaxed social values have corrupted this dream, especially on the East Coast. The main plotline of the novel reflects this assessment, as Gatsby’s dream of loving Daisy is ruined by the difference in their respective social statuses, his resorting to crime to make enough money to impress her, and the rampant materialism that characterizes her lifestyle.

Additionally, places and objects in The Great Gatsby have meaning only because characters instill them with meaning: the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg best exemplify this idea. In Nick’s mind, the ability to create meaningful symbols constitutes a central component of the American dream, as early Americans invested their new nation with their own ideals and values. Nick compares the green bulk of America rising from the ocean to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.

Just as Americans have given America meaning through their dreams for their own lives, Gatsby instills Daisy with a kind of idealized perfection that she neither deserves nor possesses. Gatsby’s dream is ruined by the unworthiness of its object, just as the American dream in the 1920s is ruined by the unworthiness of its object—money and pleasure. Like 1920s Americans in general, fruitlessly seeking a bygone era in which their dreams had value, Gatsby longs to re-create a vanished past—his time in Louisville with Daisy—but is incapable of doing so. When his dream crumbles, all that is left for Gatsby to do is die; all Nick can do is move back to Minnesota, where American values have not decayed.

The Hollowness of the Upper Class
One of the major topics explored in The Great Gatsby is the sociology of wealth, specifically, how the newly minted millionaires of the 1920s differ from and relate to the old aristocracy of the country’s richest families. In the novel, West Egg and its denizens represent the newly rich, while East Egg and its denizens, especially Daisy and Tom, represent the old aristocracy. Fitzgerald portrays the newly rich as being vulgar, gaudy, ostentatious, and lacking in social graces and taste. Gatsby, for example, lives in a monstrously ornate mansion, wears a pink suit, drives a Rolls-Royce, and does not pick up on subtle social signals, such as the insincerity of the Sloanes’ invitation to lunch. In contrast, the old aristocracy possesses grace, taste, subtlety, and elegance, epitomized by the Buchanans’ tasteful home and the flowing white dresses of Daisy and Jordan Baker.

What the old aristocracy possesses in taste, however, it seems to lack in heart, as the East Eggers prove themselves careless, inconsiderate bullies who are so used to money’s ability to ease their minds that they never worry about hurting others. The Buchanans exemplify this stereotype when, at the end of the novel, they simply move to a new house far away rather than condescend to attend Gatsby’s funeral. Gatsby, on the other hand, whose recent wealth derives from criminal activity, has a sincere and loyal heart, remaining outside Daisy’s window until four in the morning in Chapter 7 simply to make sure that Tom does not hurt her. Ironically, Gatsby’s good qualities (loyalty and love) lead to his death, as he takes the blame for killing Myrtle rather than letting Daisy be punished, and the Buchanans’ bad qualities (fickleness and selfishness) allow them to remove themselves from the tragedy not only physically but psychologically.

Class
In the monied world of The Great Gatsby, class influences all aspects of life, and especially love. Myrtle mentions this with regard to her husband, George, whom she mistook for someone of better “breeding” and hence greater prospects: “I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe.” Similarly, Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy is bound up with class. Only after amassing a large fortune does he feel able to make his move. At the end of the book, class dynamics dictate which marriage survives (Tom and Daisy), which one is destroyed (George and Myrtle), and which one will never come to be (Gatsby and Daisy). Only the most affluent couple pulls through the events that conclude the book. In fact, it seems that the accident may have brought them closer. When Nick spies on them through the window, he reports that “there was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.” Because of their elite class status, Tom and Daisy share a belief that they are immune to the consequences of their actions. In the final chapter, Nick calls Tom and Daisy “careless people” who “smashed up things and . . . let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

The American Dream
The American Dream refers to a shared set of ideals that guide the spirit of the United States. These shared ideals include a notion of freedom that ensures all Americans the possibility of upward social mobility, as long as they work for it. Every character in The Great Gatsby draws inspiration from the American Dream’s promise of wealth and prosperity. At the same time, the novel itself critiques the notion of the American Dream. Readers may end the novel wondering if the American Dream is actually attainable at all. Gatsby suffers the most from the promise of social mobility inherent to the American Dream. He spends his life believing that if he makes enough money and acquires enough possessions, he can transcend his lower-class birth and become equal to Daisy and Tom. However, even though Gatsby succeeds in acquiring wealth, he is never accepted by the upper class. Gatsby’s failure to attain the American Dream suggests the Dream is both an unattainable and unwise goal.

Love and Marriage
The ideals of love and marriage are profoundly strained in The Great Gatsby, a book that centers on two loveless marriages: the union between Tom and Daisy Buchanan and between George and Myrtle Wilson. In both cases, the marriages seem to be unions of convenience or advantage than actual love. Myrtle explains that she married George because she thought he was “a gentleman,” suggesting she hoped he’d raise her class status. Daisy nearly backed out of her marriage to Tom the day before her wedding, and Tom had an affair within a year of the wedding, but the couple is well-suited because of their shared class and desire for fun and material possessions. Even Gatsby’s all-consuming passion for Daisy seems more of a desire to possess something unattainable than actual love. Nick, meanwhile, dates Jordan Baker throughout the book, and though their relationship has its moments of warmth and kindness, both parties generally seem lukewarm and emotionally distant. “I wasn’t actually in love,” Nick recalls, “but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.” Such “tender curiosity” may be the closest thing to love in the entire novel.

Daisy’s passive role in Gatsby’s death signals a broader, more abstract antagonist that also haunts the novel: the American Dream of upward mobility. All of the characters in the book—even Nick, as he discloses in the opening pages—seek financial improvement in the hopes of securing a better life. Yet none of these characters achieves anything like happiness. Nick is the book’s most astute commentator on the illusory nature of the American Dream. On the novel’s final page, Nick specifically addresses what he considers the elusive nature of the American Dream. Even though hopeful dreaming like Gatsby’s seems to be oriented toward the future, Nick claims that such dreaming is stuck in the past. More specifically, he argues that the American Dream hearkens back to the time before America was even born, when it existed purely as an idea in some Dutch sailors’ minds. Nick’s point is that reality always falls short of the dream, and so striving to stay in the dream can just as easily lead one into a nightmare.
Protagonist: Although Nick Carraway is the narrator of The Great Gatsby, and we only see things he witnesses or is told about, Jay Gatsby is the protagonist of the novel. In addition to lending his name to the book’s title, Gatsby also serves as the novel’s focal point. Gatsby’s quest to win back Daisy incites all the action of the book, as well as the tragic conclusion. Unlike Nick, who seems to not know what he wants, or else to not want more than to be an observer, Gatsby is clear and determined about his goal. From the moment he first kissed Daisy, Gatsby has aspired to attain her. This aspiration drives all his subsequent choices, and those choices in turn affect the other characters in the novel. Myrtle’s death, George’s suicide, and Gatsby’s murder are all the result of Gatsby’s quest to have Daisy for himself. Tom, Daisy, and Nick’s decisions to leave the east are also caused by Gatsby’s actions. Despite his power to change his life and the lives of others, Gatsby fails to attain his goal. He dies without having won Daisy back from Tom. In fact, we can infer that Gatsby’s presence in their lives served to draw the couple closer together – the exact opposite of what Gatsby wanted.
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

The Green Light
Situated at the end of Daisy’s East Egg dock and barely visible from Gatsby’s West Egg lawn, the green light represents Gatsby’s hopes and dreams for the future. Gatsby associates it with Daisy, and in Chapter 1 he reaches toward it in the darkness as a guiding light to lead him to his goal. Because Gatsby’s quest for Daisy is broadly associated with the American dream, the green light also symbolizes that more generalized ideal. In Chapter 9, Nick compares the green light to how America, rising out of the ocean, must have looked to early settlers of the new nation.

The Valley of Ashes
First introduced in Chapter 2, the valley of ashes between West Egg and New York City consists of a long stretch of desolate land created by the dumping of industrial ashes. It represents the moral and social decay that results from the uninhibited pursuit of wealth, as the rich indulge themselves with regard for nothing but their own pleasure. The valley of ashes also symbolizes the plight of the poor, like George Wilson, who live among the dirty ashes and lose their vitality as a result.

The Eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg
The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are a pair of fading, bespectacled eyes painted on an old advertising billboard over the valley of ashes. They may represent God staring down upon and judging American society as a moral wasteland, though the novel never makes this point explicitly. Instead, throughout the novel, Fitzgerald suggests that symbols only have meaning because characters instill them with meaning. The connection between the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg and God exists only in George Wilson’s grief-stricken mind. This lack of concrete significance contributes to the unsettling nature of the image. Thus, the eyes also come to represent the essential meaninglessness of the world and the arbitrariness of the mental process by which people invest objects with meaning. Nick explores these ideas in Chapter 8, when he imagines Gatsby’s final thoughts as a depressed consideration of the emptiness of symbols and dreams.

Overview
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was published in 1925 during the Roaring Twenties, a period of economic prosperity and social change in the United States. Set in the summer of 1922, the novel unfolds in the fictional town of West Egg on Long Island and follows the life of Nick Carraway. Nick, the narrator, becomes entangled in the lives of his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and his mysterious neighbor, Jay Gatsby. Gatsby is a wealthy and enigmatic man known for his extravagant parties and his unrequited love for Daisy. The novel explores themes of wealth and class, with Gatsby’s pursuit of success and love serving as a symbol of the elusive and often unattainable nature of the American Dream.

The story is layered with symbolism and explores the moral and social decay hidden beneath the surface of the glittering Jazz Age. Fitzgerald’s portrayal of the excesses and moral bankruptcy of the era offers a critique of the American society of his time. The Great Gatsby remains relevant today as a commentary on the pursuit of wealth and the corruption of the American Dream. Significant film adaptations include the 1974 film starring Robert Redford as Gatsby and the 2013 adaptation featuring Leonardo DiCaprio. These adaptations—along with the endless memes inspired by the 2013 version—have contributed to the enduring popularity and cultural impact of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece.

Written by	Arthur Miller
Characters	
Abigail Williams
Reverend John Hale
Reverend Samuel Parris
John Proctor
Elizabeth Proctor
Thomas Danforth
Mary Warren
John Hathorne
Giles Corey
Rebecca Nurse
Date premiered	January 22, 1953
Place premiered	Martin Beck Theatre, New York City
Original language	English
Subject	Salem witch trials, McCarthyism
Genre	Tragedy
Setting	Salem, Massachusetts Bay Colony
The Crucible is a 1953 play by the American playwright Arthur Miller. It is a dramatized and partially fictionalized[1] story of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692–93. Miller wrote the play as an allegory for McCarthyism, when the United States government persecuted people accused of being communists.[2] Miller was questioned by the House of Representatives' Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956 and convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to identify others present at meetings he had attended.[3]

The play was first performed at the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway on January 22, 1953, starring E. G. Marshall, Beatrice Straight and Madeleine Sherwood. Miller felt that this production was too stylized and cold, and the reviews for it were largely hostile (although The New York Times noted "a powerful play [in a] driving performance").[4] The production won the 1953 Tony Award for Best Play.[5] A year later, a new production succeeded and the play became a classic.[6] It is regarded as a central work in the canon of American drama.[7]

Synopsis
Act One
The opening narration explains the context of Salem and the Puritan colonists of Massachusetts, which the narrator depicts as an isolated theocratic society in constant conflict with Native Americans. The narrator speculates that the lack of civil liberties, isolation from civilization, and lack of stability in the colony caused latent internal tensions which would contribute to the events depicted in the play.

The remainder of Act One is set in the attic of local preacher Reverend Samuel Parris. His ten-year-old daughter, Betty Parris, lies motionless. The previous evening, Reverend Parris discovered Betty, some other girls, and his Barbadian slave, Tituba, dancing naked in the forest and engaged in some sort of pagan ritual. The village is rife with rumors of witchcraft and a crowd gathers outside Rev. Parris' house. Parris becomes concerned that the event will cause him to be removed from his position as the town's preacher. He questions the girls' apparent ringleader, his niece Abigail Williams, whom Parris has been forced to adopt after her parents were brutally killed in King Philip's War. Abigail denies they were engaged in witchcraft, claiming that they had been dancing. Afterwards, the wealthy and influential Thomas Putnam and his wife, Ann arrive. At the Putnams' urging, Parris reluctantly reveals that he has invited Reverend John Hale, an expert in witchcraft and demonology, to investigate and leaves to address the crowd.

The other girls involved in the incident join Abigail and a briefly roused Betty, who attempts to jump out of the window. Abigail coerces and threatens the others to "stick to their story" of merely dancing in the woods. The other girls are frightened of the truth being revealed (in actuality, they tried to conjure a curse against Elizabeth Proctor) and being labelled witches, so they go along with Abigail. Betty then faints back into unconsciousness.

John Proctor, a local farmer and husband of Elizabeth, enters. He sends the other girls out (including Mary Warren, his family's maid) and confronts Abigail, who tells him that she and the girls were not performing witchcraft. It is revealed that Abigail once worked as a servant for the Proctors, and that she and John had an affair, for which she was fired. Abigail still harbors feelings for John and believes they are reciprocated, but John denies this. Abigail angrily mocks John for denying his true feelings for her. As they argue, a psalm is sung in the room downstairs. Betty bolts upright and begins screaming.

Rev. Parris runs back into the bedroom and various villagers arrive: Thomas and his wife, Ann, respected local woman Rebecca Nurse, and the Putnams' neighbor, farmer Giles Corey. The villagers, who had not heard the argument, assume that the singing of the psalm by the villagers in a room below had caused Betty's screaming. Tensions between them soon emerge. Mrs. Putnam is a bereaved parent seven times over; she blames witchcraft for her losses and Betty's ailment. The much more reasonable Rebecca suggests a doctor be called instead. Mr. Putnam and Corey have been feuding over land ownership. Parris is unhappy with his salary and living conditions as minister, and accuses Proctor of heading a conspiracy to oust him from the church. Abigail, standing quietly in a corner, witnesses all of this.

Reverend Hale arrives and begins his investigation. Before leaving, Giles fatefully remarks that he has noticed his wife reading unknown books and asks Hale to look into it. Hale questions Rev. Parris, Abigail and Tituba closely over the girls' activities in the woods. As the facts emerge, Abigail claims Tituba forced her to drink blood. Tituba counters that Abigail begged her to conjure a deadly curse. Parris threatens to whip Tituba to death if she does not confess to witchcraft. Tituba breaks down and falsely claims that the Devil is bewitching her and others in town. With prompting from Hale and Putnam, Tituba accuses Sarah Osborne and Sarah Good of witchcraft. Mrs. Putnam identifies Osborne as her former midwife and asserts that she must have killed her children. Abigail decides to play along with Tituba in order to prevent others from discovering her affair with Proctor, whose wife she had tried to curse out of jealousy. She leaps up, begins contorting wildly, and names Osborne and Good, as well as Bridget Bishop as having been "dancing with the devil". Betty suddenly rises and begins mimicking Abigail's movements and words, and accuses George Jacobs. As the curtain closes, the three continue with their accusations as Hale orders the arrest of the named people and sends for judges to try them.

Act Two
In a second narration, the narrator compares the Colony to post-World War II society, presenting Puritan fundamentalism as being similar to cultural norms in both the United States and the Soviet Union. Additionally, fears of Satanism taking place after incidents in Europe and the colonies are compared to fears of Communism following its implementation in Eastern Europe and China during the Cold War. (Again, narration not present in all versions).

The remainder of Act Two is set in the Proctors‘ home. John and Elizabeth are incredulous that nearly forty people have been arrested for witchcraft based on the pronouncements of Abigail and the other girls. John knows their apparent possession and accusations of witchcraft are untrue, as Abigail told him as much when they were alone together in the first act, but is unsure of how to confess without revealing the affair. Elizabeth is disconcerted to learn her husband was alone with Abigail. She believes John still lusts after Abigail and tells him that as long as he does, he will never redeem himself.

Mary Warren enters and gives Elizabeth a 'poppet' (doll-like puppet) that she made in court that day while sitting as a witness. Mary tells that thirty-nine have been arrested so far accused as witches, and they might be hanged. Mary also tells that Goody Osborne will be hanged, but Sarah Good's life is safe because she confessed that she made a compact with Lucifer (Satan) to torment Christians. Angered that Mary is neglecting her duties, John threatens to beat her. Mary retorts that she is now an official in the court, she must have to go there on daily basis and she saved Elizabeth's life that day, as Elizabeth was accused of witchcraft and was to be arrested until Mary spoke in her defense. Mary refuses to identify Elizabeth's accuser, but Elizabeth surmises accurately that it must have been Abigail. She implores John to go to court and tell the judges that Abigail and the rest of the girls are pretending. John is reluctant, fearing that doing so will require him to publicly reveal his past adultery.

Reverend Hale arrives, stating that he is interviewing all the people named in the proceedings, including Elizabeth. He mentions that Rebecca Nurse was also named, but admits that he doubts her a witch due to her extreme piousness, though he emphasizes that anything is possible. Hale is skeptical about the Proctors' devotion to Christianity, noting that they do not attend church regularly and that one of their three sons has not yet been baptized; John replies that this is because he has no respect for Parris. Challenged to recite the Ten Commandments, John fatefully forgets "thou shalt not commit adultery". When Hale questions her, Elizabeth is angered that he does not question Abigail first. Unsure of how to proceed, Hale prepares to take his leave. At Elizabeth's urging, John tells Hale he knows that the girls' afflictions are fake. When Hale responds that many of the accused have confessed, John points out that they were bound to be hanged if they did not; Hale reluctantly acknowledges this point.

Suddenly, Giles Corey and Francis Nurse enter the house and inform John and Hale that both of their wives have been arrested on charges of witchcraft; respectively, Martha Corey for reading suspicious books and Rebecca Nurse has been suspected of sacrificing children. A posse led by clerk Ezekiel Cheever and town marshal George Herrick arrive soon afterwards and present a warrant for Elizabeth's arrest, much to Hale's surprise. Cheever picks up the poppet on Elizabeth's table and finds a needle inside. He informs John that Abigail had a pain-induced fit earlier that evening and a needle was found stuck into her stomach; Abigail claimed that Elizabeth stabbed her with the needle through witchcraft, using a poppet as a conduit. John brings Mary into the room to tell the truth; Mary asserts that she made the doll and stuck the needle into it, and that Abigail saw her do so. Cheever is unconvinced and prepares to arrest Elizabeth.

John becomes greatly angered, tearing the arrest warrant to shreds and threatening Herrick and Cheever with a musket until Elizabeth calms him down and surrenders herself. He calls Hale a coward and asks him why the accusers' every utterance goes unchallenged. Hale is conflicted, but suggests that perhaps this misfortune has befallen Salem because of a great, secret crime that must be brought to light. Taking this to heart, John orders Mary to go to court with him and expose the other girls' lies, and she protests vehemently. Aware of John's affair, she warns him that Abigail is willing to expose it if necessary. John is shocked but determines the truth must prevail, whatever the personal cost.

Act Three
The third act takes place thirty-seven days later in the General Court of Salem, during the trial of Martha Corey. Francis and Giles desperately interrupt the proceedings, demanding to be heard. The court is recessed and the men thrown out of the main room, reconvening in an adjacent room. John Proctor arrives with Mary Warren and they inform Deputy Governor Danforth and Judge Hathorne about the girls' lies. Danforth then informs an unaware John that Elizabeth is pregnant, and promises to spare her from execution until the child is born, hoping to persuade John to withdraw his case. John refuses to back down and submits a deposition signed by ninety-one locals attesting to the good character of Elizabeth, Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey. Herrick also attests to John's truthfulness as well.

The deposition is dismissed by Parris and Hathorne as illegal. Rev. Hale criticizes the decision and demands to know why the accused are forbidden to defend themselves. Danforth replies that given the "invisible nature" of witchcraft, the word of the accused and their advocates cannot be trusted. He then orders that all ninety-one persons named in the deposition be arrested for questioning. Giles Corey submits his own deposition, accusing Thomas Putnam of forcing his daughter to accuse George Jacobs in order to buy up his land (as convicted witches have to forfeit all of their property). When asked by Hathorne to reveal the source of his information, Giles refuses, fearing that he or she will also be arrested. When Danforth threatens him with arrest for contempt, Giles argues that he cannot be arrested for "contempt of a hearing." Danforth then declares the court in session and Giles is arrested.

John submits Mary's deposition, which declares that she was coerced to accuse people by Abigail. Abigail denies Mary's assertions that they are pretending, and stands by her story about the poppet. When challenged by Parris and Hathorne to 'pretend to be possessed', Mary is too afraid to comply. John attacks Abigail's character, revealing that she and the other girls were caught dancing naked in the woods by Rev. Parris on the night of Betty Parris' alleged 'bewitchment'. When Danforth begins to question Abigail, she claims that Mary has begun to bewitch her with a cold wind and John loses his temper, calling Abigail a whore. He confesses their affair, says Abigail was fired from his household over it and that Abigail is trying to murder Elizabeth so that she may "dance with me on my wife's grave."

Danforth brings Elizabeth in to confirm this story, beforehand forbidding anyone to tell her about John's testimony. Unaware of John's public confession, Elizabeth fears that Abigail has revealed the affair in order to discredit John and lies, saying that there was no affair, and that she fired Abigail out of wild suspicion. Hale begs Danforth to reconsider his judgement, now agreeing Abigail is "false", but to no avail; Danforth throws out this testimony based solely upon John's earlier assertion that Elizabeth would never tell a lie.

Confusion and hysteria begin to overtake the room. Abigail and the girls run about screaming, claiming Mary's spirit is attacking them in the form of a yellow bird, which nobody else is able to see. When Danforth tells the increasingly distraught Mary that he will sentence her to hang, she joins with the other girls and recants all her allegations against them, claiming John Proctor forced her to turn her against the others and that he harbors the devil. John, in despair and having given up all hope, declares that "God is dead", and is arrested. Furious, Reverend Hale denounces the proceedings and quits the court.

Act Four
Act Four takes place three months later in the town jail, early in the morning. Tituba, sharing a cell with Sarah Good, appears to have gone insane from all of the hysteria, hearing voices and now actually claiming to talk to Satan. Marshal Herrick, depressed at having arrested so many of his neighbors, has turned to alcoholism. Many villagers have been charged with witchcraft; most have confessed and been given lengthy prison terms and their property seized by the government; twelve have been executed; seven more are to be hanged at sunrise for refusing to confess, including John Proctor, Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey. Giles Corey was tortured to death by pressing as the court tried in vain to extract a plea; though by holding out, Giles ensured that his sons would receive his land and possessions. The village has become dysfunctional with so many people in prison or dead, and with the arrival of news of rebellion against the courts in nearby Andover, whispers abound of an uprising in Salem. Abigail, fearful of the consequences, steals Parris's life savings and disappears on a ship to England with Mercy Lewis.

Danforth and Hathorne have returned to Salem to meet with Parris, and are surprised to learn that Hale has returned and is meeting with the condemned. Parris, who has lost everything to Abigail, reports that he has received death threats. He begs Danforth to postpone the executions in order to secure confessions, hoping to avoid executing some of Salem's most highly regarded citizens. Hale, deeply remorseful and blaming himself for the hysteria, has returned to counsel the condemned to falsely confess and avoid execution. He presses Danforth to pardon the remaining seven and put the entire affair behind them. Danforth refuses, stating that pardons or postponement would cast doubt on the veracity of previous confessions and hangings.

Danforth and Hale summon Elizabeth and ask her to persuade John to confess. She is bitter towards Hale, both for doubting her earlier and for wanting John to give in and ruin his good name, but agrees to speak with her husband, if only to say goodbye. She and John have a lengthy discussion, during which she commends him for holding out and not confessing. John says he is refusing to confess not out of religious conviction but through contempt for his accusers and the court. The two finally reconcile, with Elizabeth forgiving John and saddened by the thought that he cannot forgive himself and see his own goodness. Knowing in his heart that it is the wrong thing for him to do, John agrees to falsely confess to engaging in witchcraft, deciding that he has no desire or right to be a martyr.

Danforth, Hathorne, and a relieved Parris ask John to testify to the guilt of the other hold-outs and the executed. John refuses, saying he can only report on his own sins. Danforth is disappointed by this reluctance, but at the urging of Hale and Parris, allows John to sign a written confession, to be displayed on the church door as an example. John is wary, thinking his verbal confession is sufficient. As they press him further John eventually signs, but refuses to hand the paper over, stating he does not want his family and especially his three sons to be stigmatized by the public confession. The men argue until Proctor renounces his confession entirely, ripping up the signed document. Danforth calls for the sheriff and John is led away, to be hanged. Facing an imminent rebellion, Putnam and Parris frantically run out to beg Proctor to confess. Hale, guilty over John's death, pleads with Elizabeth to talk John around but she refuses, stating John has "found his goodness".

Characters (in order of appearance)
Reverend Samuel Parris
The minister of Salem. A former merchant, Parris is obsessed with his reputation and frequently complains that the village does not pay him enough, earning him a great deal of scorn. When the trials begin, he is appointed as a prosecutor and helps convict the majority of those accused of witchcraft. Towards the end of the play, he is betrayed by his niece Abigail and begins receiving death threats from angry relatives of the condemned. (In real life, Parris left Salem in 1696, the year his wife, Elizabeth, died. He found his situation untenable. Records in the Suffolk Deeds indicate it likely he returned to business in Boston in 1697. He preached two or three years at Stow. He moved to Concord in 1704 or 1705. He also preached six months in Dunstable in 1711. He died on February 27, 1720, in Sudbury, where he had spent his last years. In 1699 he had remarried, to Dorothy Noyes, in Sudbury.)
Tituba
The Parris family slave, Tituba was brought by Parris from Barbados when he moved to Salem and has served him since. Using her knowledge of herbs and magic, she has been secretly helping Abigail and her friends make love potions, and even conducts a seance on behalf of Ann Putnam. After being framed for witchcraft, she confesses and is subsequently imprisoned with Sarah Good. By the fourth act, she has been driven mad by the harsh conditions and her ending is unknown.
Abigail Williams
The main antagonist of the play.[8] Abigail previously worked as a maid for Elizabeth Proctor. After Elizabeth suspected Abigail of having an illicit relationship with John Proctor, Williams was fired and disgraced. Using her status as Parris's niece to her advantage, she accuses countless citizens of witchcraft, becoming one of the most powerful people in Salem. Eventually, she flees Salem with her uncle's fortune rather than face the consequences of her actions.
Susanna Walcott
A servant girl and part of Abigail's inner circle.
Ann Putnam
A rich and well-connected member of Salem's elite. She has one daughter, Ruth (in real life, Ann Putnam Jr.), but has lost seven other children to illness. Believing witches to be responsible, she eagerly sides with Abigail. (In real life, Ann Putnam (née Carr) had twelve children, ten of whom survived their parents, who both died in 1699).
Thomas Putnam
One of the richest men in Salem. He is greedy and conniving, using the accusations as cover to purchase land seized from convicted witches.
Betty Parris
The ten-year-old daughter of Samuel Parris and one of the primary accusers.
Mercy Lewis
Another primary accuser. In the fourth act, she flees with Abigail to avoid arrest for deceiving the court.
Mary Warren
The Proctor family's servant. She initially helps John, but later turns on him to save herself.
John Proctor
The play's protagonist and husband of Elizabeth Proctor. A local farmer, John is known for his independence and temper, which often gets him into trouble with the authorities. Contemporary notes describe him as a "strong-willed beast of a man".[9] Shamed by an affair with Abigail, John tries to stay out of the trials, but when Elizabeth is charged, he tries to reveal Abigail's deception in court. Betrayed by his maid Mary Warren, John is accused of witchcraft and sentenced to hang. He refuses to confess out of anger towards the court, but ultimately relents. After learning that his confession will likely drive his wife and children into disrepute, he decides to instead admit guilt. He is finally hanged along with several other convicted witches.
(The real John Proctor was also an innkeeper as well as a farmer, and was aged 60 when executed; Elizabeth was his third wife. He was strongly and vocally opposed to the witch trials from their beginning, being particularly scornful of spectral evidence used in the trials. As in the play, Elizabeth was accused of practicing witchcraft and arrested before John. Unlike the play, John maintained his innocence throughout the ordeal. He was hanged in August, 1692.)[9]
Giles Corey
A close friend of Proctor's. He becomes convinced that the trials are being used to steal land from the guilty and presents evidence to prove his claim. When the court demands to know where he obtained it, he refuses to cooperate and is sentenced to be pressed to death. (The character is based on a real person of the same name, who was also pressed when he would not plead guilty to charges of witchcraft.)
Rebecca Nurse
Although an elderly, respected member of the community, she is sentenced to death on charges of witchcraft (and, in the play, infanticide). (In real life, the jury initially acquitted Nurse but were ordered by William Stoughton to deliberate further. One of her two sisters, Mary Easty (or Eastey), was also hanged for witchcraft in real life, and the other, Sarah Cloyce, narrowly escaped.)
Reverend John Hale
A young minister from Beverly, Massachusetts, known for his knowledge of witchcraft. He starts out as a fervent and devoted servant of the court, using his position to investigate and charge suspected witches. Disillusioned with the corruption and abuses of the trials, he later tries to save as many suspects as possible by getting them to confess. (In reality, Hale was in his mid-fifties when the witch trials commenced.)
Elizabeth Proctor
John's wife. She is also accused of witchcraft, but is spared the death penalty due to being pregnant. She distrusts her husband for his adultery, but eventually chooses to forgive him when he refuses to confess to false charges.
Ezekiel Cheever
The clerk of Salem's General Court. He is responsible for crafting the warrants used to arrest suspected witches.
George Herrick/John Willard
Herrick is the town marshal of Salem, and leads the effort to find and arrest those accused of witchcraft until he falls into despair and turns to alcoholism. Willard is one of his deputies until he refuses to carry out any more arrests, at which point he is charged with witchcraft and hanged.
Judge John Hathorne
One of the two judges presiding over the court. Hathorne is a deeply pious man whose blind faith in Abigail's trustworthiness is largely responsible for the destruction wrought by the trials.
Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth
The chief judge of the court. He views the proceedings as an opportunity to cement his power and influence, eagerly convicting anyone brought before him. His refusal to suspend the trials even as they tear Salem apart makes him, according to Miller,[verification needed] the true villain of the play.[citation needed] (Most of the characterization of Danforth actually comes from the real life Magistrate William Stoughton, who accepted spectral evidence, and as chief judge inclined to believe that all the accused were guilty. In fact, the real Danforth opposed the use of "spectral evidence" and was much more inclined to believe the accused.)[original research?]

Historical accuracy
In 1953, the year the play debuted, Miller wrote, "The Crucible is taken from history. No character is in the play who did not take a similar role in Salem, 1692."[16] This does not appear to be accurate as Miller made both deliberate changes and incidental mistakes. Abigail Williams' age was increased from 11 or 12[17] to 17, probably to add credence to the backstory of Proctor's affair with Abigail. John Proctor himself was 60 years old in 1692, but portrayed as much younger in the play, for the same reason.[1][18]

Miller claimed, in A Note on the Historical Accuracy of this Play,[19] that "while there were several judges of almost equal authority, I have symbolized them all in Hathorne and Danforth".[1] However, this conflates Danforth with the historical and extremely influential figure of William Stoughton, who is not a character and is only briefly mentioned in the play. Both men were subsequent Deputy Governors, but it was Stoughton (who, alone among the judges, was a bachelor who never married[20]) who ordered further deliberations after the jury initially acquitted Rebecca Nurse. He refused to ever acknowledge that the trials had been anything other than a success, and was infuriated when Governor Phips (whose own wife, somehow, had been named as a possible witch) ended the trials for good and released the prisoners.[21][page needed]

Danforth did not sit on the Court of Oyer and Terminer. In fact he is recorded as being critical of the conduct of the trials, and played a role in bringing them to an end.[22] In the play, Thomas and especially Ann Putnam are disconsolate over the fact that only one of their children has survived to adolescence. In real life, the Putnams (who both died in 1699) were survived by ten of their twelve children, including Ann Jr. Thomas Putnam's conduct during the witch trial hysteria has been amply documented to have been almost entirely due to financial motivations and score-settling, something the play only makes reference to after introducing the Putnams' fictional deceased offspring as part of the plot narrative.[23][24]

In the 1953 essay, "Journey to The Crucible", Miller writes of visiting Salem and feeling like the only one interested in what really happened in 1692.[16] Many of Miller's characters were based on people who had little in the public record other than their statements from the trials, but others survived to expand, recant, or comment on the role they played at Salem, including jurors, accusers, survivors, and judges.[22] Rev. Parris issued his first in a series of apologies on November 26, 1694, and was removed from his position in 1697.[25] In 1698, Hale finished composing a lengthy essay about Salem that was reprinted by George Burr in 1914.[26]

Language of the period
The play's action takes place 70 years after the community arrived as settlers from Britain. The people on whom the characters are based would have retained strong regional dialects from their home country. Miller gave all his characters the same colloquialisms, such as "Goody" or "Goodwife", and drew on the rhythms and speech patterns of the King James Bible to achieve the effect of historical perspective he wanted.[2]

Title
Miller originally called the play Those Familiar Spirits[27] before renaming it as The Crucible. The word "crucible" is defined as a severe test or trial; alternately, a container in which metals or other substances are subjected to high temperatures. The characters whose moral standards prevail in the face of death, such as John Proctor and Rebecca Nurse, symbolically refuse to sacrifice their principles or to falsely confess.


Fahrenheit 451
Author	Ray Bradbury
Illustrator	Joseph Mugnaini[1]
Language	English
Genre	Dystopian[2]
Published	October 19, 1953 (Ballantine Books)[3]
Publication place	United States
Pages	156
Fahrenheit 451 is a 1953 dystopian novel by American writer Ray Bradbury.[4] It presents a future American society where books have been outlawed and "firemen" burn any that are found.[5] The novel follows in the viewpoint of Guy Montag, a fireman who soon becomes disillusioned with his role of censoring literature and destroying knowledge, eventually quitting his job and committing himself to the preservation of literary and cultural writings.

Fahrenheit 451 was written by Bradbury during the Second Red Scare and the McCarthy era, inspired by the book burnings in Nazi Germany and by ideological repression in the Soviet Union.[6] Bradbury's claimed motivation for writing the novel has changed multiple times. In a 1956 radio interview, Bradbury said that he wrote the book because of his concerns about the threat of burning books in the United States.[7] In later years, he described the book as a commentary on how mass media reduces interest in reading literature.[8] In a 1994 interview, Bradbury cited political correctness as an allegory for the censorship in the book, calling it "the real enemy these days" and labeling it as "thought control and freedom of speech control."[9]

The writing and theme within Fahrenheit 451 was explored by Bradbury in some of his previous short stories. Between 1947 and 1948, Bradbury wrote "Bright Phoenix", a short story about a librarian who confronts a "Chief Censor", who burns books. An encounter Bradbury had in 1949 with the police inspired him to write the short story "The Pedestrian" in 1951. In "The Pedestrian", a man going for a nighttime walk in his neighborhood is harassed and detained by the police. In the society of "The Pedestrian", citizens are expected to watch television as a leisurely activity, a detail that would be included in Fahrenheit 451. Elements of both "Bright Phoenix" and "The Pedestrian" would be combined into The Fireman, a novella published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1951. Bradbury was urged by Stanley Kauffmann, an editor at Ballantine Books, to make The Fireman into a full novel. Bradbury finished the manuscript for Fahrenheit 451 in 1953, and the novel was published later that year.

Upon its release, Fahrenheit 451 was a critical success, albeit with notable outliers. The novel's subject matter led to its censorship in apartheid South Africa and various schools in the United States. In 1954, Fahrenheit 451 won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and the Commonwealth Club of California Gold Medal.[10][11][12] It later won the Prometheus "Hall of Fame" Award in 1984[13] and a "Retro" Hugo Award in 2004.[14] Bradbury was honored with a Spoken Word Grammy nomination for his 1976 audiobook version.[15] The novel has also been adapted into films, stage plays, and video games. Film adaptations of the novel include a 1966 film directed by François Truffaut starring Oskar Werner as Guy Montag and a 2018 television film directed by Ramin Bahrani starring Michael B. Jordan as Montag, both of which received a mixed critical reception. Bradbury himself published a stage play version in 1979 and helped develop a 1984 interactive fiction video game of the same name, as well as a collection of his short stories titled A Pleasure to Burn.[16] Two BBC Radio dramatizations were also produced.

Historical and biographical context
Further information: Second Red Scare, Nazi book burnings, and ideological repression in the Soviet Union

The Nazi book burnings horrified Ray Bradbury and inspired him to write Fahrenheit 451
Shortly after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the conclusion of World War II, the United States focused its concern on the Soviet atomic bomb project and the expansion of communism. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), formed in 1938 to investigate American citizens and organizations suspected of having communist ties, held hearings in 1947 to investigate alleged communist influence in Hollywood movie-making. These hearings resulted in the blacklisting of the so-called "Hollywood Ten",[17] a group of influential screenwriters and directors.

The year that HUAC began investigating Hollywood is often considered the beginning of the Cold War, as in March 1947, the Truman Doctrine was announced. By about 1950, the Cold War was in full swing, and the American public's fear of nuclear warfare and communist influence was at a feverish level.

The government's interference in the affairs of artists and creative types infuriated Bradbury;[18] he was bitter and concerned about the workings of his government, and a late 1949 nighttime encounter with an overzealous police officer would inspire Bradbury to write "The Pedestrian", a short story which would go on to become "The Fireman" and then Fahrenheit 451. The rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy's McCarthyism persecution of accused communists, beginning in 1950, deepened Bradbury's contempt for government overreach.[19][20]

The Golden Age of Radio occurred between the early 1920s to the late 1950s, during Bradbury's early life, while the transition to the Golden Age of Television began right around the time he started to work on the stories that would eventually lead to Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury saw these forms of media as a threat to the reading of books, indeed as a threat to society, as he believed they could act as a distraction from important affairs. This contempt for mass media and technology would express itself through Mildred and her friends and is an important theme in the book.[21]

Bradbury's lifelong passion for books began at an early age. After he graduated from high school, his family could not afford for him to attend college, so Bradbury began spending time at the Los Angeles Public Library where he educated himself.[22] As a frequent visitor to his local libraries in the 1920s and 1930s, he recalls being disappointed because they did not stock popular science fiction novels, like those of H. G. Wells, because, at the time, they were not deemed literary enough. Between this and learning about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria,[23] a great impression was made on Bradbury about the vulnerability of books to censure and destruction. Later, as a teenager, Bradbury was horrified by the Nazi book burnings[24] and later by Joseph Stalin's campaign of political repression, the "Great Purge", in which writers and poets, among many others, were arrested and often executed.[6]

Plot summary
"The Hearth and the Salamander"
In a distant future,[note 1][25] Guy Montag is a fireman employed to burn outlawed books, along with the houses they are hidden in. One fall night while returning from work, he meets his new neighbor Clarisse McClellan, a teenage girl whose free-thinking ideals and liberating spirit cause him to question his life and perceived happiness. Montag returns home to find that his wife Mildred has overdosed on sleeping pills, and he calls for medical attention. Two EMTs later pump her stomach and change her blood. After they leave to rescue another overdose victim, Montag overhears Clarisse and her family talking about their illiterate society. Shortly afterward, Montag's mind is bombarded with Clarisse's subversive thoughts and the memory of Mildred's near-death. Over the next few days, Clarisse meets Montag each night as he walks home. Clarisse's simple pleasures and interests make her an outcast among her peers, and she is forced to go to therapy for her behavior. Montag always looks forward to the meetings, but one day, Clarisse goes missing.[26]

In the following days, while he and other firemen are ransacking the book-filled house of an old woman and drenching it in kerosene, Montag steals a book. The woman refuses to leave her house and her books, choosing instead to light a match and burn herself alive. Jarred by the suicide, Montag returns home and hides the book under his pillow. Later, Montag asks Mildred if she has heard anything about Clarisse. She reveals that Clarisse's family moved away after Clarisse was hit by a speeding car and died four days ago. Dismayed by her failure to mention this earlier, Montag uneasily tries to fall asleep. Outside he suspects the presence of "The Mechanical Hound", an eight-legged[27] robotic dog-like creature that resides in the firehouse and aids the firemen in hunting book hoarders.

Montag awakens ill the next morning. Mildred tries to care for her husband but finds herself more involved in the "parlor wall" entertainment in the living room – large televisions filling the walls. Montag suggests he should take a break from being a fireman, and Mildred panics over the thought of losing the house and her parlor wall "family". Captain Beatty, Montag's fire chief, visits Montag to see how he is doing. Sensing his concerns, Beatty recounts the history of how books had lost their value and how the firemen were adapted for their current role: over decades, people began to embrace new media (like film and television), sports, and an ever-quickening pace of life. Books were abridged or degraded to accommodate shorter attention spans. At the same time, advances in technology resulted in nearly all buildings being made with fireproof materials, and firemen preventing fires were no longer necessary. The government then instead turned the firemen into officers of society's peace of mind: instead of putting out fires, they were charged with starting them, specifically to burn books, which were condemned as sources of confusing and depressing thoughts that complicated people's lives. After an awkward exchange between Mildred and Montag over the book hidden under his pillow, Beatty becomes suspicious and casually adds a passing threat before leaving; he says that if a fireman had a book, he would be asked to burn it within the following twenty-four hours. If he refused, the other firemen would come and burn it for him. The encounter leaves Montag utterly shaken.

Montag later reveals to Mildred that, over the last year, he has accumulated books that are hidden in their ceiling. In a panic, Mildred grabs a book and rushes to throw it in the kitchen incinerator, but Montag subdues her and says they are going to read the books to see if they have value. If they do not, he promises the books will be burned and their lives will return to normal.

"The Sieve and the Sand"
Mildred refuses to go along with Montag's plan, questioning why she or anyone else should care about books. Montag goes on a rant about Mildred's suicide attempt, Clarisse's disappearance and death, the woman who burned herself, and the imminent war that goes ignored by the masses. He suggests that perhaps the books of the past have messages that can save society from its own destruction. Even still, Mildred remains unconvinced.

Conceding that Mildred is a lost cause, Montag will need help to understand the books. He remembers an old man named Faber, an English professor before books were banned, whom he once met in a park. Montag visits Faber's home carrying a copy of the Bible, the book he stole at the woman's house. Once there, after multiple attempts to ask, Montag forces the scared and reluctant Faber into helping him by methodically ripping pages from the Bible. Faber concedes and gives Montag a homemade earpiece communicator so that he can offer constant guidance.

At home, Mildred's friends, Mrs. Bowles and Mrs. Phelps, arrive to watch the "parlor walls". Not interested in this entertainment, Montag turns off the walls and tries to engage the women in meaningful conversation, only for them to reveal just how indifferent, ignorant, and callous they truly are. Enraged, Montag shows them a book of poetry. This confuses the women and alarms Faber, who is listening remotely. Mildred tries to dismiss Montag's actions as a tradition firemen act out once a year: they find an old book and read it as a way to make fun of how silly the past is. Montag proceeds to recite a poem (specifically Dover Beach), causing Mrs. Phelps to cry. Soon, the two women leave.

Montag hides his books in the backyard before returning to the firehouse late at night. There, Montag hands Beatty a book to cover for the one he believes Beatty knows he stole the night before, which is tossed into the trash. Beatty reveals that, despite his disillusionment, he was once an enthusiastic reader. A fire alarm sounds and Beatty picks up the address from the dispatcher system. They drive in the fire truck to the unexpected destination: Montag's house.

"Burning Bright"
Beatty orders Montag to destroy his house with a flamethrower, rather than the more powerful "salamander" that is usually used by the fire team, and tells him that his wife and her friends reported him. Montag watches as Mildred walks out of the house, too traumatized about losing her parlor wall 'family' to even acknowledge her husband's existence or the situation going on around her, and catches a taxi. Montag complies, destroying the home piece by piece, but Beatty discovers his earpiece and plans to hunt down Faber. Montag threatens Beatty with the flamethrower and, after Beatty taunts him, Montag burns Beatty alive. As Montag tries to escape the scene, the Mechanical Hound attacks him, managing to inject his leg with an anesthetic. He destroys the Hound with the flamethrower and limps away. While escaping, Montag concludes that Beatty wanted to die a long time ago, having goaded him and provided him with a weapon.

Montag runs towards Faber's house. En route, he crosses a road as a car attempts to run him over, but he manages to evade the vehicle, almost suffering the same fate as Clarisse and losing his knee. Faber urges him to make his way to the countryside and contact a group of exiled book-lovers who live there. Faber plans to leave on a bus heading to St. Louis, Missouri, where he and Montag can rendezvous later. Meanwhile, another Mechanical Hound is released to track down and kill Montag, with news helicopters following it to create a public spectacle. After wiping his scent from around the house in hopes of thwarting the Hound, Montag leaves. He escapes the manhunt by wading into a river and floating downstream, where he meets the book-lovers. They predicted Montag's arrival while watching the TV.

The drifters are all former intellectuals. They have each memorized books should the day arrive that society comes to an end, with the survivors learning to embrace the literature of the past. Wanting to contribute to the group, Montag finds that he partially memorized the Book of Ecclesiastes, discovering that the group has a special way of unlocking photographic memory. While discussing about their learnings, Montag and the group watch helplessly as bombers fly overhead and annihilate the city with nuclear weapons: the war has begun and ended in the same night. While Faber would have left on the early bus, everyone else (possibly including Mildred) is killed. Injured and dirtied, Montag and the group manage to survive the shockwave.

When the war is over, the exiles return to the city to rebuild society.

Characters
Guy Montag is the protagonist and a fireman who presents the dystopian world in which he lives first through the eyes of a worker loyal to it, then as a man in conflict about it, and eventually as someone resolved to be free of it. Throughout most of the book, Montag lacks knowledge and believes only what he hears. Clarisse McClellan inspires Montag's change, even though they do not know each other for very long.
Clarisse McClellan is a teenage girl one month short of her 17th birthday[note 2] who is Montag's neighbor.[28] She walks with Montag on his trips home from work. A modern critic has described her as an example of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl,[29] as Clarisse is an unusual sort of person compared to the others inhabiting the bookless, hedonistic society: outgoing, naturally cheerful, unorthodox, and intuitive. She is unpopular among peers and disliked by teachers for asking "why" instead of "how" and focusing on nature rather than on technology. A few days after her first meeting with Montag, she disappears without any explanation; Mildred tells Montag (and Captain Beatty confirms) that Clarisse was hit by a speeding car and that her family moved away following her death. It is implied that Beatty may have assassinated Clarisse. In the afterword of a later edition, Bradbury notes that the film adaptation changed the ending so that Clarisse (who, in the film, is now a 20-year-old schoolteacher who was fired for being unorthodox) was living with the exiles.[note 3] Bradbury, far from being displeased by this, was so happy with the new ending that he wrote it into his later stage edition.
Mildred "Millie" Montag is Guy Montag's wife. She is addicted to sleeping pills, absorbed in the shallow dramas played on her "parlor walls" (large, flat-panel televisions), and indifferent to the oppressive society around her. She is described in the book as "thin as a praying mantis from dieting, her hair burnt by chemicals to a brittle straw, and her flesh like white bacon." Despite her husband's attempts to break her from the spell society has on her, Mildred continues to be shallow and indifferent. After Montag scares her friends away by reading Dover Beach, and finding herself unable to live with someone who has been hoarding books, Mildred betrays Montag by reporting him to the firemen and abandoning him, and presumably dies when the city is bombed.
Captain Beatty is Montag's boss and the book's main antagonist. Once an avid reader, he has come to hate books due to their unpleasant content and contradicting facts and opinions. After he forces Montag to burn his own house, Montag kills him with a flamethrower. In a scene written years later by Bradbury for the Fahrenheit 451 play, Beatty invites Montag to his house where he shows him walls of books left to molder on their shelves.
Stoneman and Black are Montag's coworkers at the firehouse. They do not have a large impact on the story and function only to show the reader the contrast between the firemen who obediently do as they are told and someone like Montag, who formerly took pride in his job but subsequently realizes how damaging it is to society. Black is later framed by Montag for possessing books.
Faber is a former English professor. He has spent years regretting that he did not defend books when he saw the moves to ban them. Montag turns to him for guidance, remembering him from a chance meeting in a park sometime earlier. Faber at first refuses to help Montag and later realizes Montag is only trying to learn about books, not destroy them. He secretly communicates with Montag through an electronic earpiece and helps Montag escape the city, then gets on a bus to St. Louis and escapes the city himself before it is bombed. Bradbury notes in his afterword that Faber is part of the name of a German manufacturer of pencils, Faber-Castell but it is also the name of a famous publishing company, Faber and Faber.
Mrs. Ann Bowles and Mrs. Clara Phelps are Mildred's friends and representative of the anti-intellectual, hedonistic mainstream society presented in the novel. During a social visit to Montag's house, they brag about ignoring the bad things in their lives and have a cavalier attitude towards the upcoming war, their husbands, their children, and politics. Mrs. Phelps' husband Pete was called in to fight in the upcoming war (and believes that he'll be back in a week because of how quick the war will be) and thinks having children serves no purpose other than to ruin lives. Mrs. Bowles is a three-times-married single mother. Her first husband divorced her, her second died in a jet accident, and her third committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. She has two children who do not like or respect her due to her permissive, often negligent and abusive parenting; Mrs. Bowles brags that her kids beat her up, and she's glad she can hit back. When Montag reads Dover Beach to them, he strikes a chord in Mrs. Phelps, who starts crying over how hollow her life is. Mrs. Bowles chastises Montag for reading "silly awful hurting words".
Granger is the leader of a group of wandering intellectual exiles who memorize books in order to preserve their contents.
Title
The title page of the book explains the title as follows: Fahrenheit 451—The temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns.... On inquiring about the temperature at which paper would catch fire, Bradbury had been told that 451 °F (233 °C) was the autoignition temperature of paper.[30][31] In various studies, scientists have placed the autoignition temperature at a range of temperatures between 424 and 475 °F (218 and 246 °C), depending on the type of paper.[32][33]

Writing and development
Fahrenheit 451 developed out of a series of ideas Bradbury had visited in previously written stories. For many years, he tended to single out "The Pedestrian" in interviews and lectures as sort of a proto-Fahrenheit 451. In the Preface of his 2006 anthology Match to Flame: The Fictional Paths to Fahrenheit 451 he states that this is an oversimplification.[34] The full genealogy of Fahrenheit 451 given in Match to Flame is involved. The following covers the most salient aspects.[35]

Between 1947 and 1948,[36] Bradbury wrote the short story "Bright Phoenix" (not published until the May 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction[37][38]) about a librarian who confronts a book-burning "Chief Censor" named Jonathan Barnes.

In late 1949,[39] Bradbury was stopped and questioned by a police officer while walking late one night.[40][41] When asked "What are you doing?", Bradbury wisecracked, "Putting one foot in front of another."[40][41] This incident inspired Bradbury to write the 1951 short story "The Pedestrian".[note 4][40][41]

In "The Pedestrian", Leonard Mead is harassed and detained by the city's only remotely operated police cruiser for taking nighttime walks, something that has become extremely rare in this future-based setting, as everybody else stays inside and watches television ("viewing screens"). Alone and without an alibi, Mead is taken to the "Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies" for his peculiar habit. Fahrenheit 451 would later echo this theme of an authoritarian society distracted by broadcast media.[citation needed]

Bradbury expanded the book-burning premise of "Bright Phoenix"[42] and the totalitarian future of "The Pedestrian"[43] into "The Fireman", a novella published in the February 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction.[44][45] "The Fireman" was written in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library on a typewriter that he rented for a fee of ten cents per half hour.[46] The first draft was 25,000 words long and was completed in nine days.[47]

Urged by a publisher at Ballantine Books to double the length of his story to make a novel, Bradbury returned to the same typing room and made the story 25,000 words longer, again taking just nine days.[46] The title "Fahrenheit 451" came to him on January 22. The final manuscript was ready in mid-August, 1953.[48] The resulting novel, which some considered as a fix-up[49] (despite being an expanded rewrite of one single novella), was published by Ballantine in 1953.[50]

Supplementary material
Bradbury has supplemented the novel with various front and back matter, including a 1979 coda,[51] a 1982 afterword,[52] a 1993 foreword, and several introductions.

Censorship/banning incidents
In the years since its publication, Fahrenheit 451 has occasionally been banned, censored, or redacted in some schools at the behest of parents or teaching staff either unaware of or indifferent to the inherent irony in such censorship. Notable incidents include:

In Apartheid South Africa, the book was burned along with thousands of banned publications between the 1950s and 1970s.[75]
In 1987, Fahrenheit 451 was given "third tier" status by the Bay County School Board in Panama City, Florida, under superintendent Leonard Hall's new three-tier classification system. Third tier was meant for books to be removed from the classroom for "a lot of vulgarity". After a resident class-action lawsuit, a media stir, and student protests, the school board abandoned their tier-based censorship system and approved all the currently used books.[76]
In 1992, Venado Middle School in Irvine, California, gave copies of Fahrenheit 451 to students with all "obscene" words blacked out.[77] Parents contacted the local media and succeeded in reinstalling the uncensored copies.[77]
In 2006, parents of a 10th-grade high school student in Montgomery County, Texas, demanded the book be banned from their daughter's English class reading list.[78] Their daughter was assigned the book during Banned Books Week, but stopped reading several pages in due to what she considered the offensive language and description of the burning of the Bible. In addition, the parents protested the violence, portrayal of Christians, and depictions of firemen in the novel.[78]
Themes
Discussions about Fahrenheit 451 often center on its story foremost as a warning against state-based censorship. Indeed, when Bradbury wrote the novel during the McCarthy era, he was concerned about censorship in the United States. During a radio interview in 1956,[79][80] 

Of Mice and Men
Author	John Steinbeck
Cover artist	Ross MacDonald
Language	English
Genre	Tragedy
Publisher	Covici Friede
Publication date	1937
Publication place	United States
Pages	107
Of Mice and Men is a 1937 novella written by American author John Steinbeck.[1][2] It narrates the experiences of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers, who move from place to place in California in search of new job opportunities during the Great Depression in the United States.

Steinbeck based the novella on his own experiences working alongside migrant farm workers as a teenager in the 1910s, before the arrival of the Okies that he would describe in his novel The Grapes of Wrath. The title is taken from Robert Burns' poem "To a Mouse": "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley" ("The best laid plans of mice and men / Often go awry").

While it is a book taught in many schools,[3] Of Mice and Men has been a frequent target of censorship and book bans for vulgarity, and what some consider offensive and racist language; consequently, it appears on the American Library Association's list of the Most Challenged Books of the 21st Century.[4]

Plot
During the Great Depression in California, two migrant field workers – George Milton, an intelligent but uneducated man, and Lennie Small, a bulky, strong but mentally disabled man – are on their way from Soledad to another part of the state. They hope to one day attain the dream of settling down on their own piece of land. Lennie's part of the dream is merely to care for and pet rabbits on the farm, as he loves touching soft animals, although he always accidentally kills them by petting them too hard. This dream is one of Lennie's favorite stories, which George constantly retells. They had fled from Weed after Lennie grabbed a young woman's skirt because he thought it was pretty, and would not let go because of his tendency to hold on tighter when stressed. This led to an accusation of rape. Throughout this introduction, it becomes clear that Lennie is dependent on George as he is unable to function independently.

After being hired at a farm, the pair are confronted by Curley, the Boss's small, aggressive son with a Napoleon complex who dislikes larger men. Curley starts to target Lennie. Curley's flirtatious and provocative wife, to whom Lennie is instantly attracted, poses a problem as well. In contrast, the pair also meets Candy, an elderly ranch handyman with one hand and a loyal dog, and Slim, an intelligent and gentle jerkline-skinner whose dog has recently had a litter of puppies. Slim gives a puppy to Lennie and Candy, whose loyal, accomplished sheep dog was put down by fellow ranch-hand Carlson.

In spite of problems, their dream leaps towards reality when Candy offers to pitch in $350 with George and Lennie so that they can buy a farm at the end of the month, in return for permission to live with them. The trio are ecstatic, but their joy is overshadowed when Curley attacks Lennie, who defends himself by easily crushing Curley's fist while urged on by George.

Nevertheless, George feels more relaxed, to the extent that he even leaves Lennie behind on the ranch while he goes into town with the other ranch hands. Lennie wanders into the stable, and chats with Crooks, the bitter, yet educated stable buck, who is isolated from the other workers due to being black. Candy finds them and they discuss their plans for the farm with Crooks, who cannot resist asking them if he can hoe a garden patch on the farm, even though he scorns the possibility of the farm happening. Curley's wife makes another appearance and flirts with the men, especially Lennie. However, her spiteful side is shown when she belittles them and threatens to have Crooks lynched. They then hear the ranch hands returning, which prompts her to leave.

The next day, Lennie accidentally kills his puppy while stroking it. Curley's wife enters the barn and tries to speak to Lennie, admitting that she is lonely and how her dreams of becoming a movie star have been crushed. After finding out about Lennie's habit, she offers to let him stroke her hair, but panics and begins to scream when she feels his strength. Lennie becomes frightened, and unintentionally breaks her neck. He then runs away. When the other ranch hands find the corpse, they form into a lynch mob intent on killing him, then send for the police before beginning the search. George quickly realizes that their dream is at an end and hurries to find Lennie, hoping he will be at the meeting place they designated in case he got into trouble.

George meets Lennie at the meeting spot, and the two sit together while George retells the beloved story of the dream, despite knowing it is something that will never happen. Upon hearing the lynch mob near them, George shoots Lennie, knowing it to be a more merciful death than that at the hands of a mob. Curley, Slim, and Carlson arrive seconds after. Only Slim understands what has happened and consolingly leads George away. Curley and Carlson look on, neither understanding why Slim and George are feeling the way they are.

Characters
George Milton: A quick-witted man who is Lennie's guardian and best friend. His friendship with Lennie helps sustain his dream of a better future. He has been friends with Lennie since they were children. He is described by Steinbeck in the novel as "small and quick", every part of him being "defined", with small strong hands on slender arms. He has a dark face and "restless eyes" and "sharp, strong features" including a "thin, bony nose".
Lennie Small: A gigantic, physically strong imbecile who travels with George and is his constant companion.[5] He dreams of "living off the fatta' the lan'" and being able to tend to rabbits. His love for soft things is a weakness, mostly because he does not know his own strength, and eventually becomes his undoing. Steinbeck defines his appearance as George's "opposite", writing that he is a "huge man, shapeless of face, with large, pale eyes" and "wide, sloping shoulders". Lennie walks heavily, dragging his feet a little, "the way a bear drags his paws", adding that his arms do not swing at his sides, but hang loosely.
Candy: An aging ranch handyman, Candy lost his hand in an accident and worries about his future on the ranch. Fearing that his age is making him useless, he seizes on George's description of the farm he and Lennie will have, offering his life's savings if he can join George and Lennie in owning the land.
Slim: A "jerkline skinner", the main driver of a mule team and the "prince of the ranch". Slim is greatly respected by many of the characters and is the only character whom Curley treats with respect. His insight, intuition, kindness and natural authority draw the other ranch hands automatically towards him, and he is significantly the only character to fully understand the bond between George and Lennie. Slim is considered the "übermensch"[6] of this story by the god-like descriptions of Slim that he is the one that knows best out of the novel’s characters.
Curley: The Boss's son, a young, pugnacious character, once a semi-professional boxer. He is described by others, with some irony, as "handy", partly because he likes to keep a glove filled with vaseline on his left hand. He is very jealous and protective of his wife and immediately develops a dislike toward Lennie. At one point, Curley loses his temper after he sees Lennie appear to laugh at him, and ends up with his hand horribly damaged after Lennie fights back against him.
Curley's wife: A young, pretty woman, who is mistrusted by her husband. The other characters refer to her only as "Curley's wife". Steinbeck explained that she is "not a person, she's a symbol. She has no function, except to be a foil – and a danger to Lennie."[5] Curley's wife's preoccupation with her own beauty eventually helps precipitate her death: She allows Lennie to stroke her hair as an apparently harmless indulgence, only for her to upset Lennie when she yells at him to stop him "mussing it". Lennie tries to stop her yelling and eventually kills her accidentally by breaking her neck.
Crooks: Crooks, the black stable-hand, gets his name from his crooked back. Proud, bitter, and cynical, he is isolated from the other men because of the color of his skin. Despite himself, Crooks becomes fond of Lennie, and though he claims to have seen countless men following empty dreams of buying their own land, he asks Lennie if he can go with them and hoe in the garden. Crooks is a more relatable individual who sees things from a more rational and human perspective.
Candy's dog: A blind dog who is described as "old", "stinky", and "crippled", and is killed by Carlson.
Carlson: A "thick bodied" ranch hand, he kills Candy's dog with little sympathy.
The Boss: Curley's father, the superintendent of the ranch. The ranch is owned by "a big land company" according to Candy.
Whit: A young ranch hand.
Themes
In every bit of honest writing in the world there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other.

— John Steinbeck in his 1938 journal entry[7]
Steinbeck emphasizes aspirations throughout the book. George aspires to become independent, to be his own boss, to have a homestead, and, most important, to be "somebody". Lennie aspires to be with George on his independent homestead, and to quench his fixation on soft objects. Candy aspires to reassert his responsibility lost with the death of his dog, and for security for his old age—on George's homestead. Crooks aspires to a small homestead where he can express self-respect, security, and most of all, acceptance. Curley's wife dreams to be an actress, to satisfy her desire for fame lost when she married Curley, and an end to her loneliness.

Loneliness is a significant factor in several characters' lives. Candy is lonely after his dog is gone. Curley's wife is lonely because her husband is not the friend she hoped for—she deals with her loneliness by flirting with the men on the ranch, which causes Curley to increase his abusiveness and jealousy. The companionship of George and Lennie is the result of loneliness. Crooks states the theme candidly as "A guy goes nuts if he ain't got anybody. Don't make any difference who the guy is, long's he's with you."[8] The author further reinforces this theme through subtle methods by situating the story near the town of Soledad, which means "solitude" in Spanish.[9]

Despite the need for companionship, Steinbeck emphasizes how loneliness is sustained through the barriers established from acting inhuman to one another. The loneliness of Curley's wife is upheld by Curley's jealousy, which causes all the ranch hands to avoid her. Crooks's barrier results from being barred from the bunkhouse by restraining him to the stable; his bitterness is partially broken, however, through Lennie's ignorance.

Steinbeck's characters are often powerless, due to intellectual, economic, and social circumstances. Lennie possesses the greatest physical strength of any character, which should therefore establish a sense of respect as he is employed as a ranch hand. However, his intellectual handicap undercuts this and results in his powerlessness. Economic powerlessness is established as many of the ranch hands are victims of the Great Depression. As George, Candy and Crooks are positive, action-oriented characters, they wish to purchase a homestead, but because of the Depression, they are unable to earn enough money to fulfill their dream. Lennie is the only one who is basically unable to take care of himself, but the other characters would do this in the improved circumstances they seek. Since they cannot do so, the real danger of Lennie's mental handicap comes to the fore.

Regarding human interaction, the evil of oppression and abuse is a theme that is illustrated through Curley and Curley's wife. Curley uses his aggressive nature and superior position in an attempt to take control of his father's farm. He constantly reprimands the farm hands and accuses some of fooling around with his wife. Curley's Napoleon complex is evidenced by his threatening of the farm hands for minuscule incidents. Curley's wife, on the other hand, is not physically but verbally manipulative. She uses her sex appeal to gain some attention, flirting with the farm hands. According to the Penguin Teacher's Guide for Of Mice and Men, Curley and Curley's wife represent evil in that both oppress and abuse the migrants in different ways.[10]

Fate is felt most heavily as the characters' aspirations are destroyed when George is unable to protect Lennie (who is a real danger). Steinbeck presents this as "something that happened" or as his friend coined for him "non-teleological thinking" or "is thinking", which postulates a non-judgmental point of view.[7]

Of Mice and Men can be associated with the idea that inherent limitations exist and despite all the squirming and struggling, sometimes the circumstances of one's existence limits their capacity to live the fairy tale lives they wish to. Even the title of the novel itself references this "the title is, of course, a fragment from the poem lay Robert Burns, which gives emphasis to the idea of the futility of human endeavor or the vanity of human wishes".[11]

Animals play a role in the story as well; the heron shifts from a beautiful part of the scenery from the beginning of the novel to a predator near the end. The ending chapter has the heron return, preying upon snakes that get too curious in a repetitive nature, symbolic of the dreams of men constantly being snatched away.

Development
Of Mice and Men was Steinbeck's first attempt at writing in the form of novel-play termed a "play-novelette" by one critic. Structured in three acts of two chapters each, it is intended to be both a novella and a script for a play. It is only 30,000 words in length. Steinbeck wanted to write a novel that could be played from its lines, or a play that could be read like a novel.[12][13]

Steinbeck originally titled it Something That Happened (referring to the events of the book as "something that happened" because nobody can be really blamed for the tragedy that unfolds in the story). However, he changed the title after reading Robert Burns's poem "To a Mouse".[13] Burns's poem tells of the regret the narrator feels for having destroyed the home of a mouse while plowing his field.[14]

Steinbeck wrote this book and The Grapes of Wrath in what is now Monte Sereno, California. An early draft of Of Mice and Men was eaten by Steinbeck's dog. As he explained in a 1936 letter:[15]

My setter pup [Toby], left alone one night, made confetti of about half of my [manuscript] book. Two months [sic] work to do over again. It sets me back. There was no other draft. I was pretty mad, but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically.

In the introduction to Penguin's 1994 edition of the book, Susan Shillinglaw writes that Steinbeck, after dropping out of Stanford University, spent almost two years roaming California, finding work on ranches for Spreckels Sugar where he harvested wheat and sugar beets.[16] Steinbeck told The New York Times in 1937:[5]

I was a bindlestiff myself for quite a spell. I worked in the same country that the story is laid in. The characters are composites to a certain extent. Lennie was a real person. He's in an insane asylum in California right now. I worked alongside him for many weeks. He didn't kill a girl. He killed a ranch foreman. Got sore because the boss had fired his pal and stuck a pitchfork right through his stomach. I hate to tell you how many times. I saw him do it. We couldn't stop him until it was too late.


Author	Harper Lee
Language	English
Genre	
Southern GothicBildungsroman
Published	July 11, 1960
Publisher	J. B. Lippincott & Co.
Publication place	United States
Pages	281
To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by the American author Harper Lee. It was published in July 1960 and became instantly successful. In the United States, it is widely read in high schools and middle schools. To Kill a Mockingbird has become a classic of modern American literature; a year after its release, it won the Pulitzer Prize. The plot and characters are loosely based on Lee's observations of her family, her neighbors and an event that occurred near her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, in 1936, when she was ten.

Despite dealing with the serious issues of rape and racial inequality, the novel is renowned for its warmth and humor. Atticus Finch, the narrator's father, has served as a moral hero for many readers and as a model of integrity for lawyers. The historian Joseph Crespino explains, "In the twentieth century, To Kill a Mockingbird is probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America, and its main character, Atticus Finch, the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism."[1] As a Southern Gothic novel and Bildungsroman, the primary themes of To Kill a Mockingbird involve racial injustice and the destruction of innocence. Scholars have noted that Lee also addresses issues of class, courage, compassion, and gender roles in the Deep South. Lessons from the book emphasize tolerance and decry prejudice.[2] Despite its themes, To Kill a Mockingbird has been subject to campaigns for removal from public classrooms, often challenged for its use of racial epithets. In 2006, British librarians ranked the book ahead of the Bible as one "every adult should read before they die".[3]

Reaction to the novel varied widely upon publication. Despite the number of copies sold and its widespread use in education, literary analysis of it is sparse. Author Mary McDonough Murphy, who collected individual impressions of To Kill a Mockingbird by several authors and public figures, calls the book "an astonishing phenomenon".[4] It was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film in 1962 by director Robert Mulligan, with a screenplay by Horton Foote. Since 1990, a play based on the novel has been performed annually in Harper Lee's hometown.

To Kill a Mockingbird was Lee's only published book until Go Set a Watchman, an earlier draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, was published on July 14, 2015. Lee continued to respond to her work's impact until her death in February 2016, although she had refused any personal publicity for herself or the novel since 1964.

Biographical background and publication
Born in 1926, Harper Lee grew up in the Southern town of Monroeville, Alabama, where she became a close friend of soon-to-be-famous writer Truman Capote. She attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery (1944–45), and then studied law at the University of Alabama (1945–49). While attending college, she wrote for campus literary magazines: Huntress at Huntingdon and the humor magazine Rammer Jammer at the University of Alabama. At both colleges, she wrote short stories and other works about racial injustice, a rarely mentioned topic on such campuses at the time.[5] In 1950, Lee moved to New York City, where she worked as a reservation clerk for British Overseas Airways Corporation; there, she began writing a collection of essays and short stories about people in Monroeville. Hoping to be published, Lee presented her writing in 1957 to a literary agent recommended by Capote. An editor at J. B. Lippincott, who bought the manuscript, advised her to quit the airline and concentrate on writing.

Donations from friends allowed her to write uninterrupted for a year.[6] After finishing the first draft and returning it to Lippincott, the manuscript, at that point titled "Go Set a Watchman",[7] fell into the hands of Therese von Hohoff Torrey, known professionally as Tay Hohoff. Hohoff was impressed, "[T]he spark of the true writer flashed in every line," she would later recount in a corporate history of Lippincott,[7] but as Hohoff saw it, the manuscript was by no means fit for publication. It was, as she described it, "more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel." During the following two and a half years, she led Lee from one draft to the next until the book finally achieved its finished form.[7]

After the "Watchman" title was rejected, it was re-titled Atticus but Lee renamed it To Kill a Mockingbird to reflect that the story went beyond a character portrait. The book was published on July 11, 1960.[8] The editorial team at Lippincott warned Lee that she would probably sell only several thousand copies.[9] In 1964, Lee recalled her hopes for the book when she said,

I never expected any sort of success with 'Mockingbird.' ... I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers but, at the same time, I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement. Public encouragement. I hoped for a little, as I said, but I got rather a whole lot, and in some ways this was just about as frightening as the quick, merciful death I'd expected.[10]

Instead of a "quick and merciful death", Reader's Digest Condensed Books chose the book for reprinting in part, which gave it a wide readership immediately.[11] Since the original publication, the book has never been out of print.[12]

Plot summary
See also: List of To Kill a Mockingbird characters
The story, told by Jean Louise Finch, takes place during three years (1933–35) of the Great Depression in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama, the seat of Maycomb County. Nicknamed Scout, the narrator, who is six years old at the beginning of the book, lives with her older brother Jeremy, nicknamed Jem, and their widowed father Atticus, a middle-aged lawyer. They also have a black cook, Calpurnia, who has been with the family for many years and helps Atticus raise the two children.

Jem and Scout befriend a boy named Dill, who visits Maycomb to stay with his aunt each summer. The three children are terrified, yet fascinated, by their neighbor, the reclusive Arthur "Boo" Radley. The adults of Maycomb are hesitant to talk about Boo, and many of them have not seen him for many years. The children feed one another's imagination with rumors about his appearance and reasons for remaining hidden, and they fantasize about how to get him out of his house. After two summers of friendship with Dill, Scout and Jem find that someone is leaving them small gifts in a tree outside the Radley place. Several times the mysterious Boo makes gestures of affection to the children, but, to their disappointment, he never appears in person.

Judge Taylor appoints Atticus to defend Tom Robinson, a black man who has been accused of raping a young white woman, Mayella Ewell. Although many of Maycomb's citizens disapprove, Atticus agrees to defend Tom to the best of his ability. Other children taunt Jem and Scout for Atticus's actions, calling him a "nigger-lover". Scout is tempted to stand up for her father's honor by fighting, even though he has told her not to. One night, Atticus faces a group of men intent on lynching Tom. Scout, Jem, and Dill unexpectedly show up, and Scout inadvertently breaks the mob mentality by recognizing and talking to a classmate's father, causing the would-be lynchers to disperse.

Atticus does not want Jem and Scout to be present at Tom Robinson's trial. No seat is available on the main floor, but the Rev. Sykes, the pastor of Calpurnia's church, invites Jem, Scout and Dill to watch from the colored balcony. Atticus establishes that Mayella Ewell and her father, Bob, are lying. It is revealed that Mayella made sexual advances toward Tom, resulting in her being beaten by her father. The townspeople refer to the Ewells as "white trash" who are not to be trusted, but the jury convicts Tom regardless. Jem's faith in justice is badly shaken. Atticus is hopeful that he can get the verdict overturned, but Tom is shot and killed while trying to escape from prison.

Despite Tom's conviction, Bob Ewell is humiliated by the events of the trial. Atticus explains that he destroyed Ewell's last shred of credibility. Ewell vows revenge, spitting in Atticus' face, trying to break into the judge's house and menacing Tom Robinson's widow. Finally, he attacks Jem and Scout while they are walking home on a dark night after the school Halloween pageant. Jem suffers a broken arm and is knocked unconscious in the struggle, but amid the confusion, someone comes to the children's rescue. The mysterious man carries Jem home, where Scout realizes that he is Boo Radley.

Sheriff Tate arrives and discovers Ewell dead from a knife wound. Atticus believes that Jem was responsible, but Tate is certain it was Boo. The sheriff tells Atticus that, to protect Boo's privacy, he will report that Ewell simply fell on his own knife during the attack. Boo asks Scout to walk him home. After she says goodbye to him at his front door, he disappears, never to be seen again by Scout. While standing on the Radley porch, Scout imagines life from Boo's perspective.

Autobiographical elements
Lee said that To Kill a Mockingbird is not an autobiography, but rather an example of how an author "should write about what he knows and write truthfully".[13] Nevertheless, several people and events from Lee's childhood parallel those of the fictional Scout. Amasa Coleman Lee, Lee's father, was an attorney similar to Atticus Finch. In 1919, he defended two black men accused of murder. After they were convicted, hanged and mutilated,[14] he never took another criminal case. Lee's father was also the editor and publisher of the Monroeville newspaper. Although more of a proponent of racial segregation than Atticus, he gradually became more liberal in his later years.[15] Though Scout's mother died when she was a baby, Lee was 25 when her mother, Frances Cunningham Finch, died. Lee's mother was prone to a nervous condition that rendered her mentally and emotionally absent.[16] Lee's older brother Edwin was the inspiration for Jem.

Lee modeled the character of Dill on Truman Capote, her childhood friend known then as Truman Persons.[17][18] Just as Dill lived next door to Scout during the summer, Capote lived next door to Lee with his aunts while his mother visited New York City.[19] Like Dill, Capote had an impressive imagination and a gift for fascinating stories. Both Lee and Capote loved to read, and were atypical children in some ways: Lee was a scrappy tomboy who was quick to fight, and Capote was ridiculed for his advanced vocabulary and lisp. She and Capote made up and acted out stories they wrote on an old Underwood typewriter that Lee's father gave them. They became good friends when both felt alienated from their peers; Capote called the two of them "apart people".[20] In 1960, Capote and Lee traveled to Kansas together to investigate the multiple murders that were the basis for Capote's nonfiction novel In Cold Blood.[21]

Down the street from the Lees lived a family whose house was always boarded up; they served as the models for the fictional Radleys. The son of the family got into some legal trouble and the father kept him at home for 24 years out of shame. He was hidden until virtually forgotten; he died in 1952.[22]

The origin of Tom Robinson is less clear, although many have speculated that his character was inspired by several models. When Lee was 10 years old, a white woman near Monroeville accused a black man named Walter Lett of raping her. The story and the trial were covered by her father's newspaper, which reported that Lett was convicted and sentenced to death. After a series of letters appeared claiming Lett had been falsely accused, his sentence was commuted to life in prison. He died there of tuberculosis in 1937.[23] Scholars believe that Robinson's difficulties reflect the notorious case of the Scottsboro Boys,[24][25] in which nine black men were convicted of raping two white women on negligible evidence. However, in 2005, Lee stated that she had in mind something less sensational, although the Scottsboro case served "the same purpose" to display Southern prejudices.[26] Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman in Mississippi in 1955, and whose death is credited as a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement, is also considered a model for Tom.[27]

Style
The narrative is very tough, because [Lee] has to both be a kid on the street and aware of the mad dogs and the spooky houses and have this beautiful vision of how justice works and all the creaking mechanisms of the courthouse. Part of the beauty is that she... trusts the visual to lead her, and the sensory.

—Allan Gurganus[28]

The strongest element of style noted by critics and reviewers is Lee's talent for narration, which in an early review in Time was called "tactile brilliance".[29] Writing a decade later, another scholar noted, "Harper Lee has a remarkable gift of story-telling. Her art is visual, and with cinematographic fluidity and subtlety we see a scene melting into another scene without jolts of transition."[30] Lee combines the narrator's voice of a child observing her surroundings with a grown woman's reflecting on her childhood, using the ambiguity of this voice combined with the narrative technique of flashback to play intricately with perspectives.[31] This narrative method allows Lee to tell a "delightfully deceptive" story that mixes the simplicity of childhood observation with adult situations complicated by hidden motivations and unquestioned tradition.[32] However, at times the blending causes reviewers to question Scout's preternatural vocabulary and depth of understanding.[33] Both Harding LeMay and the novelist and literary critic Granville Hicks expressed doubt that children, as sheltered as Scout and Jem, could understand the complexities and horrors involved in the trial for Tom Robinson's life.[34][35]

Writing about Lee's style and use of humor in a tragic story, scholar Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin states: "Laughter ... [exposes] the gangrene under the beautiful surface but also by demeaning it; one can hardly ... be controlled by what one is able to laugh at."[36] Scout's precocious observations about her neighbors and behavior inspired National Endowment of the Arts director David Kipen to call her "hysterically funny".[37] To address complex issues, however, Tavernier-Courbin notes that Lee uses parody, satire, and irony effectively by using a child's perspective. After Dill promises to marry her, then spends too much time with Jem, Scout reasons the best way to get him to pay attention to her is to beat him up, which she does several times.[38] Scout's first day in school is a satirical treatment of education; her teacher says she must undo the damage Atticus has wrought in teaching her to read and write, and forbids Atticus from teaching her further.[39] Lee treats the most unfunny situations with irony, however, as Jem and Scout try to understand how Maycomb embraces racism and still tries sincerely to remain a decent society. Satire and irony are used to such an extent that Tavernier-Courbin suggests one interpretation for the book's title: Lee is doing the mocking—of education, the justice system, and her own society—by using them as subjects of her humorous disapproval.[36]

Critics also note the entertaining methods used to drive the plot.[40] When Atticus is out of town, Jem locks a Sunday school classmate in the church basement with the furnace during a game of Shadrach. This prompts their black housekeeper Calpurnia to escort Scout and Jem to her church, which allows the children a glimpse into her personal life, as well as Tom Robinson's.[41] Scout falls asleep during the Halloween pageant and makes a tardy entrance onstage, causing the audience to laugh uproariously. She is so distracted and embarrassed that she prefers to go home in her ham costume, which saves her life.[42]

Genres
Scholars have characterized To Kill a Mockingbird as both a Southern Gothic and a Bildungsroman. The grotesque and near-supernatural qualities of Boo Radley and his house, and the element of racial injustice involving Tom Robinson, contribute to the aura of the Gothic in the novel.[43][44] Lee used the term "Gothic" to describe the architecture of Maycomb's courthouse and in regard to Dill's exaggeratedly morbid performances as Boo Radley.[45] Outsiders are also an important element of Southern Gothic texts and Scout and Jem's questions about the hierarchy in the town cause scholars to compare the novel to Catcher in the Rye and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.[46] Despite challenging the town's systems, Scout reveres Atticus as an authority above all others, because he believes that following one's conscience is the highest priority, even when the result is social ostracism.[47] However, scholars debate about the Southern Gothic classification, noting that Boo Radley is, in fact, human, protective, and benevolent. Furthermore, in addressing themes such as alcoholism, incest, rape, and racial violence, Lee wrote about her small town realistically rather than melodramatically. She portrays the problems of individual characters as universal underlying issues in every society.[44]

As children coming of age, Scout and Jem face hard realities and learn from them. Lee seems to examine Jem's sense of loss about how his neighbors have disappointed him more than Scout's. Jem says to their neighbor Miss Maudie the day after the trial, "It's like bein' a caterpillar wrapped in a cocoon ... I always thought Maycomb folks were the best folks in the world, least that's what they seemed like".[48] This leads him to struggle with understanding the separations of race and class. Just as the novel is an illustration of the changes Jem faces, it is also an exploration of the realities Scout must face as an atypical girl on the verge of womanhood. As one scholar writes, "To Kill a Mockingbird can be read as a feminist Bildungsroman, for Scout emerges from her childhood experiences with a clear sense of her place in her community and an awareness of her potential power as the woman she will one day be."[49]

Themes
Despite the novel's immense popularity upon publication, it has not received the close critical attention paid to other modern American classics. Don Noble, the editor of a book of essays about the novel, estimates that the ratio of sales to analytical essays may be a million to one. Christopher Metress writes that the book is "an icon whose emotive sway remains strangely powerful because it also remains unexamined".[50] Noble suggests it does not receive academic attention because of its consistent status as a best-seller ("If that many people like it, it can't be any good.") and that general readers seem to feel they do not require analytical interpretation.[51]

When the book was released, reviewers noted that it was divided into two parts, and opinion was mixed about Lee's ability to connect them.[54] The first part of the novel concerns the children's fascination with Boo Radley and their feelings of safety and comfort in the neighborhood. Reviewers were generally charmed by Scout and Jem's observations of their quirky neighbors. One writer was so impressed by Lee's detailed explanations of the people of Maycomb that he categorized the book as Southern romantic regionalism.[55] This sentimentalism can be seen in Lee's representation of the Southern caste system to explain almost every character's behavior in the novel. Scout's Aunt Alexandra attributes Maycomb's inhabitants' faults and advantages to genealogy (families that have gambling streaks and drinking streaks),[56] and the narrator sets the action and characters amid a finely detailed background of the Finch family history and the history of Maycomb. This regionalist theme is further reflected in Mayella Ewell's apparent powerlessness to admit her advances toward Tom Robinson, and Scout's definition of "fine folks" being people with good sense who do the best they can with what they have. The South itself, with its traditions and taboos, seems to drive the plot more than the characters.[55]

The second part of the novel deals with what book reviewer Harding LeMay termed "the spirit-corroding shame of the civilized white Southerner in the treatment of the Negro".[34] In the years following its release, many reviewers considered To Kill a Mockingbird a novel primarily concerned with race relations.[57] Claudia Durst Johnson considers it "reasonable to believe" that the novel was shaped by two events involving racial issues in Alabama: Rosa Parks' refusal to yield her seat on a city bus to a white person, which sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, and the 1956 riots at the University of Alabama after Autherine Lucy and Polly Myers were admitted (Myers eventually withdrew her application and Lucy was expelled, but reinstated in 1980).[58] In writing about the historical context of the novel's construction, two other literary scholars remark: "To Kill a Mockingbird was written and published amidst the most significant and conflict-ridden social change in the South since the Civil War and Reconstruction. Inevitably, despite its mid-1930s setting, the story told from the perspective of the 1950s voices the conflicts, tensions, and fears induced by this transition."[59]

Scholar Patrick Chura, who suggests Emmett Till was a model for Tom Robinson, enumerates the injustices endured by the fictional Tom that Till also faced. Chura notes the icon of the black rapist causing harm to the representation of the "mythologized vulnerable and sacred Southern womanhood".[27] Any transgressions by black males that merely hinted at sexual contact with white females during the time the novel was set often resulted in a punishment of death for the accused. Tom Robinson's trial was juried by poor white farmers who convicted him despite overwhelming evidence of his innocence, as more educated and moderate white townspeople supported the jury's decision. Furthermore, the victim of racial injustice in To Kill a Mockingbird was physically impaired, which made him unable to commit the act he was accused of, but also crippled him in other ways.[27] Roslyn Siegel includes Tom Robinson as an example of the recurring motif among white Southern writers of the black man as "stupid, pathetic, defenseless, and dependent upon the fair dealing of the whites, rather than his own intelligence to save him".[60] Although Tom is spared from being lynched, he is killed with excessive violence during an attempted escape from prison, being shot seventeen times.

The theme of racial injustice appears symbolically in the novel as well. For example, Atticus must shoot a rabid dog, even though it is not his job to do so.[61] Carolyn Jones argues that the dog represents prejudice within the town of Maycomb, and Atticus, who waits on a deserted street to shoot the dog,[62] must fight against the town's racism without help from other white citizens. He is also alone when he faces a group intending to lynch Tom Robinson and once more in the courthouse during Tom's trial. Lee even uses dreamlike imagery from the mad dog incident to describe some of the courtroom scenes. Jones writes, "[t]he real mad dog in Maycomb is the racism that denies the humanity of Tom Robinson ... When Atticus makes his summation to the jury, he literally bares himself to the jury's and the town's anger."[62]

Class
One of the amazing things about the writing in To Kill a Mockingbird is the economy with which Harper Lee delineates not only race—white and black within a small community—but class. I mean different kinds of black people and white people both, from poor white trash to the upper crust—the whole social fabric.

—Lee Smith[63]

Scholars argue that Lee's approach to class and race was more complex "than ascribing racial prejudice primarily to 'poor white trash' ... Lee demonstrates how issues of gender and class intensify prejudice, silence the voices that might challenge the existing order, and greatly complicate many Americans' conception of the causes of racism and segregation."[59] Lee's use of the middle-class narrative voice is a literary device that allows an intimacy with the reader, regardless of class or cultural background, and fosters a sense of nostalgia. Sharing Scout and Jem's perspective, the reader is allowed to engage in relationships with the conservative antebellum Mrs. Dubose; the lower-class Ewells, and the Cunninghams who are equally poor but behave in vastly different ways; the wealthy but ostracized Mr. Dolphus Raymond; and Calpurnia and other members of the black community. The children internalize Atticus' admonition not to judge someone until they have walked around in that person's skin, gaining a greater understanding of people's motives and behavior.[59]

Courage and compassion
The novel has been noted for its poignant exploration of different forms of courage.[67][68] Scout's impulsive inclination to fight students who insult Atticus reflects her attempt to stand up for him and defend him. Atticus is the moral center of the novel, however, and he teaches Jem one of the most significant lessons of courage.[69] In a statement that both foreshadows Atticus' motivation for defending Tom Robinson and describes Mrs. Dubose, who is determined to break herself of a morphine addiction, Atticus tells Jem that courage is "when you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what".[70]

External videos
video icon After Words interview with Shields on Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, July 11, 2015, C-SPAN
Charles J. Shields, who wrote the first book-length biography of Harper Lee, offers the reason for the novel's enduring popularity and impact is that "its lessons of human dignity and respect for others remain fundamental and universal".[71] Atticus' lesson to Scout that "you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—until you climb around in his skin and walk around in it" exemplifies his compassion.[68][72] She ponders the comment when listening to Mayella Ewell's testimony. When Mayella reacts with confusion to Atticus' question if she has any friends, Scout offers that she must be lonelier than Boo Radley. Having walked Boo home after he saves their lives, Scout stands on the Radley porch and considers the events of the previous three years from Boo's perspective. One writer remarks, "... [w]hile the novel concerns tragedy and injustice, heartache and loss, it also carries with it a strong sense [of] courage, compassion, and an awareness of history to be better human beings."[68]

Gender roles
Just as Lee explores Jem's development in coming to grips with a racist and unjust society, Scout realizes what being female means, and several female characters influence her development. Scout's primary identification with her father and older brother allows her to describe the variety and depth of female characters in the novel both as one of them and as an outsider.[49] Scout's primary female models are Calpurnia and her neighbor Miss Maudie, both of whom are strong-willed, independent, and protective. Mayella Ewell also has an influence; Scout watches her destroy an innocent man in order to hide her desire for him. The female characters who comment the most on Scout's lack of willingness to adhere to a more feminine role are also those who promote the most racist and classist points of view.[66] For example, Mrs. Dubose chastises Scout for not wearing a dress and camisole, and indicates she is ruining the family name by not doing so, in addition to insulting Atticus' intentions to defend Tom Robinson. By balancing the masculine influences of Atticus and Jem with the feminine influences of Calpurnia and Miss Maudie, one scholar writes, "Lee gradually demonstrates that Scout is becoming a feminist in the South, for with the use of first-person narration, she indicates that Scout/Jean Louise still maintains the ambivalence about being a Southern lady she possessed as a child."[66]

Absent mothers and abusive fathers are another theme in the novel. Scout and Jem's mother died before Scout could remember her, Mayella's mother is dead, and Mrs. Radley is silent about Boo's confinement to the house. Apart from Atticus, the fathers described are abusers.[73] Bob Ewell, it is hinted, molested his daughter,[74] and Mr. Radley imprisons his son in his house to the extent that Boo is remembered only as a phantom. Bob Ewell and Mr. Radley represent a form of masculinity that Atticus does not, and the novel suggests that such men, as well as the traditionally feminine hypocrites at the Missionary Society, can lead society astray. Atticus stands apart as a unique model of masculinity; as one scholar explains: "It is the job of real men who embody the traditional masculine qualities of heroic individualism, bravery, and an unshrinking knowledge of and dedication to social justice and morality, to set the society straight."[73]

Laws, written and unwritten
Allusions to legal issues in To Kill a Mockingbird, particularly in scenes outside of the courtroom, have drawn the attention of legal scholars. Claudia Durst Johnson writes that "a greater volume of critical readings has been amassed by two legal scholars in law journals than by all the literary scholars in literary journals".[75] The opening quote by the 19th-century essayist Charles Lamb reads: "Lawyers, I suppose, were children once." Johnson notes that even in Scout and Jem's childhood world, compromises and treaties are struck with each other by spitting on one's palm, and laws are discussed by Atticus and his children: is it right that Bob Ewell hunts and traps out of season? Many social codes are broken by people in symbolic courtrooms: Mr. Dolphus Raymond has been exiled by society for taking a black woman as his common-law wife and having interracial children; Mayella Ewell is beaten by her father in punishment for kissing Tom Robinson; by being turned into a non-person, Boo Radley receives a punishment far greater than any court could have given him.[58] Scout repeatedly breaks codes and laws and reacts to her punishment for them. For example, she refuses to wear frilly clothes, saying that Aunt Alexandra's "fanatical" attempts to place her in them made her feel "a pink cotton penitentiary closing in on [her]".[76] Johnson states, "[t]he novel is a study of how Jem and Scout begin to perceive the complexity of social codes and how the configuration of relationships dictated by or set off by those codes fails or nurtures the inhabitants of (their) small worlds."[58]

Loss of innocence
Lee used the mockingbird to symbolize innocence in the novel
Songbirds and their associated symbolism appear throughout the novel. Their family name Finch is also Lee's mother's maiden name. The titular mockingbird is a key motif of this theme, which first appears when Atticus, having given his children air-rifles for Christmas, allows their Uncle Jack to teach them to shoot. Atticus warns them that, although they can "shoot all the bluejays they want", they must remember that "it's a sin to kill a mockingbird".[77] Confused, Scout approaches her neighbor Miss Maudie, who explains that mockingbirds never harm other living creatures. She points out that mockingbirds simply provide pleasure with their songs, saying, "They don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us."[77] Writer Edwin Bruell summarized the symbolism when he wrote in 1964, "'To kill a mockingbird' is to kill that which is innocent and harmless—like Tom Robinson."[56] Scholars have noted that Lee often returns to the mockingbird theme when trying to make a moral point.[30][78][79]

Tom Robinson is the chief example, among several in the novel, of innocents being carelessly or deliberately destroyed. However, scholar Christopher Metress connects the mockingbird to Boo Radley: "Instead of wanting to exploit Boo for her own fun (as she does in the beginning of the novel by putting on gothic plays about his history), Scout comes to see him as a 'mockingbird'—that is, as someone with an inner goodness that must be cherished."[80] The last pages of the book illustrate this as Scout relates the moral of a story Atticus has been reading to her, and, in allusions to both Boo Radley and Tom Robinson,[27] states about a character who was misunderstood, "when they finally saw him, why he hadn't done any of those things ... Atticus, he was real nice," to which he responds, "Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them."[81]

The novel exposes the loss of innocence so frequently that reviewer R. A. Dave claims that because every character has to face, or even suffer defeat, the book takes on elements of a classical tragedy.[30] In exploring how each character deals with his or her own personal defeat, Lee builds a framework to judge whether the characters are heroes or fools. She guides the reader in such judgments, alternating between unabashed adoration and biting irony. Scout's experience with the Missionary Society is an ironic juxtaposition of women who mock her, gossip, and "reflect a smug, colonialist attitude toward other races" while giving the "appearance of gentility, piety, and morality".[66] Conversely, when Atticus loses Tom's case, he is last to leave the courtroom, except for his children and the black spectators in the colored balcony, who rise silently as he walks underneath them, to honor his efforts.[82]

Social commentary and challenges
To Kill a Mockingbird has been a source of significant controversy since its being the subject of classroom study as early as 1963. The book's racial slurs, profanity, and frank discussion of rape have led people to challenge its appropriateness in libraries and classrooms across the United States. The American Library Association reported that To Kill a Mockingbird was number 21 of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 2000–2009.[110] Following parental complaints about the racist language it contains, the novel was removed from classrooms in Virginia in 2016[111][112] and Biloxi, Mississippi, where it was described as making people "uncomfortable",[113] in 2017.[114][115] In the Mississippi case, the novel was removed from the required reading list but subsequently made available to interested students with parental consent.[116] Such decisions have been criticised: the American Civil Liberties Union noted the importance of engaging with the novel's themes in places where racial injustice persists.[117] In 2021, a group of teachers in Mukilteo, Washington proposed to take the book off the list of required reading for freshman and off the list of district-approved books to be studied and analyzed in classrooms, arguing that it "centers on whiteness". The school board approved the former but not the latter proposal.[118] Becky Little, of The History Channel, and representatives of the Mark Twain House noted that the value of classics lies in their power to "challenge the way we think about things"[119] (Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has attracted similar controversy).[120] Arne Duncan, who served as Secretary of Education under President Obama, noted that removal of the book from reading lists was evidence of a nation with "real problems".[121] In 1966, a parent in Hanover, Virginia, protested that the use of rape as a plot device was immoral. Johnson cites examples of letters to local newspapers, which ranged from amusement to fury; those letters expressing the most outrage, however, complained about Mayella Ewell's attraction to Tom Robinson over the depictions of rape.[122] Upon learning the school administrators were holding hearings to decide the book's appropriateness for the classroom, Harper Lee sent $10 to The Richmond News Leader suggesting it be used toward the enrollment of "the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice".[52] The National Education Association in 1968 placed the novel second on a list of books receiving the most complaints from private organizations—after Little Black Sambo.[123]

With a shift of attitudes about race in the 1970s, To Kill a Mockingbird faced challenges of a different sort: the treatment of racism in Maycomb was not condemned harshly enough. This has led to disparate perceptions that the novel has a generally positive impact on race relations for white readers, but a more ambiguous reception by black readers. In one high-profile case outside the U.S., school districts in the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia attempted to have the book removed from standard teaching curricula in the 1990s,[note 3] stating:

The terminology in this novel subjects students to humiliating experiences that rob them of their self-respect and the respect of their peers. The word 'Nigger' is used 48 times [in] the novel ... We believe that the English Language Arts curriculum in Nova Scotia must enable all students to feel comfortable with ideas, feelings and experiences presented without fear of humiliation ... To Kill a Mockingbird is clearly a book that no longer meets these goals and therefore must no longer be used for classroom instruction.[124]

Furthermore, despite the novel's thematic focus on racial injustice, its black characters are not fully examined.[74] In its use of racial epithets, stereotyped depictions of superstitious blacks, and Calpurnia, who to some critics is an updated version of the "contented slave" motif and to others simply unexplored, the book is viewed as marginalizing black characters.[125][126] One writer asserts that the use of Scout's narration serves as a convenient mechanism for readers to be innocent and detached from the racial conflict. Scout's voice "functions as the not-me which allows the rest of us—black and white, male and female—to find our relative position in society".[74] A teaching guide for the novel published by The English Journal cautions, "what seems wonderful or powerful to one group of students may seem degrading to another".[127] A Canadian language arts consultant found that the novel resonated well with white students, but that black students found it "demoralizing".[128] With racism told from a white perspective with a focus on white courage and morality, some have labeled the novel as having a "white savior complex",[129] a criticism also leveled at the film adaptation with its white savior narrative.[130] Another criticism, articulated by Michael Lind, is that the novel indulges in classist stereotyping and demonization of poor rural "white trash".[131]

The novel is cited as a factor in the success of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, however, in that it "arrived at the right moment to help the South and the nation grapple with the racial tensions (of) the accelerating civil rights movement".[132] Its publication is so closely associated with the Civil Rights Movement that many studies of the book and biographies of Harper Lee include descriptions of important moments in the movement, despite the fact that she had no direct involvement in any of them.[133][134][135] Civil Rights leader Andrew Young comments that part of the book's effectiveness is that it "inspires hope in the midst of chaos and confusion" and by using racial epithets portrays the reality of the times in which it was set. Young views the novel as "an act of humanity" in showing the possibility of people rising above their prejudices.[136] Alabama author Mark Childress compares it to the impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book that is popularly implicated in starting the U.S. Civil War. Childress states the novel

gives white Southerners a way to understand the racism that they've been brought up with and to find another way. And most white people in the South were good people. Most white people in the South were not throwing bombs and causing havoc ... I think the book really helped them come to understand what was wrong with the system in the way that any number of treatises could never do, because it was popular art, because it was told from a child's point of view.[137]

Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Birmingham campaign, asserts that To Kill a Mockingbird condemns racism instead of racists, and states that every child in the South has moments of racial cognitive dissonance when they are faced with the harsh reality of inequality. This feeling causes them to question the beliefs with which they have been raised, which for many children is what the novel does. McWhorter writes of Lee, "for a white person from the South to write a book like this in the late 1950s is really unusual—by its very existence an act of protest."[138][note 4] Author James McBride calls Lee brilliant but stops short of calling her brave:

I think by calling Harper Lee brave you kind of absolve yourself of your own racism ... She certainly set the standards in terms of how these issues need to be discussed, but in many ways I feel ... the moral bar's been lowered. And that's really distressing. We need a thousand Atticus Finches.

McBride, however, defends the book's sentimentality, and the way Lee approaches the story with "honesty and integrity".[139]


Romeo and Juliet

Written by	William Shakespeare
Characters	
Romeo
Juliet
Count Paris
Mercutio
Tybalt
The Nurse
Rosaline
Benvolio
Friar Laurence
Date premiered	1597[a]
Original language	Early Modern English
Series	First Quarto
Subject	Love
Genre	Shakespearean tragedy
Setting	Italy (Verona and Mantua)

"Romeo and Juliet: Act I"
Duration: 46 minutes and 16 seconds.46:16
The opening act of Romeo and Juliet.
See also: Acts II, III, IV, V
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Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare early in his career about the romance between two Italian youths from feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular plays during his lifetime and, along with Hamlet, is one of his most frequently performed. Today, the title characters are regarded as archetypal young lovers.

Romeo and Juliet belongs to a tradition of tragic romances stretching back to antiquity. The plot is based on an Italian tale written by Matteo Bandello and translated into verse as The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke in 1562 and retold in prose in Palace of Pleasure by William Painter in 1567. Shakespeare borrowed heavily from both but expanded the plot by developing a number of supporting characters, in particular Mercutio and Paris. Believed to have been written between 1591 and 1595, the play was first published in a quarto version in 1597. The text of the first quarto version was of poor quality, however, and later editions corrected the text to conform more closely with Shakespeare's original.

Shakespeare's use of poetic dramatic structure (including effects such as switching between comedy and tragedy to heighten tension, the expansion of minor characters, and numerous sub-plots to embellish the story) has been praised as an early sign of his dramatic skill. The play ascribes different poetic forms to different characters, sometimes changing the form as the character develops. Romeo, for example, grows more adept at the sonnet over the course of the play.

Romeo and Juliet has been adapted numerous times for stage, film, musical, and opera venues. During the English Restoration, it was revived and heavily revised by William Davenant. David Garrick's 18th-century version also modified several scenes, removing material then considered indecent, and Georg Benda's Romeo und Julie omitted much of the action and used a happy ending. Performances in the 19th century, including Charlotte Cushman's, restored the original text and focused on greater realism. John Gielgud's 1935 version kept very close to Shakespeare's text and used Elizabethan costumes and staging to enhance the drama. In the 20th and into the 21st century, the play has been adapted to film in versions as diverse as George Cukor's Romeo and Juliet (1936), Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968), Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996), and Carlo Carlei's Romeo and Juliet (2013).

Characters
Main article: Characters in Romeo and Juliet
Ruling house of Verona
Prince Escalus is the ruling Prince of Verona.
Count Paris is a kinsman of Escalus who wishes to marry Juliet.
Mercutio is another kinsman of Escalus, a friend of Romeo.
House of Capulet
Capulet is the patriarch of the house of Capulet.
Lady Capulet is the matriarch of the house of Capulet.
Juliet Capulet, the 13-year-old daughter of Capulet, is the play's female protagonist.
Tybalt is a cousin of Juliet, the nephew of Lady Capulet.
The Nurse is Juliet's personal attendant and confidante.
Rosaline is Lord Capulet's niece, Romeo's love in the beginning of the story.
Peter, Sampson, and Gregory are servants of the Capulet household.
House of Montague
Montague is the patriarch of the house of Montague.
Lady Montague is the matriarch of the house of Montague.
Romeo Montague, the son of Montague, is the play's male protagonist.
Benvolio is Romeo's cousin and best friend.
Abram and Balthasar are servants of the Montague household.
Others
Friar Laurence is a Franciscan friar and Romeo's confidant.
Friar John is sent to deliver Friar Laurence's letter to Romeo.
An Apothecary who reluctantly sells Romeo poison.
A Chorus reads a prologue to each of the first two acts.
Synopsis

L'ultimo bacio dato a Giulietta da Romeo by Francesco Hayez. Oil on canvas, 1823.
The play, set in Verona, Italy, begins with a street brawl between Montague and Capulet servants who, like the masters they serve, are sworn enemies. Prince Escalus of Verona intervenes and declares that further breach of the peace will be punishable by death. Later, Count Paris talks to Capulet about marrying his daughter Juliet, but Capulet asks Paris to wait another two years and invites him to attend a planned Capulet ball. Lady Capulet and Juliet's Nurse try to persuade Juliet to accept Paris's courtship.

Meanwhile, Benvolio talks with his cousin Romeo, Montague's son, about Romeo's recent depression. Benvolio discovers that it stems from unrequited infatuation for a girl named Rosaline, one of Capulet's nieces. Persuaded by Benvolio and Mercutio, Romeo attends the ball at the Capulet house in hopes of meeting Rosaline. However, Romeo instead meets and falls in love with Juliet. Juliet's cousin, Tybalt, is enraged at Romeo for sneaking into the ball but is stopped from killing Romeo by Juliet's father, who does not wish to shed blood in his house. After the ball, in what is now famously known as the "balcony scene," Romeo sneaks into the Capulet orchard and overhears Juliet at her window vowing her love to him in spite of her family's hatred of the Montagues. Romeo makes himself known to her, and they agree to be married. With the help of Friar Laurence, who hopes to reconcile the two families through their children's union, they are secretly married the next day.

Tybalt, meanwhile, still incensed that Romeo had sneaked into the Capulet ball, challenges him to a duel. Romeo, now considering Tybalt his kinsman, refuses to fight. Mercutio is offended by Tybalt's insolence, as well as Romeo's "vile submission",[1] and accepts the duel on Romeo's behalf. Mercutio is fatally wounded when Romeo attempts to break up the fight, and declares a curse upon both households before he dies. ("A plague on both your houses!") Grief-stricken and racked with guilt, Romeo confronts and slays Tybalt.

Montague argues that Romeo has justly executed Tybalt for the murder of Mercutio. The Prince, now having lost a kinsman in the warring families' feud, exiles Romeo from Verona, under penalty of death if he ever returns. Romeo secretly spends the night in Juliet's chamber, where they consummate their marriage. Capulet, misinterpreting Juliet's grief, agrees to marry her to Count Paris and threatens to disown her when she refuses to become Paris's "joyful bride".[2] When she then pleads for the marriage to be delayed, her mother rejects her.

Juliet visits Friar Laurence for help, and he offers her a potion that will put her into a deathlike coma or catalepsy for "two and forty hours".[3] The Friar promises to send a messenger to inform Romeo of the plan so that he can rejoin her when she awakens. On the night before the wedding, she takes the drug and, when discovered apparently dead, she is laid in the family crypt.

The messenger, however, does not reach Romeo and, instead, Romeo learns of Juliet's apparent death from his servant, Balthasar. Heartbroken, Romeo buys poison from an apothecary and goes to the Capulet crypt. He encounters Paris who has come to mourn Juliet privately. Believing Romeo to be a vandal, Paris confronts him and, in the ensuing battle, Romeo kills Paris. Still believing Juliet to be dead, he drinks the poison. Juliet then awakens and, discovering that Romeo is dead, stabs herself with his dagger and joins him in death. The feuding families and the Prince meet at the tomb to find all three dead. Friar Laurence recounts the story of the two "star-cross'd lovers", fulfilling the curse that Mercutio swore. The families are reconciled by their children's deaths and agree to end their violent feud. The play ends with the Prince's elegy for the lovers: "For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo."[4]

Sources
Romeo and Juliet borrows from a tradition of tragic love stories dating back to antiquity. One of these is Pyramus and Thisbe, from Ovid's Metamorphoses, which contains parallels to Shakespeare's story: the lovers' parents despise each other, and Pyramus falsely believes his lover Thisbe is dead.[5] The Ephesiaca of Xenophon of Ephesus, written in the 3rd century, also contains several similarities to the play, including the separation of the lovers, and a potion that induces a deathlike sleep.[6]

One of the earliest references to the names Montague and Capulet is from Dante's Divine Comedy, who mentions the Montecchi (Montagues) and the Cappelletti (Capulets) in canto six of Purgatorio:[7]

Come and see, you who are negligent,
Montagues and Capulets, Monaldi and Filippeschi
One lot already grieving, the other in fear.[8]

However, the reference is part of a polemic against what Dante saw as moral decay of Florence, Lombardy, and the Italian states in general; through his characters, Dante aimed to chastise Albert I of Germany for neglecting what Dante felt were his responsibilities towards Italy ("you who are negligent") as "King of the Romans", as well as successive popes for their encroachment from purely spiritual affairs, thus leading to a climate of incessant bickering and warfare between rival political parties in Lombardy. History records the name of the family Montague as being lent to such a political party in Verona, but that of the Capulets as from a Cremonese family, both of whom play out their conflict in Lombardy as a whole rather than within the confines of Verona.[9] Allied to rival political factions, the parties are grieving ("One lot already grieving") because their endless warfare has led to the destruction of both parties,[9] rather than a grief from the loss of their ill-fated offspring as the play sets forth, which appears to be a solely poetic creation within this context.


Masuccio Salernitano, author of Mariotto & Ganozza (1476), the earliest known version of Romeo & Juliet tale
The earliest known version of the Romeo and Juliet tale akin to Shakespeare's play is the story of Mariotto and Ganozza by Masuccio Salernitano, in the 33rd novel of his Il Novellino published in 1476.[10] Salernitano sets the story in Siena and insists its events took place in his own lifetime. His version of the story includes the secret marriage, the colluding friar, the fray where a prominent citizen is killed, Mariotto's exile, Ganozza's forced marriage, the potion plot, and the crucial message that goes astray. In this version, Mariotto is caught and beheaded and Ganozza dies of grief.[11][12]


Frontispiece of Giulietta e Romeo by Luigi da Porto, 1530
Luigi da Porto (1485–1529) adapted the story as Giulietta e Romeo[13] and included it in his Historia novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti (A Newly-Discovered History of two Noble Lovers), written in 1524 and published posthumously in 1531 in Venice.[14][15] Da Porto drew on Pyramus and Thisbe, Boccaccio's Decameron, and Salernitano's Mariotto e Ganozza, but it is likely that his story is also autobiographical: He was a soldier present at a ball on 26 February 1511, at a residence of the pro-Venice Savorgnan clan in Udine, following a peace ceremony attended by the opposing pro-Imperial Strumieri clan. There, Da Porto fell in love with Lucina, a Savorgnan daughter, but the family feud frustrated their courtship. The next morning, the Savorgnans led an attack on the city, and many members of the Strumieri were murdered. Years later, still half-paralyzed from a battle-wound, Luigi wrote Giulietta e Romeo in Montorso Vicentino (from which he could see the "castles" of Verona), dedicating the novella to the bellisima e leggiadra (the beautiful and graceful) Lucina Savorgnan.[13][16] Da Porto presented his tale as historically factual and claimed it took place at least a century earlier than Salernitano had it, in the days Verona was ruled by Bartolomeo della Scala[17] (anglicized as Prince Escalus).


Title page of Arthur Brooke's poem, Romeus and Juliet
Da Porto presented the narrative in close to its modern form, including the names of the lovers, the rival families of Montecchi and Capuleti (Cappelletti) and the location in Verona.[10] He named the friar Laurence (frate Lorenzo) and introduced the characters Mercutio (Marcuccio Guertio), Tybalt (Tebaldo Cappelletti), Count Paris (conte (Paride) di Lodrone), the faithful servant, and Giulietta's nurse. Da Porto originated the remaining basic elements of the story: the feuding families, Romeo—left by his mistress—meeting Giulietta at a dance at her house, the love scenes (including the balcony scene), the periods of despair, Romeo killing Giulietta's cousin (Tebaldo), and the families' reconciliation after the lovers' suicides.[18] In da Porto's version, Romeo takes poison and Giulietta keeps her breath until she dies.[19]

In 1554, Matteo Bandello published the second volume of his Novelle, which included his version of Giuletta e Romeo,[15] probably written between 1531 and 1545. Bandello lengthened and weighed down the plot while leaving the storyline basically unchanged (though he did introduce Benvolio).[18] Bandello's story was translated into French by Pierre Boaistuau in 1559 in the first volume of his Histoires Tragiques. Boaistuau adds much moralising and sentiment, and the characters indulge in rhetorical outbursts.[20]

In his 1562 narrative poem The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet, Arthur Brooke translated Boaistuau faithfully but adjusted it to reflect parts of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.[21] There was a trend among writers and playwrights to publish works based on Italian novelle—Italian tales were very popular among theatre-goers—and Shakespeare may well have been familiar with William Painter's 1567 collection of Italian tales titled Palace of Pleasure.[22] This collection included a version in prose of the Romeo and Juliet story named "The goodly History of the true and constant love of Romeo and Juliett". Shakespeare took advantage of this popularity: The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Romeo and Juliet are all from Italian novelle. Romeo and Juliet is a dramatization of Brooke's translation, and Shakespeare follows the poem closely but adds detail to several major and minor characters (the Nurse and Mercutio in particular).[23][24][25]

Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander and Dido, Queen of Carthage, both similar stories written in Shakespeare's day, are thought to be less of a direct influence, although they may have helped create an atmosphere in which tragic love stories could thrive.[21]

Date and text

Title page of the first edition
It is unknown when exactly Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet. Juliet's Nurse refers to an earthquake she says occurred 11 years ago.[26] This may refer to the Dover Straits earthquake of 1580, which would date that particular line to 1591. Other earthquakes—both in England and in Verona—have been proposed in support of the different dates.[27] But the play's stylistic similarities with A Midsummer Night's Dream and other plays conventionally dated around 1594–95, place its composition sometime between 1591 and 1595.[28][b] One conjecture is that Shakespeare may have begun a draft in 1591, which he completed in 1595.[29]

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was published in two quarto editions prior to the publication of the First Folio of 1623. These are referred to as Q1 and Q2. The first printed edition, Q1, appeared in early 1597, printed by John Danter. Because its text contains numerous differences from the later editions, it is labelled a so-called 'bad quarto'; the 20th-century editor T. J. B. Spencer described it as "a detestable text, probably a reconstruction of the play from the imperfect memories of one or two of the actors", suggesting that it had been pirated for publication.[30] An alternative explanation for Q1's shortcomings is that the play (like many others of the time) may have been heavily edited before performance by the playing company.[31] However, "the theory, formulated by [Alfred] Pollard," that the 'bad quarto' was reconstructed from memory by some of the actors is now under attack. Alternative theories are that some or all of 'the bad quartos' are early versions by Shakespeare or abbreviations made either for Shakespeare's company or for other companies."[32] In any event, its appearance in early 1597 makes 1596 the latest possible date for the play's composition.[27]


The title page from the First Folio, printed in 1623
The superior Q2 called the play The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet. It was printed in 1599 by Thomas Creede and published by Cuthbert Burby. Q2 is about 800 lines longer than Q1.[31] Its title page describes it as "Newly corrected, augmented and amended". Scholars believe that Q2 was based on Shakespeare's pre-performance draft (called his foul papers) since there are textual oddities such as variable tags for characters and "false starts" for speeches that were presumably struck through by the author but erroneously preserved by the typesetter. It is a much more complete and reliable text and was reprinted in 1609 (Q3), 1622 (Q4) and 1637 (Q5).[30] In effect, all later Quartos and Folios of Romeo and Juliet are based on Q2, as are all modern editions since editors believe that any deviations from Q2 in the later editions (whether good or bad) are likely to have arisen from editors or compositors, not from Shakespeare.[31]

The First Folio text of 1623 was based primarily on Q3, with clarifications and corrections possibly coming from a theatrical prompt book or Q1.[30][33] Other Folio editions of the play were printed in 1632 (F2), 1664 (F3), and 1685 (F4).[34] Modern versions—that take into account several of the Folios and Quartos—first appeared with Nicholas Rowe's 1709 edition, followed by Alexander Pope's 1723 version. Pope began a tradition of editing the play to add information such as stage directions missing in Q2 by locating them in Q1. This tradition continued late into the Romantic period. Fully annotated editions first appeared in the Victorian period and continue to be produced today, printing the text of the play with footnotes describing the sources and culture behind the play.[35]

Themes and motifs
Scholars have found it extremely difficult to assign one specific, overarching theme to the play. Proposals for a main theme include a discovery by the characters that human beings are neither wholly good nor wholly evil, but instead are more or less alike,[36] awaking out of a dream and into reality, the danger of hasty action, or the power of tragic fate. None of these have widespread support. However, even if an overall theme cannot be found it is clear that the play is full of several small thematic elements that intertwine in complex ways. Several of those most often debated by scholars are discussed below.[37]

Love
"Romeo
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
Juliet
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss."

—Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene V[38]

Romeo and Juliet is sometimes considered to have no unifying theme, save that of young love.[36] Romeo and Juliet have become emblematic of young lovers and doomed love. Since it is such an obvious subject of the play, several scholars have explored the language and historical context behind the romance of the play.[39]

On their first meeting, Romeo and Juliet use a form of communication recommended by many etiquette authors in Shakespeare's day: metaphor. By using metaphors of saints and sins, Romeo was able to test Juliet's feelings for him in a non-threatening way. This method was recommended by Baldassare Castiglione (whose works had been translated into English by this time). He pointed out that if a man used a metaphor as an invitation, the woman could pretend she did not understand him, and he could retreat without losing honour. Juliet, however, participates in the metaphor and expands on it. The religious metaphors of "shrine", "pilgrim", and "saint" were fashionable in the poetry of the time and more likely to be understood as romantic rather than blasphemous, as the concept of sainthood was associated with the Catholicism of an earlier age.[40] Later in the play, Shakespeare removes the more daring allusions to Christ's resurrection in the tomb he found in his source work: Brooke's Romeus and Juliet.[41]


Watercolor by John Masey Wright of Act II, Scene ii (the balcony scene).
In the later balcony scene, Shakespeare has Romeo overhear Juliet's soliloquy, but in Brooke's version of the story, her declaration is done alone. By bringing Romeo into the scene to eavesdrop, Shakespeare breaks from the normal sequence of courtship. Usually, a woman was required to be modest and shy to make sure that her suitor was sincere, but breaking this rule serves to speed along the plot. The lovers are able to skip courting and move on to plain talk about their relationship—agreeing to be married after knowing each other for only one night.[39] In the final suicide scene, there is a contradiction in the message—in the Catholic religion, suicides were often thought to be condemned to Hell, whereas people who die to be with their loves under the "Religion of Love" are joined with their loves in Paradise. Romeo and Juliet's love seems to be expressing the "Religion of Love" view rather than the Catholic view. Another point is that, although their love is passionate, it is only consummated in marriage, which keeps them from losing the audience's sympathy.[42]

The play arguably equates love and sex with death. Throughout the story, both Romeo and Juliet, along with the other characters, fantasise about it as a dark being, often equating it with a lover. Capulet, for example, when he first discovers Juliet's (faked) death, describes it as having deflowered his daughter.[43] Juliet later erotically compares Romeo and death. Right before her suicide, she grabs Romeo's dagger, saying "O happy dagger! This is thy sheath. There rust, and let me die."[44][45]

Fate and chance
"O, I am fortune's fool!"

—Romeo, Act III Scene I[46]

Scholars are divided on the role of fate in the play. No consensus exists on whether the characters are truly fated to die together or whether the events take place by a series of unlucky chances. Arguments in favour of fate often refer to the description of the lovers as "star-cross'd". This phrase seems to hint that the stars have predetermined the lovers' future.[47] John W. Draper points out the parallels between the Elizabethan belief in the four humours and the main characters of the play (for example, Tybalt as a choleric). Interpreting the text in the light of humours reduces the amount of plot attributed to chance by modern audiences.[48] Still, other scholars see the play as a series of unlucky chances—many to such a degree that they do not see it as a tragedy at all, but an emotional melodrama.[48] Ruth Nevo believes the high degree to which chance is stressed in the narrative makes Romeo and Juliet a "lesser tragedy" of happenstance, not of character. For example, Romeo's challenging Tybalt is not impulsive; it is, after Mercutio's death, the expected action to take. In this scene, Nevo reads Romeo as being aware of the dangers of flouting social norms, identity, and commitments. He makes the choice to kill, not because of a tragic flaw, but because of circumstance.[49]

Duality (light and dark)
"O brawling love, O loving hate,
O any thing of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!"

—Romeo, Act I, Scene I[50]

Scholars have long noted Shakespeare's widespread use of light and dark imagery throughout the play. Caroline Spurgeon considers the theme of light as "symbolic of the natural beauty of young love" and later critics have expanded on this interpretation.[49][51] For example, both Romeo and Juliet see the other as light in a surrounding darkness. Romeo describes Juliet as being like the sun,[52] brighter than a torch,[53] a jewel sparkling in the night,[54] and a bright angel among dark clouds.[55] Even when she lies apparently dead in the tomb, he says her "beauty makes / This vault a feasting presence full of light."[56] Juliet describes Romeo as "day in night" and "Whiter than snow upon a raven's back."[57][58] This contrast of light and dark can be expanded as symbols—contrasting love and hate, youth and age in a metaphoric way.[49] Sometimes these intertwining metaphors create dramatic irony. For example, Romeo and Juliet's love is a light in the midst of the darkness of the hate around them, but all of their activity together is done in night and darkness while all of the feuding is done in broad daylight. This paradox of imagery adds atmosphere to the moral dilemma facing the two lovers: loyalty to family or loyalty to love. At the end of the story, when the morning is gloomy and the sun hiding its face for sorrow, light and dark have returned to their proper places, the outward darkness reflecting the true, inner darkness of the family feud out of sorrow for the lovers. All characters now recognise their folly in light of recent events, and things return to the natural order, thanks to the love and death of Romeo and Juliet.[51] The "light" theme in the play is also heavily connected to the theme of time since light was a convenient way for Shakespeare to express the passage of time through descriptions of the sun, moon, and stars.[59]

Time
"These times of woe afford no time to woo."

—Paris, Act III, Scene IV[60]

Time plays an important role in the language and plot of the play. Both Romeo and Juliet struggle to maintain an imaginary world void of time in the face of the harsh realities that surround them. For instance, when Romeo swears his love to Juliet by the moon, she protests "O swear not by the moon, th'inconstant moon, / That monthly changes in her circled orb, / Lest that thy love prove likewise variable."[61] From the very beginning, the lovers are designated as "star-cross'd"[62][c] referring to an astrologic belief associated with time. Stars were thought to control the fates of humanity, and as time passed, stars would move along their course in the sky, also charting the course of human lives below. Romeo speaks of a foreboding he feels in the stars' movements early in the play, and when he learns of Juliet's death, he defies the stars' course for him.[48][64]

Another central theme is haste: Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet spans a period of four to six days, in contrast to Brooke's poems spanning nine months.[59] Scholars such as G. Thomas Tanselle believe that time was "especially important to Shakespeare" in this play, as he used references to "short-time" for the young lovers as opposed to references to "long-time" for the "older generation" to highlight "a headlong rush towards doom".[59] Romeo and Juliet fight time to make their love last forever. In the end, the only way they seem to defeat time is through a death that makes them immortal through art.[65]

Time is also connected to the theme of light and dark. In Shakespeare's day, plays were most often performed at noon or in the afternoon in broad daylight.[d] This forced the playwright to use words to create the illusion of day and night in his plays. Shakespeare uses references to the night and day, the stars, the moon, and the sun to create this illusion. He also has characters frequently refer to days of the week and specific hours to help the audience understand that time has passed in the story. All in all, no fewer than 103 references to time are found in the play, adding to the illusion of its passage.[66][67]

Criticism and interpretation
Critical history

Portrait of the earliest recorded critic of the play, Samuel Pepys, by John Hayls. Oil on canvas, 1666.
The earliest known critic of the play was diarist Samuel Pepys, who wrote in 1662: "it is a play of itself the worst that I ever heard in my life."[68] Poet John Dryden wrote 10 years later in praise of the play and its comic character Mercutio: "Shakespear show'd the best of his skill in his Mercutio, and he said himself, that he was forc'd to kill him in the third Act, to prevent being killed by him."[68] Criticism of the play in the 18th century was less sparse but no less divided. Publisher Nicholas Rowe was the first critic to ponder the theme of the play, which he saw as the just punishment of the two feuding families. In mid-century, writer Charles Gildon and philosopher Lord Kames argued that the play was a failure in that it did not follow the classical rules of drama: the tragedy must occur because of some character flaw, not an accident of fate. Writer and critic Samuel Johnson, however, considered it one of Shakespeare's "most pleasing" plays.[69]

In the later part of the 18th and through the 19th century, criticism centred on debates over the moral message of the play. Actor and playwright David Garrick's 1748 adaptation excluded Rosaline: Romeo abandoning her for Juliet was seen as fickle and reckless. Critics such as Charles Dibdin argued that Rosaline had been included in the play in order to show how reckless the hero was and that this was the reason for his tragic end. Others argued that Friar Laurence might be Shakespeare's spokesman in his warnings against undue haste. At the beginning of the 20th century, these moral arguments were disputed by critics such as Richard Green Moulton: he argued that accident, and not some character flaw, led to the lovers' deaths.[70]

Dramatic structure
In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare employs several dramatic techniques that have garnered praise from critics, most notably the abrupt shifts from comedy to tragedy (an example is the punning exchange between Benvolio and Mercutio just before Tybalt arrives). Before Mercutio's death in Act III, the play is largely a comedy.[71] After his accidental demise, the play suddenly becomes serious and takes on a tragic tone. When Romeo is banished, rather than executed, and Friar Laurence offers Juliet a plan to reunite her with Romeo, the audience can still hope that all will end well. They are in a "breathless state of suspense" by the opening of the last scene in the tomb: If Romeo is delayed long enough for the Friar to arrive, he and Juliet may yet be saved.[72] These shifts from hope to despair, reprieve, and new hope serve to emphasise the tragedy when the final hope fails and both the lovers die at the end.[73]

Shakespeare also uses sub-plots to offer a clearer view of the actions of the main characters. For example, when the play begins, Romeo is in love with Rosaline, who has refused all of his advances. Romeo's infatuation with her stands in obvious contrast to his later love for Juliet. This provides a comparison through which the audience can see the seriousness of Romeo and Juliet's love and marriage. Paris' love for Juliet also sets up a contrast between Juliet's feelings for him and her feelings for Romeo. The formal language she uses around Paris, as well as the way she talks about him to her Nurse, show that her feelings clearly lie with Romeo. Beyond this, the sub-plot of the Montague–Capulet feud overarches the whole play, providing an atmosphere of hate that is the main contributor to the play's tragic end.[73]

Language
Shakespeare uses a variety of poetic forms throughout the play. He begins with a 14-line prologue in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, spoken by a Chorus. Most of Romeo and Juliet is, however, written in blank verse, and much of it in strict iambic pentameter, with less rhythmic variation than in most of Shakespeare's later plays.[74] In choosing forms, Shakespeare matches the poetry to the character who uses it. Friar Laurence, for example, uses sermon and sententiae forms and the Nurse uses a unique blank verse form that closely matches colloquial speech.[74] Each of these forms is also moulded and matched to the emotion of the scene the character occupies. For example, when Romeo talks about Rosaline earlier in the play, he attempts to use the Petrarchan sonnet form. Petrarchan sonnets were often used by men to exaggerate the beauty of women who were impossible for them to attain, as in Romeo's situation with Rosaline. This sonnet form is used by Lady Capulet to describe Count Paris to Juliet as a handsome man.[75] When Romeo and Juliet meet, the poetic form changes from the Petrarchan (which was becoming archaic in Shakespeare's day) to a then more contemporary sonnet form, using "pilgrims" and "saints" as metaphors.[76] Finally, when the two meet on the balcony, Romeo attempts to use the sonnet form to pledge his love, but Juliet breaks it by saying "Dost thou love me?"[77] By doing this, she searches for true expression, rather than a poetic exaggeration of their love.[78] Juliet uses monosyllabic words with Romeo but uses formal language with Paris.[79] Other forms in the play include an epithalamium by Juliet, a rhapsody in Mercutio's Queen Mab speech, and an elegy by Paris.[80] Shakespeare saves his prose style most often for the common people in the play, though at times he uses it for other characters, such as Mercutio.[81] Humour, also, is important: scholar Molly Mahood identifies at least 175 puns and wordplays in the text.[82] Many of these jokes are sexual in nature, especially those involving Mercutio and the Nurse.[83]

Psychoanalytic criticism
Early psychoanalytic critics saw the problem of Romeo and Juliet in terms of Romeo's impulsiveness, deriving from "ill-controlled, partially disguised aggression",[84] which leads both to Mercutio's death and to the double suicide.[84][e] Romeo and Juliet is not considered to be exceedingly psychologically complex, and sympathetic psychoanalytic readings of the play make the tragic male experience equivalent with sicknesses.[86] Norman Holland, writing in 1966, considers Romeo's dream[87] as a realistic "wish fulfilling fantasy both in terms of Romeo's adult world and his hypothetical childhood at stages oral, phallic and oedipal" – while acknowledging that a dramatic character is not a human being with mental processes separate from those of the author.[88] Critics such as Julia Kristeva focus on the hatred between the families, arguing that this hatred is the cause of Romeo and Juliet's passion for each other. That hatred manifests itself directly in the lovers' language: Juliet, for example, speaks of "my only love sprung from my only hate"[89] and often expresses her passion through an anticipation of Romeo's death.[90] This leads on to speculation as to the playwright's psychology, in particular to a consideration of Shakespeare's grief for the death of his son, Hamnet.[91]

Feminist criticism
Feminist literary critics argue that the blame for the family feud lies in Verona's patriarchal society. For Coppélia Kahn, for example, the strict, masculine code of violence imposed on Romeo is the main force driving the tragedy to its end. When Tybalt kills Mercutio, Romeo shifts into a violent mode, regretting that Juliet has made him so "effeminate".[92] In this view, the younger males "become men" by engaging in violence on behalf of their fathers, or in the case of the servants, their masters. The feud is also linked to male virility, as the numerous jokes about maidenheads aptly demonstrate.[93][94] Juliet also submits to a female code of docility by allowing others, such as the Friar, to solve her problems for her. Other critics, such as Dympna Callaghan, look at the play's feminism from a historicist angle, stressing that when the play was written the feudal order was being challenged by increasingly centralised government and the advent of capitalism. At the same time, emerging Puritan ideas about marriage were less concerned with the "evils of female sexuality" than those of earlier eras and more sympathetic towards love-matches: when Juliet dodges her father's attempt to force her to marry a man she has no feeling for, she is challenging the patriarchal order in a way that would not have been possible at an earlier time.[95]

Queer theory

The playbill from a 1753 production at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane starring David Garrick
A number of critics have found the character of Mercutio to have unacknowledged homoerotic desire for Romeo.[96] Jonathan Goldberg examined the sexuality of Mercutio and Romeo utilising queer theory in Queering the Renaissance (1994), comparing their friendship with sexual love.[97] Mercutio, in friendly conversation, mentions Romeo's phallus, suggesting traces of homoeroticism.[98] An example is his joking wish "To raise a spirit in his mistress' circle ... letting it there stand / Till she had laid it and conjured it down."[99][100] Romeo's homoeroticism can also be found in his attitude to Rosaline, a woman who is distant and unavailable and brings no hope of offspring. As Benvolio argues, she is best replaced by someone who will reciprocate. Shakespeare's procreation sonnets describe another young man who, like Romeo, is having trouble creating offspring and who may be seen as being a homosexual. Goldberg believes that Shakespeare may have used Rosaline as a way to express homosexual problems of procreation in an acceptable way. In this view, when Juliet says "...that which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet",[101] she may be raising the question of whether there is any difference between the beauty of a man and the beauty of a woman.[102]

The balcony scene
The balcony scene was introduced by Da Porto in 1524. He had Romeo walk frequently by her house, "sometimes climbing to her chamber window", and wrote, "It happened one night, as love ordained, when the moon shone unusually bright, that whilst Romeo was climbing the balcony, the young lady ... opened the window, and looking out saw him".[103] After this they have a conversation in which they declare eternal love to each other. A few decades later, Bandello greatly expanded this scene, diverging from the familiar one: Julia has her nurse deliver a letter asking Romeo to come to her window with a rope ladder, and he climbs the balcony with the help of his servant, Julia and the nurse (the servants discreetly withdraw after this).[18]

Nevertheless, in October 2014, Lois Leveen pointed out in The Atlantic that the original Shakespeare play did not contain a balcony; it just says that Juliet appears at a window.[104] The word balcone is not known to have existed in the English language until two years after Shakespeare's death.[105] The balcony was certainly used in Thomas Otway's 1679 play, The History and Fall of Caius Marius, which had borrowed much of its story from Romeo and Juliet and placed the two lovers in a balcony reciting a speech similar to that between Romeo and Juliet. Leveen suggested that during the 18th century, David Garrick chose to use a balcony in his adaptation and revival of Romeo and Juliet and modern adaptations have continued this tradition.[104]

The Catcher in the Rye

Author	J. D. Salinger
Cover artist	E. Michael Mitchell[1][2]
Language	English
Genre	Realistic fiction, Coming-of-age fiction
Published	July 16, 1951[3]
Publisher	Little, Brown and Company
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print
Pages	234 (may vary)
OCLC	287628
Dewey Decimal	813.54
The Catcher in the Rye is a novel by American author J. D. Salinger that was partially published in serial form in 1945–46 before being novelized in 1951. Originally intended for adults, it is often read by adolescents for its themes of angst and alienation, and as a critique of superficiality in society.[4][5] The novel also deals with themes of innocence, identity, belonging, loss, connection, sex, and depression. The main character, Holden Caulfield, has become an icon for teenage rebellion.[6] Caulfield, nearly of age, gives his opinion on a wide variety of topics as he narrates his recent life events.

The Catcher in the Rye has been translated widely.[7] About one million copies are sold each year, with total sales of more than 65 million books.[8] The novel was included on Time's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923,[9] and it was named by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.[10][11][12] In 2003, it was listed at number 15 on the BBC's survey "The Big Read".

Plot

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Holden Caulfield recalls the events of a long weekend, shortly before the previous year's Christmas. The story begins at Pencey Preparatory Academy, a boarding school in Pennsylvania, where he has been expelled after failing all his classes, except English.

Later, Holden agrees to write an English composition for his roommate, Ward Stradlater, who is heading out on a date. He is distressed when he learns that Stradlater's date is Jane Gallagher, with whom Holden has been infatuated. When Stradlater returns, hours later, he fails to appreciate the deeply personal composition Holden has written for him about the baseball glove of Holden's late brother, Allie, who died from leukemia years earlier, and refuses to say whether he had sex with Jane. Enraged, Holden punches and insults him, but Stradlater easily wins the fight. Fed up with the "phonies" at Pencey Prep, Holden decides to catch a train to New York, planning to stay away from his home until Wednesday, when his parents will have received notification of his expulsion.

Holden checks into the Edmont Hotel, where he spends an evening dancing with three tourists at the lounge until he tires of them. Following a disappointing visit to a nightclub, an angst-ridden Holden agrees to have Sunny, a prostitute, visit his room. When she enters and disrobes, Holden, a virgin, experiences a change of heart, saying he only wants to talk. Annoyed, she leaves, only to return with her pimp, Maurice, who demands more money (though Holden maintains he paid the right amount). Holden insults Maurice, Sunny takes money from Holden's wallet, and Maurice punches him in the stomach. Afterward, Holden, imagining himself shot by Maurice, pictures murdering him with a pistol.

The next morning, Holden—increasingly depressed and desperate for personal connection—calls Sally Hayes, a familiar date (despite his characterization of her as "queen of all phonies"). They agree to meet that afternoon to attend a play at the Biltmore Theater. Meanwhile, Holden shops for a special record, "Little Shirley Beans," for his 10-year-old sister, Phoebe. After the play, Holden and Sally ice skate at Rockefeller Center, where Holden rants against society and frightens Sally. He invites her to run away with him that night to live in the New England wilderness, but she declines. The conversation sours, and the two part angrily.

He then meets his old classmate Carl Luce for drinks at the Wicker Bar. Holden annoys Carl, whom he suspects of being gay, by unrelentingly questioning him about his sex life. Luce says Holden should see a psychiatrist to understand himself better. Afterwards, Holden gets drunk, awkwardly flirts with several adults, calls an icy Sally, accidentally breaks Phoebe's record, and finds himself broke.

Nostalgic to see Phoebe, Holden sneaks into his parents' apartment while they are out and wakes her. Though happy to see him, Phoebe quickly guesses he has been expelled and chastises him for his general aimlessness and disdain. When she asks if he cares about anything, Holden shares a fantasy (based on a mishearing of Robert Burns's Comin' Through the Rye), in which he imagines himself saving children running through a field of rye by catching them before they fall off a nearby cliff. Phoebe points out that the actual poem says, "when a body meet a body, comin' through the rye." Holden breaks down in tears, and his sister tries to console him.

As his parents return home, he slips out and visits his former English teacher, Mr. Antolini, who expresses concern that Holden is headed for "a terrible fall." Mr. Antolini advises him to begin applying himself and provides him with a place to sleep. Holden is upset when he awakens to find Mr. Antolini patting his head, which he interprets as a sexual advance. He leaves and spends the rest of the night in a train-waiting room at Grand Central Terminal, sinking deeper into despair.

In the morning, having lost hope of ever finding meaningful connection in the city, he decides to head out West to live as a deaf-mute gas station attendant in a log cabin. He arranges to see Phoebe at lunchtime to explain his plan and say goodbye. When they meet up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she arrives with a suitcase and asks to go with him. Holden refuses, which upsets Phoebe. He tries to cheer her by allowing her to skip school at the Central Park Zoo, but she remains angry. They eventually reach the carousel, where they reconcile after he buys her a ticket. The sight of her riding the carousel fills him with happiness.

He alludes to encountering his parents that night and "getting sick," mentioning that he will be attending another academy in September. The novel ends with Holden stating that he is reluctant to say more because talk of school has made him miss his former classmates.

History
Various older stories by Salinger contain characters similar to those in The Catcher in the Rye. While at Columbia University, Salinger wrote a short story called "The Young Folks" in Whit Burnett's class; one character from this story has been described as a "thinly penciled prototype of Sally Hayes". In November 1941 he sold the story "Slight Rebellion off Madison", which featured Holden Caulfield, to The New Yorker, but it was not published until December 21, 1946, due to World War II. The story "I'm Crazy", which was published in the December 22, 1945 issue of Collier's, contained material that was later used in The Catcher in the Rye. In 1946, The New Yorker accepted a 90-page manuscript about Holden Caulfield for publication, but Salinger later withdrew it.[13] The school Holden attends is Pencey Preparatory Academy, a boarding school in Pennsylvania that Salinger may have based on the Valley Forge Military Academy and College.[14]

Writing style
The Catcher in the Rye is narrated in a subjective style from the point of view of Holden Caulfield, following his exact thought processes. There is flow in the seemingly disjointed ideas and episodes; for example, as Holden sits in a chair in his dorm, minor events, such as picking up a book or looking at a table, unfold into discussions about experiences.

Critical reviews affirm that the novel accurately reflected the teenage colloquial speech of the time.[15] Words and phrases that appear frequently include:[16]

"Flitty" – homosexual
"Give her the time" – sexual intercourse
"Necking" – kissing, hugging, and caressing passionately
"Phony" – people who are dishonest or fake about who they really are[17]
"Prince" – a fine, generous, helpful fellow (often used in sarcastic fashion)
"Rubbernecks" – people who turn their heads to gaze in curiosity
"Snowing" – deceiving, misleading, or winning over by glib talk, flattery, etc.
Interpretations
Bruce Brooks held that Holden's attitude remains unchanged at story's end, implying no maturation, thus differentiating the novel from young adult fiction.[18] In contrast, Louis Menand thought that teachers assign the novel because of the optimistic ending, to teach adolescent readers that "alienation is just a phase."[19] While Brooks maintained that Holden acts his age, Menand claimed that Holden thinks as an adult, given his ability to accurately perceive people and their motives. Others highlight the dilemma of Holden's state, in between adolescence and adulthood.[20][21] Holden is quick to become emotional. "I felt sorry as hell for..." is a phrase he often uses. It is often said that Holden changes at the end, when he watches Phoebe on the carousel, and he talks about the golden ring and how it's good for kids to try to grab it.[20]

Peter Beidler in his A Reader's Companion to J. D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" identified the movie that the prostitute "Sunny" refers to. In chapter 13 she says that in the movie a boy who looked like Holden fell off a boat, and from this detail, Beidler deduced that the movie was Captains Courageous (1937), with the boy played by child-actor Freddie Bartholomew.[22]

Each Caulfield child has literary talent. D.B. writes screenplays in Hollywood;[23] Holden also reveres D.B. for his writing skill (Holden's own best subject), but he also despises Hollywood industry-based movies, considering them the ultimate in "phony" as the writer has no space for his own imagination and describes D.B.'s move to Hollywood to write for films as "prostituting himself"; Allie wrote poetry on his baseball glove;[24] and Phoebe is a diarist.[25] This "catcher in the rye" is an analogy for Holden, who admires in children attributes that he often struggles to find in adults, like innocence, kindness, spontaneity, and generosity. Falling off the cliff could be a progression into the adult world that surrounds him and that he strongly criticizes. Later, Phoebe and Holden exchange roles as the "catcher" and the "fallen"; he gives her his hunting hat, the catcher's symbol, and becomes the fallen as Phoebe becomes the catcher.[26]

In their biography of Salinger, David Shields and Shane Salerno argue that: "The Catcher in the Rye can best be understood as a disguised war novel." Salinger witnessed the horrors of World War II, but rather than writing a combat novel, Salinger, according to Shields and Salerno, "took the trauma of war and embedded it within what looked to the naked eye like a coming-of-age novel."[27]

Reception
The Catcher in the Rye has been consistently listed as one of the best novels of the twentieth century. Shortly after its publication, in an article for The New York Times, Nash K. Burger called it "an unusually brilliant novel,"[3] while James Stern wrote an admiring review of the book in a voice imitating Holden's.[28] George H. W. Bush called it a "marvelous book," listing it among the books that inspired him.[29] In June 2009, the BBC's Finlo Rohrer wrote that, 58 years since publication, the book is still regarded "as the defining work on what it is like to be a teenager."[30] Adam Gopnik considers it one of the "three perfect books" in American literature, along with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby, and believes that "no book has ever captured a city better than Catcher in the Rye captured New York in the fifties."[31] In an appraisal of The Catcher in the Rye written after the death of J. D. Salinger, Jeff Pruchnic says the novel has retained its appeal for many generations. Pruchnic describes Holden as a "teenage protagonist frozen midcentury but destined to be discovered by those of a similar age in every generation to come."[32] Bill Gates said that The Catcher in the Rye is one of his favorite books,[33] as has Aaron Sorkin.[34]

Not all reception has been positive. The book has had its share of naysayers, including the longtime Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley, who, in 2004, wrote that the experience of rereading the novel after several decades proved to be "a painful experience: The combination of Salinger's execrable prose and Caulfield's jejune narcissism produced effects comparable to mainlining castor oil." Yardley described the novel as among the worst popular books in the annals of American literature. "Why," Yardley asked, "do English teachers, whose responsibility is to teach good writing, repeatedly and reflexively require students to read a book as badly written as this one?"[35] According to Rohrer, many contemporary readers, as Yardley found, "just cannot understand what the fuss is about.... many of these readers are disappointed that the novel fails to meet the expectations generated by the mystique it is shrouded in. J. D. Salinger has done his part to enhance this mystique. That is to say, he has done nothing."[30] Rohrer assessed the reasons behind both the popularity and criticism of the book, saying that it "captures existential teenage angst" and has a "complex central character" and "accessible conversational style"; while at the same time some readers may dislike the "use of 1940s New York vernacular" and the excessive "whining" of the "self-obsessed character".

Censorship in the United States
In 1960, a teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was fired for assigning the novel in class. She was later reinstated.[36] Between 1961 and 1982, The Catcher in the Rye was the most censored book in high schools and libraries in the United States.[37] The book was briefly banned in the Issaquah, Washington, high schools in 1978 when three members of the School Board alleged the book was part of an "overall communist plot".[38] This ban did not last long, and the offended board members were immediately recalled and removed in a special election.[39] In 1981, it was both the most censored book and the second most taught book in public schools in the United States.[40] According to the American Library Association, The Catcher in the Rye was the 10th most frequently challenged book from 1990 to 1999.[10] It was one of the ten most challenged books of 2005,[41] and although it had been off the list for three years, it reappeared in the list of most challenged books of 2009.[42]

The challenges generally begin with Holden's frequent use of vulgar language;[43][44] other reasons include sexual references,[45] blasphemy, undermining of family values[44] and moral codes,[46] encouragement of rebellion,[47] and promotion of drinking, smoking, lying, promiscuity, and sexual abuse.[46] The book was written for an adult audience, which often forms the foundation of many challengers' arguments against it.[48] Often the challengers have been unfamiliar with the plot itself.[37] Shelley Keller-Gage, a high school teacher who faced objections after assigning the novel in her class, noted that "the challengers are being just like Holden... They are trying to be catchers in the rye."[44] Censorship of the book often causes a Streisand effect, as such incidents cause many to put themselves on the waiting list to borrow the novel, where there was no waiting list before.[49][50]


Pride and Prejudice

Author	Jane Austen
Working title	First Impressions
Language	English
Genre	Classic Regency novel
Romance novel
Set in	Hertfordshire and Derbyshire
Publisher	T. Egerton, Whitehall
Publication date	28 January 1813
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print (hardback, 3 volumes), digitalized

Pride and Prejudice is the second novel by English author Jane Austen, published in 1813. A novel of manners, it follows the character development of Elizabeth Bennet, the protagonist of the book, who learns about the repercussions of hasty judgments and comes to appreciate the difference between superficial goodness and actual goodness.

Mr Bennet, owner of the Longbourn estate in Hertfordshire, has five daughters, but his property is entailed and can only be passed to a male heir. His wife also lacks an inheritance, so his family faces becoming poor upon his death. Thus, it is imperative that at least one of the daughters marry well to support the others, which is a primary motivation driving the plot.

Pride and Prejudice has consistently appeared near the top of lists of "most-loved books" among literary scholars and the reading public. It has become one of the most popular novels in English literature, with over 20 million copies sold, and has inspired many derivatives in modern literature.[1][2] For more than a century, dramatic adaptations, reprints, unofficial sequels, films, and TV versions of Pride and Prejudice have portrayed the memorable characters and themes of the novel, reaching mass audiences.[3]

Plot summary

Mr Darcy says Elizabeth is "not handsome enough to tempt him" to dance. (Artist: C.E. Brock, 1895)
In the early 19th century, the Bennet family live at their Longbourn estate, situated near the village of Meryton in Hertfordshire, England. Mrs Bennet's greatest desire is to marry off her five daughters to secure their futures.

The arrival of Mr Bingley, a rich bachelor who rents the neighbouring Netherfield estate, gives her hope that one of her daughters might contract an advantageous marriage, because "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife".

At a ball, the family is introduced to the Netherfield party, including Mr Bingley, his two sisters and Mr Darcy, his dearest friend. Mr Bingley's friendly and cheerful manner earns him popularity among the guests. He appears interested in Jane, the eldest Bennet daughter. Mr Darcy, reputed to be twice as wealthy as Mr Bingley, is haughty and aloof, causing a decided dislike of him. He declines to dance with Elizabeth, the second-eldest Bennet daughter, as she is "not handsome enough". Although she jokes about it with her friend, Elizabeth is deeply offended. Despite this first impression, Mr Darcy secretly begins to find himself drawn to Elizabeth as they continue to encounter each other at social events, appreciating her wit and frankness.

Mr Collins, the heir to the Longbourn estate, visits the Bennet family with the intention of finding a wife among the five girls under the advice of his patroness Lady Catherine de Bourgh, also revealed to be Mr Darcy's aunt. He decides to pursue Elizabeth. The Bennet family meet the charming army officer George Wickham, who tells Elizabeth in confidence about Mr Darcy's unpleasant treatment of him in the past. Elizabeth, blinded by her prejudice toward Mr Darcy, believes him.

Elizabeth dances with Mr Darcy at a ball, where Mrs Bennet hints loudly that she expects Jane and Bingley to become engaged. Elizabeth rejects Mr Collins' marriage proposal, to her mother's fury and her father's relief. Mr Collins subsequently proposes to Charlotte Lucas, a friend of Elizabeth, and is accepted.

Having heard Mrs Bennet's words at the ball and disapproving of the marriage, Mr Darcy joins Mr Bingley in a trip to London and, with the help of his sisters, persuades him not to return to Netherfield. A heartbroken Jane visits her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner in London to raise her spirits, while Elizabeth's hatred for Mr Darcy grows as she suspects he was responsible for Mr Bingley's departure.


Elizabeth tells her father that Darcy was responsible for uniting Lydia and Wickham, in one of the two earliest illustrations of Pride and Prejudice.[4] The clothing styles reflect the time the illustration was engraved (the 1830s), not the time in which the novel was written or set.
In the spring, Elizabeth visits Charlotte and Mr Collins in Kent. Elizabeth and her hosts are invited to Rosings Park, Lady Catherine's home. Mr Darcy and his cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam, are also visiting Rosings Park. Fitzwilliam tells Elizabeth how Mr Darcy recently saved a friend, presumably Bingley, from an undesirable match. Elizabeth realises that the prevented engagement was to Jane.

Mr Darcy proposes to Elizabeth, declaring his love for her despite her low social connections. She is shocked, as she was unaware of Mr Darcy's interest, and rejects him angrily, saying that he is the last person she would ever marry and that she could never love a man who caused her sister such unhappiness; she further accuses him of treating Wickham unjustly. Mr Darcy brags about his success in separating Bingley and Jane and sarcastically dismisses the accusation regarding Wickham without addressing it.

The next day, Mr Darcy gives Elizabeth a letter, explaining that Wickham, the son of his late father's steward, had refused the "living" his father had arranged for him and was instead given money for it. Wickham quickly squandered the money and tried to elope with Darcy's 15-year-old sister, Georgiana, for her considerable dowry. Mr Darcy also writes that he separated Jane and Bingley because he believed her indifferent to Bingley and because of the lack of propriety displayed by her family. Elizabeth is ashamed by her family's behaviour and her own prejudice against Mr Darcy.

Months later, Elizabeth accompanies the Gardiners on a tour of Derbyshire. They visit Pemberley, Darcy's estate. When Mr Darcy returns unexpectedly, he is exceedingly gracious with Elizabeth and the Gardiners. Elizabeth is surprised by Darcy's behaviour and grows fond of him, even coming to regret rejecting his proposal. She receives news that her sister Lydia has run off with Wickham. She tells Mr Darcy, then departs in haste. After an agonising interim, Wickham agrees to marry Lydia. Lydia and Wickham visit the Bennet family at Longbourn, where Lydia tells Elizabeth that Mr Darcy was at her wedding. Though Mr Darcy had sworn everyone involved to secrecy, Mrs Gardiner now feels obliged to inform Elizabeth that he secured the match, at great expense and trouble to himself.

Mr Bingley and Mr Darcy return to Netherfield. Jane accepts Mr Bingley's proposal. Lady Catherine, having heard rumours that Elizabeth intends to marry Mr Darcy, visits her and demands she promise never to accept Mr Darcy's proposal, as she and Darcy's late mother had already planned his marriage to her daughter Anne. Elizabeth refuses and asks the outraged Lady Catherine to leave. Darcy, heartened by his aunt's indignant relaying of Elizabeth's response, again proposes to her and is accepted.

Characters
Character genealogy

Scenes from Pride and Prejudice, by C. E. Brock (c. 1885)

Elizabeth and Mr Darcy by Hugh Thomson, 1894
Elizabeth Bennet – the second-eldest of the Bennet daughters, she is attractive, witty and intelligent – but with a tendency to form tenacious and prejudiced first impressions. As the story progresses, so does her relationship with Mr Darcy. The course of Elizabeth and Darcy's relationship is ultimately decided when Darcy overcomes his pride, and Elizabeth overcomes her prejudice, leading them both to surrender to their love for each other.
Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy – Mr Bingley's friend and the wealthy owner of the estate of Pemberley in Derbyshire, said to be worth at least £10,000 a year. Although he is handsome, tall, and intelligent, Darcy lacks ease and social graces, so others frequently mistake his initially haughty reserve as proof of excessive pride. A new visitor to the Meryton setting of the novel, he is ultimately Elizabeth Bennet's love interest. Though he appears to be proud and is largely disliked by people for this reason, his servants vouch for his kindness and decency.
Mr Bennet – A logical and reasonable late-middle-aged landed gentleman of a more modest income of £2,000 per annum, and the dryly sarcastic patriarch of the Bennet family, with five unmarried daughters. His estate, Longbourn, is entailed to the male line. His affection for his wife wore off early in their marriage and is now reduced to mere toleration. He is often described as 'indolent' in the novel.
Mrs Bennet (née Gardiner) – the middle-aged wife of Mr Bennet, and the mother of their five daughters. Mrs Bennet is a hypochondriac who imagines herself susceptible to attacks of tremors and palpitations (her "poor nerves") whenever things are not going her way. Her main ambition in life is to marry her daughters off to wealthy men. Whether or not any such matches will give her daughters happiness is of little concern to her. She was settled a dowry of £4,000 from her father.

In a letter to Cassandra dated May 1813, Jane Austen describes a picture she saw at a gallery which was a good likeness of "Mrs Bingley" – Jane Bennet. Deirdre Le Faye in The World of Her Novels suggests that "Portrait of Mrs Q" is the picture Austen was referring to. (pp. 201–203)
Jane Bennet – the eldest Bennet sister. She is considered the most beautiful young lady in the neighbourhood and is inclined to see only the good in others (but can be persuaded otherwise on sufficient evidence). She falls in love with Charles Bingley, a rich young gentleman recently moved to Hertfordshire and a close friend of Mr Darcy.
Mary Bennet – the middle Bennet sister, and the plainest of her siblings. Mary has a serious disposition and mostly reads and plays music, although she is often impatient to display her accomplishments and is rather vain about them. She frequently moralises to her family. According to James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen, Mary ended up marrying one of her Uncle Philips' law clerks and moving into Meryton with him.
Catherine "Kitty" Bennet – the fourth Bennet daughter. Though older than Lydia, she is her shadow and follows her in her pursuit of the officers of the militia. She is often portrayed as envious of Lydia and is described as a "silly" young woman. However, it is said that she improved when removed from Lydia's influence. According to James Edward Austen-Leigh's A Memoir of Jane Austen, Kitty later married a clergyman who lived near Pemberley.
Lydia Bennet – the youngest Bennet sister. She is frivolous and headstrong. Her main activity in life is socialising, especially flirting with the officers of the militia. This leads to her running off with George Wickham, although he has no intention of marrying her. Lydia shows no regard for the moral code of her society; as Ashley Tauchert says, she "feels without reasoning".[5]

Charles Bingley – a handsome, amiable, wealthy young gentleman around the age of 22 from the north of England, who leases Netherfield Park, an estate three miles from Longbourn, with the hopes of purchasing it. He is contrasted with Mr Darcy for having more generally pleasing manners, although he is reliant on his more experienced friend for advice. An example of this is the prevention of Bingley and Jane's romance because of Bingley's undeniable dependence on Darcy's opinion.[6] He lacks resolve and is easily influenced by others; his two sisters, Miss Caroline Bingley and Mrs Louisa Hurst, both disapprove of Bingley's growing affection for Miss Jane Bennet. He inherited a fortune of £100,000.[7]

Caroline Bingley – the vainglorious, snobbish sister of Charles Bingley, with a fortune of £20,000. Miss Bingley harbours designs upon Mr Darcy, and therefore is jealous of his growing attachment to Elizabeth. She attempts to dissuade Mr Darcy from liking Elizabeth by ridiculing the Bennet family and criticising Elizabeth's comportment. Miss Bingley also disapproves of her brother's esteem for Jane Bennet, and is disdainful of society in Meryton. Her wealth and her expensive education seem to be the two greatest sources of Miss Bingley's vanity and conceit; likewise, she is very insecure about the fact that her and her family's money all comes from trade, and is eager both for her brother to purchase an estate, elevating the Bingleys to the ranks of the gentry, and for herself to marry a landed gentleman. The dynamic between Miss Bingley and her sister, Louisa Hurst, seems to echo that of Lydia and Kitty Bennet, and of Mrs Bennet and Mrs Phillips, in that one sister of the pair is no more than a follower of the other. Louisa is married to Mr Hurst, who has a house in Grosvenor Square, London.
George Wickham – Wickham has been acquainted with Mr Darcy since infancy, being the son of Mr Darcy's father's steward. An officer in the militia, he is superficially charming and rapidly forms an attachment with Elizabeth Bennet. He later runs off with Lydia with no intention of marriage, which would have resulted in her and her family's complete disgrace, but for Darcy's intervention to bribe Wickham to marry her by paying off his immediate debts.
Mr William Collins – Mr Collins is Mr Bennet's distant second cousin, a clergyman, and the current heir presumptive to his estate of Longbourn House. He is an obsequious and pompous man, prone to making long and tedious speeches, who is excessively devoted to his patroness, Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
Lady Catherine de Bourgh – the overbearing aunt of Mr Darcy. Lady Catherine is the wealthy owner of Rosings Park, where she resides with her daughter Anne and is fawned upon by her rector, Mr Collins. She is haughty, pompous, domineering, and condescending and has long planned to marry off her sickly daughter to Darcy to 'unite their two great estates', claiming it to be the dearest wish of both her and her late sister, Lady Anne Darcy (née Fitzwilliam).
Mr Edward Gardiner and Mrs Gardiner – Edward Gardiner is Mrs Bennet's brother and a successful tradesman of sensible and gentlemanly character. Aunt Gardiner is genteel and elegant and is close to her nieces Jane and Elizabeth. The Gardiners are the parents of four children. They are instrumental in bringing about the marriage between Darcy and Elizabeth.

Georgiana Darcy – Georgiana is Mr Darcy's quiet, amiable and shy younger sister, with a dowry of £30,000, and is aged barely 16 when the story begins. When still 15, Miss Darcy almost eloped with Mr Wickham but was saved by her brother, whom she idolises. Thanks to years of tutelage under masters, she is accomplished at the piano, singing, playing the harp, drawing, and modern languages and is therefore described as Caroline Bingley's idea of an "accomplished woman".

Charlotte Lucas – Charlotte is Elizabeth's friend who, at 27 years old (and thus beyond what was then considered prime marriageable age), fears becoming a burden to her family and therefore readily agrees to marry Mr Collins to gain financial security, having seized the opportunity to claim his attentions after Elizabeth turns down his proposal. Though the novel stresses the importance of love and understanding in marriage, Austen never seems to condemn Charlotte's decision to marry for security. She uses Charlotte to convey how women of her time would adhere to society's expectation for women to marry even if it is not out of love, but convenience.[8] Charlotte is the daughter of Sir William Lucas and Lady Lucas, neighbours of the Bennet family.
Colonel Fitzwilliam – Colonel Fitzwilliam is the younger son of an earl and the nephew of Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Lady Anne Darcy; this makes him the cousin of Anne de Bourgh and the Darcy siblings, Fitzwilliam and Georgiana. He is about 30 years old at the beginning of the novel. He is the coguardian of Miss Georgiana Darcy, along with his cousin, Mr Darcy. According to Colonel Fitzwilliam, as a younger son, he cannot marry without thought to his prospective bride's dowry.

Diagram showing relationships among the principal characters of Pride and Prejudice
Major themes
Many critics take the title as the start when analysing the themes of Pride and Prejudice but Robert Fox cautions against reading too much into the title (which was initially First Impressions), because commercial factors may have played a role in its selection. "After the success of Sense and Sensibility, nothing would have seemed more natural than to bring out another novel of the same author using again the formula of antithesis and alliteration for the title."

The qualities of the title are not exclusively assigned to one or the other of the protagonists; both Elizabeth and Darcy display pride and prejudice."[9] The phrase "pride and prejudice" had been used over the preceding two centuries by Joseph Hall, Jeremy Taylor, Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson.[10][11] Austen is thought to have taken her title from a passage in Fanny Burney's Cecilia (1782), a novel she is known to have admired:

"The whole of this unfortunate business," said Dr Lyster, "has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE. […] if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination."[11][12] (capitalisation as in the original)

A theme in much of Austen's work is the importance of environment and upbringing in developing young people's character and morality.[13] Social standing and wealth are not necessarily advantages in her works, and a further theme common to Austen's work is ineffectual parents. In Pride and Prejudice, the failure of Mr and Mrs Bennet as parents is blamed for Lydia's lack of moral judgment. Darcy has been taught to be principled and scrupulously honourable but he is also proud and overbearing.[13] Kitty, rescued from Lydia's bad influence and spending more time with her older sisters after they marry, is said to improve greatly in their superior society.[14]

The American novelist Anna Quindlen observed in an introduction to an edition of Austen's novel in 1995:

Pride and Prejudice is also about that thing that all great novels consider, the search for self. And it is the first great novel that teaches us this search is as surely undertaken in the drawing room making small talk as in the pursuit of a great white whale or the public punishment of adultery.[15]

Marriage
The opening line of the novel announces: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."[16] This sets marriage as a motif and a problem in the novel. Readers are poised to question whether or not these single men need a wife, or if the need is dictated by the "neighbourhood" families and their daughters who require a "good fortune".

Marriage is a complex social activity that takes political and financial economy into account. In the case of Charlotte Lucas, the seeming success of her marriage lies in the comfortable financial circumstances of their household, while the relationship between Mr and Mrs Bennet serves to illustrate bad marriages based on an initial attraction and surface over substance (economic and psychological).

The Bennets' marriage is an example that the youngest Bennet, Lydia, re-enacts with Wickham and the results are far from felicitous. Although the central characters, Elizabeth and Darcy, begin the novel as hostile acquaintances and unlikely friends, they eventually work toward a better understanding of themselves and each other, which frees them to truly fall in love. This does not eliminate the challenges of the real differences in their technically equivalent social status as gentry and their female relations. It does however provide them with a better understanding of each other's point of view from the different ends of the rather wide scale of differences within that category.

When Elizabeth rejects Darcy's first proposal, the argument of marrying for love is introduced. Elizabeth only accepts Darcy's proposal when she is certain she loves him and her feelings are reciprocated.[17] Austen's complex sketching of different marriages ultimately allows readers to question what forms of alliance are desirable especially when it comes to privileging economic, sexual, or companionate attraction.[18]

Wealth
Money plays a fundamental role in the marriage market, for the young ladies seeking a well-off husband and for men who wish to marry a woman of means. George Wickham tries to elope with Georgiana Darcy, and Colonel Fitzwilliam states that he will marry someone with wealth.

Marrying a woman of a rich family also ensured a linkage to a higher-class family, as is visible in the desires of Bingley's sisters to have their brother married to Georgiana Darcy. Mrs Bennet is frequently seen encouraging her daughters to marry a wealthy man of high social class. In chapter 1, when Mr Bingley arrives, she declares "I am thinking of his marrying one of them".[19]

Inheritance was by descent but could be further restricted by entailment, which in the case of the Longbourn estate restricted inheritance to male heirs only. In the case of the Bennet family, Mr Collins was to inherit the family estate upon Mr Bennet's death in the absence of any closer male heirs, and his proposal to Elizabeth would have ensured her security; but she refuses his offer.

Inheritance laws benefited males because married women did not have independent legal rights until the second half of the 19th century. For the upper-middle and aristocratic classes, marriage to a man with a reliable income was almost the only route to security for the woman and the children she was to have.[20] The irony of the opening line is that generally within this society it would be a woman who would be looking for a wealthy husband to have a prosperous life.[21]

Class

Lady Catherine and Elizabeth by C. E. Brock, 1895

Lady Catherine confronts Elizabeth about Darcy, on the title page of the first illustrated edition. This is the other of the first two illustrations of the novel.
Austen might be known now for her "romances" but the marriages in her novels engage with economics and class distinction. Pride and Prejudice is hardly the exception.

When Darcy proposes to Elizabeth, he cites their economic and social differences as an obstacle his excessive love has had to overcome, though he still anxiously harps on the problems it poses for him within his social circle. His aunt, Lady Catherine, later characterises these differences in particularly harsh terms when she conveys what Elizabeth's marriage to Darcy will become, "Will the shades of Pemberley be thus polluted?" Although Elizabeth responds to Lady Catherine's accusations that hers is a potentially contaminating economic and social position (Elizabeth even insists she and Darcy, as gentleman's daughter and gentleman, are "equals"), Lady Catherine refuses to accept the possibility of Darcy's marriage to Elizabeth. However, as the novel closes, "…through curiosity to see how his wife conducted herself", Lady Catherine condescends to visit them at Pemberley.[22]

The Bingleys present a particular problem for navigating class. Though Caroline Bingley and Mrs Hurst behave and speak of others as if they have always belonged in the upper echelons of society, Austen makes it clear that the Bingley fortunes stem from trade. The fact that Bingley rents Netherfield Hall – it is, after all, "to let" – distinguishes him significantly from Darcy, whose estate belonged to his father's family and who through his mother is the grandson and nephew of an earl. Bingley, unlike Darcy, does not own his property but has portable and growing wealth that makes him a good catch on the marriage market for poorer daughters of the gentry, like Jane Bennet, or of ambitious merchants. Class plays a central role in the evolution of the characters and Jane Austen's radical approach to class is seen as the plot unfolds.[23]

An undercurrent of the old Anglo-Norman upper class is hinted at in the story, as suggested by the names of Fitzwilliam Darcy and his aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh; Fitzwilliam, D'Arcy, de Bourgh (Burke), and even Bennet, are traditional Norman surnames.[24]

Self-knowledge
Through their interactions and their critiques of each other, Darcy and Elizabeth come to recognise their faults and work to correct them. Elizabeth meditates on her own mistakes thoroughly in chapter 36:

"How despicably have I acted!" she cried; "I, who have prided myself on my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity in useless or blameable distrust. How humiliating is this discovery! yet, how just a humiliation! Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly. Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment I never knew myself."[25]

Other characters rarely exhibit this depth of understanding or at least are not given the space within the novel for this sort of development.

Tanner writes that Mrs Bennet in particular, "has a very limited view of the requirements of that performance; lacking any introspective tendencies she is incapable of appreciating the feelings of others and is only aware of material objects".[26] Mrs Bennet's behaviour reflects the society in which she lives, as she knows that her daughters will not succeed if they do not get married. "The business of her life was to get her daughters married: its solace was visiting and news."[27] This shows that Mrs Bennet is only aware of "material objects" and not of her feelings and emotions.[28]

A notable exception is Charlotte Lucas, Elizabeth Bennet's close friend and confidant. She accepts Mr Collins's proposal of marriage once Lizzie rejects him, not out of sentiment but acute awareness of her circumstances as "one of a large family". Charlotte's decision is reflective of her prudent nature and awareness.

Style
Pride and Prejudice, like most of Austen's works, employs the narrative technique of free indirect speech, which has been defined as "the free representation of a character's speech, by which one means, not words actually spoken by a character, but the words that typify the character's thoughts, or the way the character would think or speak, if she thought or spoke".[29]

Austen creates her characters with fully developed personalities and unique voices. Though Darcy and Elizabeth are very alike, they are also considerably different.[30] By using narrative that adopts the tone and vocabulary of a particular character (in this case, Elizabeth), Austen invites the reader to follow events from Elizabeth's viewpoint, sharing her prejudices and misapprehensions. "The learning curve, while undergone by both protagonists, is disclosed to us solely through Elizabeth's point of view and her free indirect speech is essential ... for it is through it that we remain caught, if not stuck, within Elizabeth's misprisions."[29]

The few times the reader is allowed to gain further knowledge of another character's feelings, is through the letters exchanged in this novel. Darcy's first letter to Elizabeth is an example of this as through his letter, the reader and Elizabeth are both given knowledge of Wickham's true character.

Austen is known to use irony throughout the novel especially from viewpoint of the character of Elizabeth Bennet. She conveys the "oppressive rules of femininity that actually dominate her life and work, and are covered by her beautifully carved trojan horse of ironic distance."[5] Beginning with a historical investigation of the development of a particular literary form and then transitioning into empirical verifications, it reveals free indirect discourse as a tool that emerged over time as practical means for addressing the physical distinctness of minds. Seen in this way, free indirect discourse is a distinctly literary response to an environmental concern, providing a scientific justification that does not reduce literature to a mechanical extension of biology, but takes its value to be its own original form.[31]


Lord of the Flies


The original UK Lord of the Flies book cover
Author	William Golding
Cover artist	Anthony Gross[1]
Genre	Allegorical novel
Publisher	Faber and Faber
Publication date	17 September 1954
Publication place	United Kingdom
Pages	224[2]
OCLC	47677622
Lord of the Flies is the 1954 debut novel of British author William Golding. The plot concerns a group of British boys who are stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempts to govern themselves. The novel's themes include morality, leadership, and the tension between civility and chaos.

Lord of the Flies was generally well received, and is a popular assigned book in schools.

Background
Published in 1954, Lord of the Flies was Golding's first novel. Golding got the idea for the plot from The Coral Island, a children's adventure novel with a focus on Christianity and the supposed civilising influence of British colonialism. Golding thought that the book was unrealistic, and asked his wife if it would be a good idea if he "wrote a book about children on an island, children who behave in the way children really would behave?"[3]

The novel's title is a literal translation of Beelzebub, a biblical demon considered the god of pride and warfare.[4] Golding, who was a philosophy teacher before becoming a Royal Navy lieutenant, experienced war firsthand, and commanded a landing craft in the Normandy landings during D-Day in 1944. After the war ended and Golding returned to England, the world was dominated by Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation, which led Golding to examine the nature of humanity and went on to inspire Lord of the Flies.[5]

Lord of the Flies was rejected by many publishers before being accepted by Faber & Faber. An initial rejection labelled the book as "absurd ... Rubbish & dull".[6] The book was originally titled Strangers from Within, which was considered "too abstract and too explicit"[7] and was eventually changed to Lord of the Flies.[8][9]

Editor Charles Monteith worked with Golding on several major edits, including removing the entire first section which described an evacuation from nuclear war.[6][7] The character of Simon was also heavily edited to remove an interaction with a mysterious figure who is implied to be God.[10] Ultimately, Golding accepted the edits, and wrote that "I've lost any kind of objectivity I ever had over this novel and can hardly bear to look at it."[11] The edited manuscripts are available to view at the University of Exeter library.[12]

Plot
In the midst of a wartime evacuation, a British aeroplane crashes on an isolated island in a remote region of the Pacific Ocean. The only survivors are boys in their middle childhood or preadolescence. A fair-haired boy named Ralph and a fat boy nicknamed Piggy find a conch shell, which Ralph uses as a horn to gather the survivors. Ralph immediately commands authority over the other boys using the conch, and is elected their "chief". He establishes three goals for the boys: to have fun, to survive, and to constantly maintain a smoke signal that could alert passing ships. Ralph, a red-haired boy named Jack, and a quiet boy named Simon use Piggy's glasses to create a signal fire.

The semblance of order deteriorates as the boys grow lazy and ignore Ralph's efforts to improve life on the island. They become paranoid about an imaginary monster called "the beast". Ralph fails to convince the boys that no beast exists, while Jack gains popularity by declaring that he will personally hunt and kill the monster. At one point, Jack takes the boys to hunt a wild pig, including the boys who were meant to watch the signal fire. The smoke signal goes out, failing to attract a ship that was passing by the island. Ralph angrily confronts Jack and considers relinquishing his role as leader, but is persuaded not to do so by Piggy.

One night, an air battle occurs near the island and the body of a fighter pilot drifts down in a parachute. Twin boys Sam and Eric mistake the corpse for the beast. When Ralph and Jack investigate with another boy, Roger, they flee in terror, believing the beast is real. Jack tries to turn the others against Ralph, and goes off alone to form his own tribe, with most of the other boys gradually joining him.

Jack and his followers set up an offering to the beast in the forest: a pig's head, mounted on a sharpened stick and swarming with flies. Simon, who often ventures into the forest alone, has an imaginary dialogue with the head, which he dubs the "Lord of the Flies". The head tells Simon that there is no beast on the island, and predicts that the other boys will turn on Simon. That night, Ralph and Piggy visit Jack's tribe, who have begun painting their faces and engaging in primitive ritual dances. When Simon realises that the beast is only a dead pilot, he rushes to tell Jack's tribe, but the frenzied boys (including Ralph and Piggy) mistake Simon for the beast and beat him to death.

Jack and his tribe steal Piggy's glasses, the only means of starting a fire. Ralph goes to Jack's camp with Piggy, Sam, and Eric to confront him and retrieve the glasses. Roger triggers a trap that kills Piggy and shatters the conch. Ralph manages to escape, but Sam and Eric are forced to join Jack's tribe.

That night, Ralph secretly confronts Sam and Eric, who warn him that Jack plans to hunt him. The following morning, Jack's tribe sets fire to the forest. Ralph narrowly escapes the boys and the fire, and finally falls in front of a uniformed adult – a British naval officer who has landed on the island to investigate the fire. Ralph, Jack, and the other boys erupt into sobs over the "end of innocence". The officer expresses his disappointment at seeing the boys exhibiting such feral, warlike behaviour, then turns, "moved and a little embarrassed," to stare at his cruiser waiting offshore.

Characters
Primary
Ralph: The athletic and charismatic protagonist who is the boys' elected leader. He is often representative of order, civilisation, and productive leadership. At the beginning of the novel, Ralph sets out to build huts and thinks of ways to improve their chances of being rescued. Ralph's influence over the boys is at first secure, but it declines as the boys defect to Jack and turn to savagery.
Jack Merridew: The strong-willed antagonist who represents savagery, violence, and power. At the beginning of the novel, he is infuriated at losing the leadership election to Ralph. He then leads his tribe, consisting of a group of ex-choir boys, into the deep forest where they hunt pigs and turn into barbarians with painted faces. By the end of the novel, he uses the boys' fear of the beast to assert control over them.
Simon: An innately spiritual boy who is often the voice of reason in the rivalry between Ralph and Jack.
Piggy: Ralph's intellectual and talkative friend who helps Ralph to become leader and is the source of many innovative ideas. He represents the rational side of humanity. Piggy's asthma, weight and poor eyesight make him a target of scorn and violence. His real name is not given.
Roger: An initially quiet boy who eventually becomes violent when Jack rises to power.
Secondary
Sam and Eric: Twins, who are among Ralph's few supporters at the end of the novel. Roger forces them to join Jack's tribe.
The Officer: A naval officer who rescues the surviving boys at the end of the novel. He does not understand the boys' warlike behaviour, despite commanding a warship himself.
Themes
The novel's major themes of morality, civility, leadership, and society all explore the duality of human nature.[5]

Lord of the Flies portrays a scenario in which upper-class British children quickly descend into chaos and violence without adult authority, despite the boys' attempts to establish order and co-ordination. This subverts the colonial narration found in many British books of this period, such as The Coral Island.[5] Lord of the Flies contains various references to The Coral Island, such as the rescuing naval officer describing the boys' misadventures as a "jolly good show. Like the Coral Island."[13] Golding's three central characters, Ralph, Piggy, and Jack, can also be interpreted as caricatures of the protagonists in The Coral Island.[14]

At an allegorical level, a central theme is how the desire for civilisation conflicts with the desire for power. Lord of the Flies also portrays the tension between groupthink and individuality, rational and emotional reactions, and morality and immorality. These themes have been explored in an essay by American literary critic Harold Bloom.[15]

Some examples of symbolism in Lord of the Flies are the signal fire, Piggy's glasses, and the conch shell, which can be read as representing hope, reason, and unity, among other interpretations.

The novel also examines aspects of war, as the story is set during a war that has begun before the boys arrive on the island.[16] Although the location of the island is never stated, it is implied to be somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.

Genre and style
As a tale of adventure and survival, Lord of the Flies fits the genre of romanticism. It also questions human morality, making it a work of philosophical fiction. The novel is styled as allegorical fiction, embodying the concepts of inherent human savagery, mob mentality, and totalitarian leadership.[17] However, Golding deviates from typical allegory in that both the protagonists and the antagonists are fully developed, realistic characters.

Reception
Critical response
Its first print run of 3,000 copies was slow to sell, but Lord of the Flies went on to become very popular, with more than ten million copies sold as of 2015.[7] E. M. Forster chose Lord of the Flies as his "outstanding novel of the year", and it was described in one review as "not only a first-rate adventure but a parable of our times".[7] In February 1960, Floyd C. Gale of Galaxy Science Fiction rated Lord of the Flies five stars out of five, stating, "Golding paints a truly terrifying picture of the decay of a minuscule society ... Well on its way to becoming a modern classic".[18] Marc D. Hauser called Lord of the Flies "riveting" and said that it "should be standard reading in biology, economics, psychology, and philosophy".[19]

Lord of the Flies presents a view of humanity unimaginable before the horrors of Nazi Europe, and then plunges into speculations about mankind in the state of nature. Bleak and specific, but universal, fusing rage and grief, Lord of the Flies is both a novel of the 1950s, and for all time.

—Robert McCrum, The Guardian.[7]

Lord of the Flies was included on the American Library Association's list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 1990–1999, for its controversial stance on human nature and individual welfare versus the common good.[20] The book has been criticised as cynical for portraying humanity as inherently selfish and violent. It has been linked with the essay "The Tragedy of the Commons" by Garrett Hardin and with books by Ayn Rand and countered by "Management of the Commons" by Elinor Ostrom.[21] Lord of the Flies has been contrasted with Tongan castaways an incident from 1965, when a group of schoolboys on a fishing boat from Tonga were marooned on an uninhabited island and considered dead by their relatives. The group not only managed to survive for over 15 months but "had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination". When ship captain Peter Warner found them, they were in good health and spirits. The Dutch historian, Rutger Bregman, writing about the Tonga event, called Golding's portrayal unrealistic.[22]

Awards
Lord of the Flies was awarded a place on both lists of Modern Library 100 Best Novels, reaching number 41 on the editor's list and 25 on the reader's list.[23] In 2003, Lord of the Flies was listed at number 70 on the BBC's survey The Big Read,[24] and in 2005 it was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923.[25] Time also included the novel in its list of the 100 Best Young-Adult Books of All Time.[26]

Popular in schools, especially in the English-speaking world, a 2016 UK poll saw Lord of the Flies ranked third in the nation's favourite books from school, behind George Orwell's Animal Farm and Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.[27]

In 2019, BBC News included Lord of the Flies on its list of the 100 most inspiring novels.[28]

In other media
Film
Three film adaptations were based on the book:

Lord of the Flies (1963), directed by Peter Brook
Alkitrang Dugo (1975), a Filipino film, directed by Lupita A. Concio
Lord of the Flies (1990), directed by Harry Hook
A fourth adaptation, to feature an all-female cast, was announced by Warner Bros. in August 2017.[29][30] Subsequently abandoned, it inspired the 2021 television series Yellowjackets.[31] Ladyworld, an all-female adaptation, was released in 2018.

Television
In April 2023, the BBC announced that the British production company Eleven Film would produce the first ever television adaptation of the novel, written by screenwriter Jack Thorne.[32]

Stage
The book was first adapted for the stage and performed in 1984 at Clifton College Preparatory School. It was adapted by Elliot Watkins, a teacher at the school, with the consent of Golding, who attended the opening night.[citation needed]

Nigel Williams wrote his own adaptation of the text for the stage some ten years later. It was debuted by the Royal Shakespeare Company in July 1995.[33] The Pilot Theatre Company toured it extensively in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

In October 2014 it was announced that the 2011 production[34][failed verification] of Lord of the Flies would return to conclude the 2015 season at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre ahead of a major UK tour. The production was to be directed by Timothy Sheader.[citation needed]

Kansas-based Orange Mouse Theatricals and Mathew Klickstein produced a topical, gender-bending adaptation called Ladies of the Fly that was co-written by a group of girls aged 8 to 16 based on the original text and their own lives. The production was performed by the girls as an immersive live-action show in August 2018.[35]

Radio
In June 2013, BBC Radio 4 Extra broadcast a dramatisation by Judith Adams in four 30-minute episodes directed by Sasha Yevtushenko. The cast included Ruth Wilson as narrator, Finn Bennett as Ralph, Richard Linnel as Jack, Caspar Hilton-Hilley as Piggy, and Jack Caine as Simon.[36]

Influence
Literature
Author Stephen King named his fictional town of Castle Rock after Jack's mountain camp in Lord of the Flies.[37] The book itself appears prominently in King's novels Cujo (1981), Misery (1987) and Hearts in Atlantis (1999).[38] His novel It was influenced by Golding's novel: "I thought to myself I'd really like to write a story about what's gained and what's lost when you go from childhood to adulthood, and also, the things we experience in childhood that are like seeds that blossom later on."[39] In 2011, King wrote an introduction for a new edition of Lord of the Flies to mark the centenary of Golding's birth.[40] King's town of Castle Rock inspired the name of Rob Reiner's production company, Castle Rock Entertainment.[41]

Alan Garner credits the book with making him want to become a writer.[42]


Hamlet

Written by	William Shakespeare
Characters	
Hamlet
Claudius
Gertrude
Polonius
Ophelia
Laertes
Horatio
Original language	Early Modern English
Genre	Shakespearean tragedy
Setting	Denmark
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, usually shortened to Hamlet (/ˈhæmlɪt/), is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play. Set in Denmark, the play depicts Prince Hamlet and his attempts to exact revenge against his uncle, Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet's father in order to seize his throne and marry Hamlet's mother. Hamlet is considered among the "most powerful and influential tragedies in the English language", with a story capable of "seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others".[1] It is widely considered one of the greatest plays of all time.[2] Three different early versions of the play are extant: the First Quarto (Q1, 1603); the Second Quarto (Q2, 1604); and the First Folio (F1, 1623). Each version includes lines and passages missing from the others.[3]

Many works have been pointed to as possible sources for Shakespeare's play, from ancient Greek tragedies to Elizabethan dramas. The editors of the Arden Shakespeare question the idea of "source hunting", pointing out that it presupposes that authors always require ideas from other works for their own, and suggests that no author can have an original idea or be an originator. When Shakespeare wrote, there were many stories about sons avenging the murder of their fathers, and many about clever avenging sons pretending to be foolish in order to outsmart their foes. This would include the story of the ancient Roman, Lucius Junius Brutus, which Shakespeare apparently knew, as well as the story of Amleth, which was preserved in Latin by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum, and printed in Paris in 1514. The Amleth story was subsequently adapted and then published in French in 1570 by the 16th-century scholar François de Belleforest. It has a number of plot elements and major characters in common with Shakespeare's Hamlet, and lacks others that are found in Shakespeare. Belleforest's story was first published in English in 1608, after Hamlet had been written, though it's possible that Shakespeare had encountered it in the French-language version.[4]

Characters
Main article: Characters in Hamlet
Hamlet – son of the late king and nephew of the present king, Claudius
Claudius – King of Denmark, Hamlet's uncle and brother to the former king
Gertrude – Queen of Denmark and Hamlet's mother
Polonius – chief counsellor to the king
Ophelia – Polonius's daughter
Horatio – friend of Hamlet
Laertes – Polonius's son
Voltimand and Cornelius – courtiers
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – courtiers, friends of Hamlet
Osric – a courtier
Marcellus – an officer
Barnardo – an officer
Francisco – a soldier
Reynaldo – Polonius's servant
Ghost – the ghost of Hamlet's father
Fortinbras – prince of Norway
Gravediggers – a pair of sextons
Player King, Player Queen, Lucianus, etc. – players
Plot

Kronborg Castle is immortalized as Elsinore in the play Hamlet
Act I
Prince Hamlet of Denmark is the son of the recently deceased King Hamlet, and nephew of King Claudius, his father's brother and successor. Claudius hastily married King Hamlet's widow, Gertrude, Hamlet's mother, and took the throne for himself. Denmark has a long-standing feud with neighbouring Norway, in which King Hamlet slew King Fortinbras of Norway in a battle some years ago. Although Denmark defeated Norway and the Norwegian throne fell to King Fortinbras's infirm brother, Denmark fears that an invasion led by the dead Norwegian king's son, Prince Fortinbras, is imminent.

On a cold night on the ramparts of Elsinore, the Danish royal castle, the sentries Bernardo and Marcellus discuss a ghost resembling the late King Hamlet which they have recently seen, and bring Prince Hamlet's friend Horatio as a witness. After the ghost appears again, the three vow to tell Prince Hamlet what they have witnessed.

The court gathers the next day, and King Claudius and Queen Gertrude discuss affairs of state with their elderly adviser Polonius. Claudius grants permission for Polonius's son Laertes to return to school in France, and he sends envoys to inform the King of Norway about Fortinbras. Claudius also questions Hamlet regarding his continuing to grieve for his father, and forbids him to return to his university in Wittenberg. After the court exits, Hamlet despairs of his father's death and his mother's hasty remarriage. Learning of the ghost from Horatio, Hamlet resolves to see it himself.


Horatio, Hamlet, and the ghost (Artist: Henry Fuseli, 1789)[5]
As Polonius's son Laertes prepares to depart for France, Polonius offers him advice that culminates in the maxim "to thine own self be true."[6] Polonius's daughter, Ophelia, admits her interest in Hamlet, but Laertes warns her against seeking the prince's attention, and Polonius orders her to reject his advances. That night on the rampart, the ghost appears to Hamlet, tells the prince that he was murdered by Claudius (by pouring poison into his ear as he slept), and demands that Hamlet avenge the murder. Hamlet agrees, and the ghost vanishes. The prince confides to Horatio and the sentries that from now on he plans to "put an antic disposition on", or act as though he has gone mad. Hamlet forces them to swear to keep his plans for revenge secret; however, he remains uncertain of the ghost's reliability.

Act II
Ophelia rushes to her father, telling him that Hamlet arrived at her door the prior night half-undressed and behaving erratically. Polonius blames love for Hamlet's madness and resolves to inform Claudius and Gertrude. As he enters to do so, the king and queen are welcoming Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two student acquaintances of Hamlet, to Elsinore. The royal couple has requested that the two students investigate the cause of Hamlet's mood and behaviour. Additional news requires that Polonius wait to be heard: messengers from Norway inform Claudius that the king of Norway has rebuked Prince Fortinbras for attempting to re-fight his father's battles. The forces that Fortinbras had conscripted to march against Denmark will instead be sent against Poland, though they will pass through Danish territory to get there.

Polonius tells Claudius and Gertrude his theory regarding Hamlet's behaviour, and then speaks to Hamlet in a hall of the castle to try to learn more. Hamlet feigns madness and subtly insults Polonius all the while. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive, Hamlet greets his "friends" warmly but quickly discerns that they are there to spy on him for Claudius. Hamlet admits that he is upset at his situation but refuses to give the true reason, instead remarking "What a piece of work is a man". Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tell Hamlet that they have brought along a troupe of actors that they met while travelling to Elsinore. Hamlet, after welcoming the actors and dismissing his friends-turned-spies, asks them to deliver a soliloquy about the death of King Priam and Queen Hecuba at the climax of the Trojan War. Hamlet then asks the actors to stage The Murder of Gonzago, a play featuring a death in the style of his father's murder. Hamlet intends to study Claudius's reaction to the play, and thereby determine the truth of the ghost's story of Claudius's guilt.

Act III
Polonius forces Ophelia to return Hamlet's love letters to the prince while he and Claudius secretly watch in order to evaluate Hamlet's reaction. Hamlet is walking alone in the hall as the King and Polonius await Ophelia's entrance. Hamlet muses on thoughts of life versus death. When Ophelia enters and tries to return Hamlet's things, Hamlet accuses her of immodesty and cries "get thee to a nunnery", though it is unclear whether this, too, is a show of madness or genuine distress. His reaction convinces Claudius that Hamlet is not mad for love. Shortly thereafter, the court assembles to watch the play Hamlet has commissioned. After seeing the Player King murdered by his rival pouring poison in his ear, Claudius abruptly rises and runs from the room; for Hamlet, this is proof of his uncle's guilt.


Hamlet mistakenly stabs Polonius (Artist: Coke Smyth, 19th century).
Gertrude summons Hamlet to her chamber to demand an explanation. Meanwhile, Claudius talks to himself about the impossibility of repenting, since he still has possession of his ill-gotten goods: his brother's crown and wife. He sinks to his knees. Hamlet, on his way to visit his mother, sneaks up behind him but does not kill him, reasoning that killing Claudius while he is praying will send him straight to heaven while his father's ghost is stuck in purgatory. In the queen's bedchamber, Hamlet and Gertrude fight bitterly. Polonius, spying on the conversation from behind a tapestry, calls for help as Gertrude, believing Hamlet wants to kill her, calls out for help herself.

Hamlet, believing it is Claudius, stabs wildly, killing Polonius, but he pulls aside the curtain and sees his mistake. In a rage, Hamlet brutally insults his mother for her apparent ignorance of Claudius's villainy, but the ghost enters and reprimands Hamlet for his inaction and harsh words. Unable to see or hear the ghost herself, Gertrude takes Hamlet's conversation with it as further evidence of madness. After begging the queen to stop sleeping with Claudius, Hamlet leaves, dragging Polonius's corpse away.

Act IV
Hamlet jokes with Claudius about where he has hidden Polonius's body, and the king, fearing for his life, sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to accompany Hamlet to England with a sealed letter to the English king requesting that Hamlet be executed immediately.

Unhinged by grief at Polonius's death, Ophelia wanders Elsinore. Laertes arrives back from France, enraged by his father's death and his sister's madness. Claudius convinces Laertes that Hamlet is solely responsible, but a letter soon arrives indicating that Hamlet has returned to Denmark, foiling Claudius's plan. Claudius switches tactics, proposing a fencing match between Laertes and Hamlet to settle their differences. Laertes will be given a poison-tipped foil, and, if that fails, Claudius will offer Hamlet poisoned wine as a congratulation. Gertrude interrupts to report that Ophelia has drowned, though it is unclear whether it was suicide or an accident caused by her madness.

Act V

The gravedigger scene.[7] (Artist: Eugène Delacroix, 1839)
Horatio has received a letter from Hamlet, explaining that the prince escaped by negotiating with pirates who attempted to attack his England-bound ship, and the friends reunite offstage. Two gravediggers discuss Ophelia's apparent suicide while digging her grave. Hamlet arrives with Horatio and banters with one of the gravediggers, who unearths the skull of a jester from Hamlet's childhood, Yorick. Hamlet picks up the skull, saying "Alas, poor Yorick" as he contemplates mortality. Ophelia's funeral procession approaches, led by Laertes. Hamlet and Horatio initially hide, but when Hamlet realizes that Ophelia is the one being buried, he reveals himself, proclaiming his love for her. Laertes and Hamlet fight by Ophelia's graveside, but the brawl is broken up.

Back at Elsinore, Hamlet explains to Horatio that he had discovered Claudius's letter among Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's belongings and replaced it with a forged copy indicating that his former friends should be killed instead. A foppish courtier, Osric, interrupts the conversation to deliver the fencing challenge to Hamlet. Hamlet, despite Horatio's pleas, accepts it. Hamlet does well at first, leading the match by two hits to none, and Gertrude raises a toast to him using the poisoned glass of wine Claudius had set aside for Hamlet. Claudius tries to stop her but is too late: she drinks, and Laertes realizes the plot will be revealed. Laertes slashes Hamlet with his poisoned blade. In the ensuing scuffle, they switch weapons, and Hamlet wounds Laertes with his own poisoned sword. Gertrude collapses and, claiming she has been poisoned, dies. In his dying moments, Laertes reconciles with Hamlet and reveals Claudius's plan. Hamlet rushes at Claudius and kills him. As the poison takes effect, Hamlet, hearing that Fortinbras is marching through the area, names the Norwegian prince as his successor. Horatio, distraught at the thought of being the last survivor and living whilst Hamlet does not, says he will commit suicide by drinking the dregs of Gertrude's poisoned wine, but Hamlet begs him to live on and tell his story. Hamlet dies in Horatio's arms, proclaiming "the rest is silence". Fortinbras, who was ostensibly marching towards Poland with his army, arrives at the palace, along with an English ambassador bringing news of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's deaths. Horatio promises to recount the full story of what happened, and Fortinbras, seeing the entire Danish royal family dead, takes the crown for himself and orders a military funeral to honour Hamlet.

Sources
Main article: Sources of Hamlet

A facsimile of Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus, which contains the legend of Amleth
Hamlet-like legends are so widely found (for example in Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, Byzantium, and Arabia) that the core "hero-as-fool" theme is possibly Indo-European in origin.[8] Several ancient written precursors to Hamlet can be identified. The first is the anonymous Scandinavian Saga of Hrolf Kraki. In this, the murdered king has two sons—Hroar and Helgi—who spend most of the story in disguise, under false names, rather than feigning madness, in a sequence of events that differs from Shakespeare's.[9] The second is the Roman legend of Brutus, recorded in two separate Latin works. Its hero, Lucius ("shining, light"), changes his name and persona to Brutus ("dull, stupid"), playing the role of a fool to avoid the fate of his father and brothers, and eventually slaying his family's killer, King Tarquinius. A 17th-century Nordic scholar, Torfaeus, compared the Icelandic hero Amlóði (Amlodi) and the hero Prince Ambales (from the Ambales Saga) to Shakespeare's Hamlet. Similarities include the prince's feigned madness, his accidental killing of the king's counsellor in his mother's bedroom, and the eventual slaying of his uncle.[10]

Many of the earlier legendary elements are interwoven in the 13th-century "Life of Amleth" (Latin: Vita Amlethi) by Saxo Grammaticus, part of Gesta Danorum.[11] Written in Latin, it reflects classical Roman concepts of virtue and heroism, and was widely available in Shakespeare's day.[12] Significant parallels include the prince feigning madness, his mother's hasty marriage to the usurper, the prince killing a hidden spy, and the prince substituting the execution of two retainers for his own. A reasonably faithful version of Saxo's story was translated into French in 1570 by François de Belleforest, in his Histoires tragiques.[13] Belleforest embellished Saxo's text substantially, almost doubling its length, and introduced the hero's melancholy.[14]


Title page of The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd
According to one theory, Shakespeare's main source may be an earlier play—now lost—known today as the Ur-Hamlet. Possibly written by Thomas Kyd or by Shakespeare, the Ur-Hamlet would have existed by 1589, and would have incorporated a ghost.[15] Shakespeare's company, the Chamberlain's Men, may have purchased that play and performed a version for some time, which Shakespeare reworked.[16] However, no copy of the Ur-Hamlet has survived, and it is impossible to compare its language and style with the known works of any of its putative authors. In 1936 Andrew Cairncross suggested that, until more becomes known, it may be assumed that Shakespeare wrote the Ur-Hamlet.[17] Eric Sams lists reasons for supporting Shakespeare’s authorship.[18] Harold Jenkins considers that there are no grounds for thinking that the Ur-Hamlet is an early work by Shakespeare, which he then rewrote.[19] Professor Terri Bourus in 2016, one of three general editors of the New Oxford Shakespeare,[20] in her paper "Enter Shakespeare's Young Hamlet, 1589" suggests that Shakespeare was "interested in sixteenth-century French literature, from the very beginning of his career" and therefore "did not need Thomas Kyd to pre-digest Belleforest's histoire of Amleth and spoon-feed it to him". She considers that the hypothesized Ur-Hamlet is Shakespeare's Q1 text, and that this derived directly from Belleforest's French version.[21]

The precise combination of Shakespeare's use of the Ur-Hamlet, Belleforest, Saxo, or Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy as sources for Hamlet is not known. However, elements of Belleforest's version which are not in Saxo's story do appear in Shakespeare's play.[22]

Most scholars reject the idea that Hamlet is in any way connected with Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet Shakespeare, who died in 1596 at age eleven. Conventional wisdom holds that Hamlet is too obviously connected to legend, and the name Hamnet was quite popular at the time.[23] However, Stephen Greenblatt has argued that the coincidence of the names and Shakespeare's grief for the loss of his son may lie at the heart of the tragedy. He notes that the name of Hamnet Sadler, the Stratford neighbour after whom Hamnet was named, was often written as Hamlet Sadler and that, in the loose orthography of the time, the names were virtually interchangeable.[24][25]

Scholars have often speculated that Hamlet's Polonius might have been inspired by William Cecil (Lord Burghley)—Lord High Treasurer and chief counsellor to Queen Elizabeth I. E. K. Chambers suggested Polonius's advice to Laertes may have echoed Burghley's to his son Robert Cecil.[26] John Dover Wilson thought it almost certain that the figure of Polonius caricatured Burghley.[27] A. L. Rowse speculated that Polonius's tedious verbosity might have resembled Burghley's.[28] Lilian Winstanley thought the name Corambis (in the First Quarto) did suggest Cecil and Burghley.[29] Harold Jenkins considers the idea of Polonius as a caricature of Burghley to be conjecture, perhaps based on the similar role they each played at court, and perhaps also based on the similarity between Burghley addressing his Ten Precepts to his son, and Polonius offering "precepts" to his son, Laertes.[30] Jenkins suggests that any personal satire may be found in the name "Polonius", which might point to a Polish or Polonian connection.[31] G. R. Hibbard hypothesised that differences in names (Corambis/Polonius:Montano/Raynoldo) between the First Quarto and other editions might reflect a desire not to offend scholars at Oxford University. (Robert Pullen, was the founder of Oxford University, and John Rainolds, was the President of Corpus Christi College.)[32]

Date

"Any dating of Hamlet must be tentative", states the New Cambridge editor, Phillip Edwards. MacCary suggests 1599 or 1600;[33] James Shapiro offers late 1600 or early 1601;[34] Wells and Taylor suggest that the play was written in 1600 and revised later;[35] the New Cambridge editor settles on mid-1601;[36] the New Swan Shakespeare Advanced Series editor agrees with 1601;[37] Thompson and Taylor, tentatively ("according to whether one is the more persuaded by Jenkins or by Honigmann") suggest a terminus ad quem of either Spring 1601 or sometime in 1600.[38]

The earliest date estimate relies on Hamlet's frequent allusions to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, itself dated to mid-1599.[39][40] The latest date estimate is based on an entry, of 26 July 1602, in the Register of the Stationers' Company, indicating that Hamlet was "latelie Acted by the Lo: Chamberleyne his servantes".

In 1598, Francis Meres published his Palladis Tamia, a survey of English literature from Chaucer to its present day, within which twelve of Shakespeare's plays are named. Hamlet is not among them, suggesting that it had not yet been written. As Hamlet was very popular, Bernard Lott, the series editor of New Swan, believes it "unlikely that he [Meres] would have overlooked ... so significant a piece".[37]

The phrase "little eyases"[41] in the First Folio (F1) may allude to the Children of the Chapel, whose popularity in London forced the Globe company into provincial touring.[42] This became known as the War of the Theatres, and supports a 1601 dating.[37] Katherine Duncan-Jones accepts a 1600–01 attribution for the date Hamlet was written, but notes that the Lord Chamberlain's Men, playing Hamlet in the 3000-capacity Globe, were unlikely to be put to any disadvantage by an audience of "barely one hundred" for the Children of the Chapel's equivalent play, Antonio's Revenge; she believes that Shakespeare, confident in the superiority of his own work, was making a playful and charitable allusion to his friend John Marston's very similar piece.[43]

A contemporary of Shakespeare's, Gabriel Harvey, wrote a marginal note in his copy of the 1598 edition of Chaucer's works, which some scholars use as dating evidence. Harvey's note says that "the wiser sort" enjoy Hamlet, and implies that the Earl of Essex—executed in February 1601 for rebellion—was still alive. Other scholars consider this inconclusive. Edwards, for example, concludes that the "sense of time is so confused in Harvey's note that it is really of little use in trying to date Hamlet". This is because the same note also refers to Spenser and Watson as if they were still alive ("our flourishing metricians"), but also mentions "Owen's new epigrams", published in 1607.[44]

Texts
Three early editions of the text, each different, have survived, making attempts to establish a single "authentic" text problematic.[45][46][47]

First Quarto (Q1): In 1603 the booksellers Nicholas Ling and John Trundell published, and Valentine Simmes printed, the so-called "bad" first quarto, under the name The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke. Q1 contains just over half of the text of the later second quarto.
Second Quarto (Q2): In 1604 Nicholas Ling published, and James Roberts printed, the second quarto, under the same name as the first. Some copies are dated 1605, which may indicate a second impression; consequently, Q2 is often dated "1604/5". Q2 is the longest early edition, although it omits about 77 lines found in F1[48] (most likely to avoid offending James I's queen, Anne of Denmark).[49]
First Folio (F1): In 1623 Edward Blount and William and Isaac Jaggard published The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke in the First Folio, the first edition of Shakespeare's Complete Works. [50]
This list does not include three additional early texts, John Smethwick's Q3, Q4, and Q5 (1611–37), which are regarded as reprints of Q2 with some alterations.[50]


The first page of the First Folio printing of Hamlet, 1623
Early editors of Shakespeare's works, beginning with Nicholas Rowe (1709) and Lewis Theobald (1733), combined material from the two earliest sources of Hamlet available at the time, Q2 and F1. Each text contains material that the other lacks, with many minor differences in wording: scarcely 200 lines are identical in the two. Editors have combined them in an effort to create one "inclusive" text that reflects an imagined "ideal" of Shakespeare's original. Theobald's version became standard for a long time,[51] and his "full text" approach continues to influence editorial practice to the present day. Some contemporary scholarship, however, discounts this approach, instead considering "an authentic Hamlet an unrealisable ideal. ... there are texts of this play but no text".[52] The 2006 publication by Arden Shakespeare of different Hamlet texts in different volumes is perhaps evidence of this shifting focus and emphasis.[a] Other editors have continued to argue the need for well-edited editions taking material from all versions of the play. Colin Burrow has argued that "most of us should read a text that is made up by conflating all three versions ... it's about as likely that Shakespeare wrote: "To be or not to be, ay, there's the point" [in Q1], as that he wrote the works of Francis Bacon. I suspect most people just won't want to read a three-text play ... [multi-text editions are] a version of the play that is out of touch with the needs of a wider public."[57]

Traditionally, editors of Shakespeare's plays have divided them into five acts. None of the early texts of Hamlet, however, were arranged this way, and the play's division into acts and scenes derives from a 1676 quarto. Modern editors generally follow this traditional division but consider it unsatisfactory; for example, after Hamlet drags Polonius's body out of Gertrude's bedchamber, there is an act-break[58] after which the action appears to continue uninterrupted.[59]


Comparison of the 'To be, or not to be' soliloquy in the first three editions of Hamlet, showing the varying quality of the text in the Bad Quarto, the Good Quarto and the First Folio
Q1 was discovered in 1823. Only two copies are extant. According to Jenkins, "The unauthorized nature of this quarto is matched by the corruption of its text."[60] Yet Q1 has value: it contains stage directions (such as Ophelia entering with a lute and her hair down) that reveal actual stage practices in a way that Q2 and F1 do not; it contains an entire scene (usually labelled 4.6)[61] that does not appear in either Q2 or F1; and it is useful for comparison with the later editions. The major deficiency of Q1 is in the language: particularly noticeable in the opening lines of the famous "To be, or not to be" soliloquy: "To be, or not to be, aye there's the point. / To die, to sleep, is that all? Aye all: / No, to sleep, to dream, aye marry there it goes." However, the scene order is more coherent, without the problems of Q2 and F1 of Hamlet seeming to resolve something in one scene and enter the next drowning in indecision. New Cambridge editor Kathleen Irace has noted that "Q1's more linear plot design is certainly easier [...] to follow [...] but the simplicity of the Q1 plot arrangement eliminates the alternating plot elements that correspond to Hamlet's shifts in mood."[62]

Q1 is considerably shorter than Q2 or F1 and may be a memorial reconstruction of the play as Shakespeare's company performed it, by an actor who played a minor role (most likely Marcellus).[63] Scholars disagree whether the reconstruction was pirated or authorised. It is suggested by Irace that Q1 is an abridged version intended especially for travelling productions, thus the question of length may be considered as separate from issues of poor textual quality.[56][64] Editing Q1 thus poses problems in whether or not to "correct" differences from Q2 and F. Irace, in her introduction to Q1, wrote that "I have avoided as many other alterations as possible, because the differences...are especially intriguing...I have recorded a selection of Q2/F readings in the collation." The idea that Q1 is not riddled with error but is instead eminently fit for the stage has led to at least 28 different Q1 productions since 1881.[65] Other productions have used the probably superior Q2 and Folio texts, but used Q1's running order, in particular moving the to be or not to be soliloquy earlier.[66] Developing this, some editors such as Jonathan Bate have argued that Q2 may represent "a 'reading' text as opposed to a 'performance' one" of Hamlet, analogous to how modern films released on disc may include deleted scenes: an edition containing all of Shakespeare's material for the play for the pleasure of readers, so not representing the play as it would have been staged.[67][68]

Analysis and criticism
Main article: Critical approaches to Hamlet
Critical history
From the early 17th century, the play was famous for its ghost and vivid dramatisation of melancholy and insanity, leading to a procession of mad courtiers and ladies in Jacobean and Caroline drama.[69][70] Though it remained popular with mass audiences, late 17th-century Restoration critics saw Hamlet as primitive and disapproved of its lack of unity and decorum.[71][72] This view changed drastically in the 18th century, when critics regarded Hamlet as a hero—a pure, brilliant young man thrust into unfortunate circumstances.[73]

By the mid-18th century, however, the advent of Gothic literature brought psychological and mystical readings, returning madness and the ghost to the forefront.[74] Not until the late 18th century did critics and performers begin to view Hamlet as confusing and inconsistent. Before then, he was either mad, or not; either a hero, or not; with no in-betweens.[75] These developments represented a fundamental change in literary criticism, which came to focus more on character and less on plot.[76] In the 18th century, one negative French review of Hamlet would be widely discussed for centuries, in particular in publications throughout the 19th and 20th century. [77] [78] [79] [80] [81] [82] [83] In 1768, Voltaire wrote a negative review of Hamlet, stating that "it is vulgar and barbarous drama, which would not be tolerated by the vilest populace of France or Italy... one would imagine this piece to be a work of a drunken savage".[84]

By the 19th century, Romantic critics valued Hamlet for its internal, individual conflict reflecting the strong contemporary emphasis on internal struggles and inner character in general.[85] Then too, critics started to focus on Hamlet's delay as a character trait, rather than a plot device.[76] This focus on character and internal struggle continued into the 20th century, when criticism branched in several directions, discussed in context and interpretation below.

Dramatic structure
Modern editors have divided the play into five acts, and each act into scenes. The First Folio marks the first two acts only. The quartos do not have such divisions. The division into five acts follows Seneca, who in his plays, regularized the way ancient Greek tragedies contain five episodes, which are separated by four choral odes. In Hamlet the development of the plot or the action are determined by the unfolding of Hamlet's character. The soliloquies do not interrupt the plot, instead they are highlights of each block of action. The plot is the developing revelation of Hamlet's view of what is "rotten in the state of Denmark." The action of the play is driven forward in dialogue; but in the soliloquies time and action stop, the meaning of action is questioned, fog of illusion is broached, and truths are exposed.

The contrast between appearance and reality is a significant theme. Hamlet is presented with an image, and then interprets its deeper or darker meaning. Examples begin with Hamlet questioning the reality of the ghost. It continues with Hamlet's taking on an "antic disposition" in order to appear mad, though he is not. The contrast (appearance and reality) is also expressed in several "spying scenes": Act two begins with Polonius sending Reynaldo to spy on his son, Laertes. Claudius and Polonius spy on Ophelia as she meets with Hamlet. In act two, Claudius asks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet. Similarly, the play-within-a-play is used by Hamlet to reveal his step-father's hidden nature.

There is no subplot, but the play presents the affairs of the courtier Polonius, his daughter, Ophelia, and his son, Laertes—who variously deal with madness, love and the death of a father in ways that contrast with Hamlet's. The graveyard scene eases tension prior to the catastrophe, and, as Hamlet holds the skull, it is shown that Hamlet no longer fears damnation in the afterlife, and accepts that there is a "divinity that shapes our ends".[86]

Hamlet's enquiring mind has been open to all kinds of ideas, but in act five he has decided on a plan, and in a dialogue with Horatio he seems to answer his two earlier soliloquies on suicide: "We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is't to leave betimes."[87][88]

Length
The First Quarto (1603) text of Hamlet contains 15,983 words, the Second Quarto (1604) contains 28,628 words, and the First Folio (1623) contains 27,602 words. Counting the number of lines varies between editions, partly because prose sections in the play may be formatted with varied lengths.[89] Editions of Hamlet that are created by conflating the texts of the Second Quarto and the Folio are said to have approximately 3,900 lines;[90] the number of lines varies between those editions based on formatting the prose sections, counting methods, and how the editors have joined the texts together.[91] Hamlet is by far the longest play that Shakespeare wrote, and one of the longest plays in the Western canon. It might require more than four hours to stage;[92] a typical Elizabethan play would need two to three hours.[93] It is speculated that because of the considerable length of Q2 and F1, there was an expectation that those texts would be abridged for performance, or that Q2 and F1 may have been aimed at a reading audience.[94]

That Q1 is so much shorter than Q2 has spurred speculation that Q1 is an early draft, or perhaps an adaptation, a bootleg copy, or a stage adaptation. On the title page of Q2, its text is described as "newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was." That is probably a comparison to Q1.[89]

Language

Hamlet's statement that his dark clothes are the outer sign of his inner grief demonstrates strong rhetorical skill (artist: Eugène Delacroix 1834).
Much of Hamlet's language is courtly: elaborate, witty discourse, as recommended by Baldassare Castiglione's 1528 etiquette guide, The Courtier. This work specifically advises royal retainers to amuse their masters with inventive language. Osric and Polonius, especially, seem to respect this injunction. Claudius's speech is rich with rhetorical figures—as is Hamlet's and, at times, Ophelia's—while the language of Horatio, the guards, and the gravediggers is simpler. Claudius's high status is reinforced by using the royal first person plural ("we" or "us"), and anaphora mixed with metaphor to resonate with Greek political speeches.[95]

Of all the characters, Hamlet has the greatest rhetorical skill. He uses highly developed metaphors, stichomythia, and in nine memorable words deploys both anaphora and asyndeton: "to die: to sleep— / To sleep, perchance to dream".[96] In contrast, when occasion demands, he is precise and straightforward, as when he explains his inward emotion to his mother: "But I have that within which passes show, / These but the trappings and the suits of woe".[97] At times, he relies heavily on puns to express his true thoughts while simultaneously concealing them.[98] Pauline Kiernan argues that Shakespeare changed English drama forever in Hamlet because he "showed how a character's language can often be saying several things at once, and contradictory meanings at that, to reflect fragmented thoughts and disturbed feelings". She gives the example of Hamlet's advice to Ophelia, "get thee to a nunnery",[99] which, she claims, is simultaneously a reference to a place of chastity and a slang term for a brothel, reflecting Hamlet's confused feelings about female sexuality.[100] However Harold Jenkins does not agree, having studied the few examples that are used to support that idea, and finds that there is no support for the assumption that "nunnery" was used that way in slang, or that Hamlet intended such a meaning. The context of the scene suggests that a nunnery would not be a brothel, but instead a place of renunciation and a "sanctuary from marriage and from the world’s contamination".[101] Thompson and Taylor consider the brothel idea incorrect considering that "Hamlet is trying to deter Ophelia from breeding".[102]

Hamlet’s first words in the play are a pun; when Claudius addresses him as "my cousin Hamlet, and my son", Hamlet says as an aside: "A little more than kin, and less than kind."[103]

An unusual rhetorical device, hendiadys, appears in several places in the play. Examples are found in Ophelia's speech at the end of the nunnery scene: "Th'expectancy and rose of the fair state"[104] and "And I, of ladies most deject and wretched".[105] Many scholars have found it odd that Shakespeare would, seemingly arbitrarily, use this rhetorical form throughout the play. One explanation may be that Hamlet was written later in Shakespeare's life, when he was adept at matching rhetorical devices to characters and the plot. Linguist George T. Wright suggests that hendiadys had been used deliberately to heighten the play's sense of duality and dislocation.[106]

Hamlet's soliloquies have also captured the attention of scholars. Hamlet interrupts himself, vocalising either disgust or agreement with himself and embellishing his own words. He has difficulty expressing himself directly and instead blunts the thrust of his thought with wordplay. It is not until late in the play, after his experience with the pirates, that Hamlet is able to articulate his feelings freely.[107]

Context and interpretation
Religious

John Everett Millais' Ophelia (1852) depicts Lady Ophelia's mysterious death by drowning. In the play, the gravediggers discuss whether Ophelia's death was a suicide and whether she merits a Christian burial.
Written at a time of religious upheaval and in the wake of the English Reformation, the play is alternately Catholic (or piously medieval) and Protestant (or consciously modern). The ghost describes himself as being in purgatory and as dying without last rites. This and Ophelia's burial ceremony, which is characteristically Catholic, make up most of the play's Catholic connections. Some scholars have observed that revenge tragedies come from Catholic countries such as Italy and Spain, where the revenge tragedies present contradictions of motives, since according to Catholic doctrine the duty to God and family precedes civil justice. Hamlet's conundrum then is whether to avenge his father and kill Claudius or to leave the vengeance to God, as his religion requires.[108][b]

Much of the play's Protestant tones derive from its setting in Denmark—both then and now a predominantly Protestant country,[c] though it is unclear whether the fictional Denmark of the play is intended to portray this implicit fact. Dialogue refers explicitly to the German city of Wittenberg where Hamlet, Horatio, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern attend university, implying where the Protestant reformer Martin Luther nailed the Ninety-five Theses to the church door in 1517.[109]

Philosophical

Philosophical ideas in Hamlet are similar to those of the French writer Michel de Montaigne, a contemporary of Shakespeare's (artist: Thomas de Leu, fl. 1560–1612).
Hamlet is often perceived as a philosophical character, expounding ideas that are now described as relativist, existentialist, and sceptical. For example, he expresses a subjectivistic idea when he says to Rosencrantz: "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so". [110] The idea that nothing is real except in the mind of the individual finds its roots in the Greek Sophists, who argued that since nothing can be perceived except through the senses—and since all individuals sense, and therefore perceive things differently—there is no absolute truth, but rather only relative truth.[111] The clearest alleged instance of existentialism is in the "to be, or not to be"[112] speech, where Hamlet is thought by some to use "being" to allude to life and action, and "not being" to death and inaction.

Hamlet reflects the contemporary scepticism promoted by the French Renaissance humanist Michel de Montaigne.[113] Prior to Montaigne's time, humanists such as Pico della Mirandola had argued that man was God's greatest creation, made in God's image and able to choose his own nature, but this view was subsequently challenged in Montaigne's Essais of 1580. Hamlet's "What a piece of work is a man" seems to echo many of Montaigne's ideas, and many scholars have discussed whether Shakespeare drew directly from Montaigne or whether both men were simply reacting similarly to the spirit of the times.[114][115][113]

Psychoanalytic

Freud suggested that an unconscious Oedipal conflict caused Hamlet's hesitations (artist: Eugène Delacroix 1844).
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud’s thoughts regarding Hamlet were first published in his book The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), as a footnote to a discussion of Sophocles’ tragedy, Oedipus Rex, all of which is part of his consideration of the causes of neurosis. Freud does not offer over-all interpretations of the plays, but uses the two tragedies to illustrate and corroborate his psychological theories, which are based on his treatments of his patients and on his studies. Productions of Hamlet have used Freud's ideas to support their own interpretations.[116][117] In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud says that according to his experience "parents play a leading part in the infantile psychology of all persons who subsequently become psychoneurotics," and that "falling in love with one parent and hating the other" is a common impulse in early childhood, and is important source material of "subsequent neurosis". He says that "in their amorous or hostile attitude toward their parents" neurotics reveal something that occurs with less intensity "in the minds of the majority of children". Freud considered that Sophocles’ tragedy, Oedipus Rex, with its story that involves crimes of parricide and incest, "has furnished us with legendary matter which corroborates" these ideas, and that the "profound and universal validity of the old legends" is understandable only by recognizing the validity of these theories of "infantile psychology".[118]

Freud explores the reason "Oedipus Rex is capable of moving a modern reader or playgoer no less powerfully than it moved the contemporary Greeks". He suggests that "It may be that we were all destined to direct our first sexual impulses toward our mothers, and our first impulses of hatred and violence toward our fathers." Freud suggests that we "recoil from the person for whom this primitive wish of our childhood has been fulfilled with all the force of the repression which these wishes have undergone in our minds since childhood."[118]

These ideas, which became a cornerstone of Freud's psychological theories, he named the "Oedipus complex", and, at one point, he considered calling it the "Hamlet complex".[119] Freud considered that Hamlet "is rooted in the same soil as Oedipus Rex." But the difference in the "psychic life" of the two civilizations that produced each play, and the progress made over time of "repression in the emotional life of humanity" can be seen in the way the same material is handled by the two playwrights: In Oedipus Rex incest and murder are brought into the light as might occur in a dream, but in Hamlet these impulses "remain repressed" and we learn of their existence through Hamlet's inhibitions to act out the revenge, while he is shown to be capable of acting decisively and boldly in other contexts. Freud asserts, "The play is based on Hamlet’s hesitation in accomplishing the task of revenge assigned to him; the text does not give the cause or the motive of this." The conflict is "deeply hidden".[120]

Hamlet is able to perform any kind of action except taking revenge on the man who murdered his father and has taken his father's place with his mother—Claudius has led Hamlet to realize the repressed desires of his own childhood. The loathing which was supposed to drive him to revenge is replaced by "self-reproach, by conscientious scruples" which tell him "he himself is no better than the murderer whom he is required to punish".[121] Freud suggests that Hamlet's sexual aversion expressed in his "nunnery" conversation with Ophelia supports the idea that Hamlet is "an hysterical subject".[121][122]

Freud suggests that the character Hamlet goes through an experience that has three characteristics, which he numbered: 1) "the hero is not psychopathic, but becomes so" during the course of the play. 2) "the repressed desire is one of those that are similarly repressed in all of us." It is a repression that "belongs to an early stage of our individual development". The audience identifies with the character of Hamlet, because "we are victims of the same conflict." 3) It is the nature of theatre that "the struggle of the repressed impulse to become conscious" occurs in both the hero onstage and the spectator, when they are in the grip of their emotions, "in the manner seen in psychoanalytic treatment".[123]

Freud points out that Hamlet is an exception in that psychopathic characters are usually ineffective in stage plays; they "become as useless for the stage as they are for life itself", because they do not inspire insight or empathy, unless the audience is familiar with the character's inner conflict. Freud says, "It is thus the task of the dramatist to transport us into the same illness."[124]

John Barrymore's long-running 1922 performance in New York, directed by Thomas Hopkins, "broke new ground in its Freudian approach to character", in keeping with the post-World War I rebellion against everything Victorian.[125] He had a "blunter intention" than presenting the genteel, sweet prince of 19th-century tradition, imbuing his character with virility and lust.[126]

Beginning in 1910, with the publication of "The Œdipus-Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery: A Study in Motive"[127] Ernest Jones—a psychoanalyst and Freud's biographer—developed Freud's ideas into a series of essays that culminated in his book Hamlet and Oedipus (1949). Influenced by Jones's psychoanalytic approach, several productions have portrayed the "closet scene", where Hamlet confronts his mother in her private quarters, in a sexual light.[128] In this reading, Hamlet is disgusted by his mother's "incestuous" relationship with Claudius while simultaneously fearful of killing him, as this would clear Hamlet's path to his mother's bed. Ophelia's madness after her father's death may also be read through the Freudian lens: as a reaction to the death of her hoped-for lover, her father. Ophelia is overwhelmed by having her unfulfilled love for him so abruptly terminated and drifts into the oblivion of insanity.[129][130] In 1937, Tyrone Guthrie directed Laurence Olivier in a Jones-inspired Hamlet at The Old Vic.[131] Olivier later used some of these same ideas in his 1948 film version of the play.

In the Bloom's Shakespeare Through the Ages volume on Hamlet, editors Bloom and Foster express a conviction that the intentions of Shakespeare in portraying the character of Hamlet in the play exceeded the capacity of the Freudian Oedipus complex to completely encompass the extent of characteristics depicted in Hamlet throughout the tragedy: "For once, Freud regressed in attempting to fasten the Oedipus Complex upon Hamlet: it will not stick, and merely showed that Freud did better than T.S. Eliot, who preferred Coriolanus to Hamlet, or so he said. Who can believe Eliot, when he exposes his own Hamlet Complex by declaring the play to be an aesthetic failure?"[132] The book also notes James Joyce's interpretation, stating that he "did far better in the Library Scene of Ulysses, where Stephen marvellously credits Shakespeare, in this play, with universal fatherhood while accurately implying that Hamlet is fatherless, thus opening a pragmatic gap between Shakespeare and Hamlet."[132]

Joshua Rothman has written in The New Yorker that "we tell the story wrong when we say that Freud used the idea of the Oedipus complex to understand Hamlet". Rothman suggests that "it was the other way around: Hamlet helped Freud understand, and perhaps even invent, psychoanalysis". He concludes, "The Oedipus complex is a misnomer. It should be called the 'Hamlet complex'."[133]

Jacques Lacan
In the 1950s, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan analyzed Hamlet to illustrate some of his concepts. His structuralist theories about Hamlet were first presented in a series of seminars given in Paris and later published in "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet". Lacan postulated that the human psyche is determined by structures of language and that the linguistic structures of Hamlet shed light on human desire.[134] His point of departure is Freud's Oedipal theories, and the central theme of mourning that runs through Hamlet.[135] In Lacan's analysis, Hamlet unconsciously assumes the role of phallus—the cause of his inaction—and is increasingly distanced from reality "by mourning, fantasy, narcissism and psychosis", which create holes (or lack) in the real, imaginary, and symbolic aspects of his psyche.[134] Lacan's theories influenced some subsequent literary criticism of Hamlet because of his alternative vision of the play and his use of semantics to explore the play's psychological landscape.[134]

Feminist

Ophelia is distracted by grief.[136] Feminist critics have explored her descent into madness (artist: Henrietta Rae 1890).
In the 20th century, feminist critics opened up new approaches to Gertrude and Ophelia. New historicist and cultural materialist critics examined the play in its historical context, attempting to piece together its original cultural environment.[137] They focused on the gender system of early modern England, pointing to the common trinity of maid, wife, or widow, with whores outside of that stereotype. In this analysis, the essence of Hamlet is the central character's changed perception of his mother as a whore because of her failure to remain faithful to Old Hamlet. In consequence, Hamlet loses his faith in all women, treating Ophelia as if she too were a whore and dishonest with Hamlet. Ophelia, by some critics, can be seen as honest and fair; however, it is virtually impossible to link these two traits, since 'fairness' is an outward trait, while 'honesty' is an inward trait.[138]


Hamlet tries to show his mother Gertrude his father's ghost (artist: Nicolai A. Abildgaard, c. 1778).
Carolyn Heilbrun's 1957 essay "The Character of Hamlet's Mother" defends Gertrude, arguing that the text never hints that Gertrude knew of Claudius poisoning King Hamlet. This analysis has been praised by many feminist critics, combating what is, by Heilbrun's argument, centuries' worth of misinterpretation. By this account, Gertrude's worst crime is of pragmatically marrying her brother-in-law in order to avoid a power vacuum. This is borne out by the fact that King Hamlet's ghost tells Hamlet to leave Gertrude out of Hamlet's revenge, to leave her to heaven, an arbitrary mercy to grant to a conspirator to murder.[139][140][141]

Ophelia has also been defended by feminist critics, most notably Elaine Showalter.[142] Ophelia is surrounded by powerful men: her father, brother, and Hamlet. All three disappear: Laertes leaves, Hamlet abandons her, and Polonius dies. Conventional theories had argued that without these three powerful men making decisions for her, Ophelia is driven into madness.[143] Feminist theorists argue that she goes mad with guilt because, when Hamlet kills her father, he has fulfilled her sexual desire to have Hamlet kill her father so they can be together. Showalter points out that Ophelia has become the symbol of the distraught and hysterical woman in modern culture.[144]

Influence
See also: Literary influence of Hamlet
Hamlet is one of the most quoted works in the English language, and is often included on lists of the world's greatest literature.[d] As such, it reverberates through the writing of later centuries. Academic Laurie Osborne identifies the direct influence of Hamlet in numerous modern narratives, and divides them into four main categories: fictional accounts of the play's composition, simplifications of the story for young readers, stories expanding the role of one or more characters, and narratives featuring performances of the play.[146]


Actors before Hamlet by Władysław Czachórski (1875), National Museum in Warsaw
English poet John Milton was an early admirer of Shakespeare and took evident inspiration from his work. As John Kerrigan discusses, Milton originally considered writing his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) as a tragedy.[147] While Milton did not ultimately go that route, the poem still shows distinct echoes of Shakespearean revenge tragedy, and of Hamlet in particular. As scholar Christopher N. Warren argues, Paradise Lost's Satan "undergoes a transformation in the poem from a Hamlet-like avenger into a Claudius-like usurper," a plot device that supports Milton's larger Republican internationalist project.[148] The poem also reworks theatrical language from Hamlet, especially around the idea of "putting on" certain dispositions, as when Hamlet puts on "an antic disposition," similarly to the Son in Paradise Lost who "can put on / [God's] terrors."[149]

Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, published about 1749, describes a visit to Hamlet by Tom Jones and Mr Partridge, with similarities to the "play within a play".[150] In contrast, Goethe's Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, written between 1776 and 1796, not only has a production of Hamlet at its core but also creates parallels between the ghost and Wilhelm Meister's dead father.[150] In the early 1850s, in Pierre, Herman Melville focuses on a Hamlet-like character's long development as a writer.[150] Ten years later, Dickens's Great Expectations contains many Hamlet-like plot elements: it is driven by revenge-motivated actions, contains ghost-like characters (Abel Magwitch and Miss Havisham), and focuses on the hero's guilt.[150] Academic Alexander Welsh notes that Great Expectations is an "autobiographical novel" and "anticipates psychoanalytic readings of Hamlet itself".[151] About the same time, George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss was published, introducing Maggie Tulliver "who is explicitly compared with Hamlet"[152] though "with a reputation for sanity".[153]

L. Frank Baum's first published short story was "They Played a New Hamlet" (1895). When Baum had been touring New York State in the title role, the actor playing the ghost fell through the floorboards, and the rural audience thought it was part of the show and demanded that the actor repeat the fall, because they thought it was funny. Baum would later recount the actual story in an article, but the short story is told from the point of view of the actor playing the ghost.

In the 1920s, James Joyce managed "a more upbeat version" of Hamlet—stripped of obsession and revenge—in Ulysses, though its main parallels are with Homer's Odyssey.[150] In the 1990s, two novelists were explicitly influenced by Hamlet. In Angela Carter's Wise Children, To be or not to be is reworked as a song and dance routine, and Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince has Oedipal themes and murder intertwined with a love affair between a Hamlet-obsessed writer, Bradley Pearson, and the daughter of his rival.[152] In the late 20th century, David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest draws heavily from Hamlet and takes its title from the play's text; Wallace incorporates references to the gravedigger scene, the marriage of the main character's mother to his uncle, and the re-appearance of the main character's father as a ghost.

Topic: Themes in The Great Gatsby  

Description: Themes in The Great Gatsby include decayed social and moral values, greed, and empty pursuit of pleasure, rampant materialism, decline of the American Dream, class disparity, and inequality. An often overlooked theme is inconsiderate bullies who are so used to money’s ability to ease their minds that they never worry about hurting others. Ask yourself: Where do you see these themes in the Great Gatsby?

Topic: Historical Context in The Great Gatsby

Description: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American writer, whose works illustrate the Jazz Age. The Great Gatsby reflects the era’s post-war economic boom and the accompanying moral decline.

Topic: Symbolism in The Great Gatsby 

Description: Symbols in the Great Gatsby include the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, the Valley of Ashes, and the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. These symbols enhance the novel's exploration of themes such as the American Dream and social decay.

Topic: Potential Reading Challenges with The Great Gatsby
  
Description: The first-person narrative and Nick Carraway's unreliability as a narrator may challenge readers' understanding of the true events and characters' motivations.

Topic: Controversies in The Great Gatsby  

Description: The novel has been both praised and criticized for its portrayal of the American Dream and its depiction of wealth and class disparity.

Topic: Genre of The Great Gatsby 
 
Description: Novel

Topic: Publish Date of The Great Gatsby   

Description: 1925

Topic: Setting (location) of The Great Gatsby: 
 
Description: New York

Topic: Setting (time period) of The Great Gatsby  

Description: 1922

Topic: Topic: Summary in The Great Gatsby  

Description: Set in the Roaring Twenties, "The Great Gatsby" tells the story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for Daisy Buchanan, exploring themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, and excess.

Topic: Similar Books to The Great Gatsby
  
Description: "Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies"

Topic: Themes of The Crucible

Description: Themes in The Crucible include authority and dissent, the power of hysteria, the danger of ideology, the conflict between individual integrity and social conformity, and the impact of guilt.

Topic: Historical Context of The Crucible

Description: Based on historical people and real events, Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible during the McCarthy era, drawing parallels between the Salem witch trials and the contemporary "witch hunts" of suspected communists.

Topic: Symbolism of The Crucible

Description: "The forest that surrounds the setting of Salem symbolizes the unknown, fear, and the potential for evil. The witch trials symbolize the destructive power of socially sanctioned violence."

Topic: Potential Reading Challenges of The Crucible

Description: Understanding the Salem witch trials and how they relate to the McCarthy hearings may present challenges to readers unfamiliar with these historical events.

Topic: Controversies of The Crucible

  Description: Miller wrote the play as an allegory for McCarthyism, criticizing the paranoia and injustice of the Red Scare, which was controversial at the time of its publication.

Topic: Genre of The Crucible

Description: Play

Topic: Publish Date of The Crucible 

Description: 1953

Topic: Setting (location) of The Crucible

Description: Massachusetts

Topic: Setting (time period) of The Crucible

Description: 1692

Topic: Summary of The Crucible

Description: Set during the Salem witch trials, "The Crucible" explores the mass hysteria and social manipulation that led to the accusation and execution of alleged witches in 17th century Salem.

Topic: Similar Books to The Crucible

Description: "The Scarlet Letter, Fahrenheit 451, The Children’s Hour, Twelve Angry Men"

Topic: Themes of Fahrenheit 451
 
Description: Fahrenheit 451 explores the dangers of censorship, the loss of individual thought, and the consequences of a society obsessed with superficial entertainment.

Topic: Historical Context of Fahrenheit 451 

Description: Bradbury wrote this novel in response to the era of McCarthyism and the growing fears of censorship and conformity in the 1950s.

Topic: Symbolism of Fahrenheit 451 
  
Description: Symbols throughout Fahrenheit 451 include blood, representing a human being's primal nature, and fire, symbolizing destruction but also potential for a new beginning.

Topic: Potential Reading Challenges of Fahrenheit 451 

Description: The futuristic world and its oppressive society may be difficult for some readers to grasp, especially the concept of book burning as a form of censorship.

Topic: Controversies of Fahrenheit 451
 
Description: The book explores themes of censorship and the suppression of dissenting ideas, which were controversial during the time of its publication.

Topic: Genre of Fahrenheit 451  

Description: Novel

Topic: Publish Date of Fahrenheit 451 

Description: 1953

Topic: Setting (location) of Fahrenheit 451  

Description: Dystopian America

Topic: Setting (time period) of Fahrenheit 451 

Description: Future

Topic: Summary of Fahrenheit 451  

Description: In a dystopian future where books are banned and "firemen" burn any that are found, one fireman begins to question society's anti-book stance and undergoes a transformation.

Topic: Similar Book to Fahrenheit 451   

Description: "Lord of the Flies, 1984, Animal Farm, The Hunger Games"

Topic: Themes of Of Mice and Men  

Description: Themes in Of Mice and Men include loneliness, the struggle for personal independence, and the American Dream's unattainability for marginalized individuals.

Topic: Historical Context of Of Mice and Men 

Description: Steinbeck sets Of Mice and Men against the backdrop of the Great Depression, highlighting the economic hardships and social issues of the time.

Topic: Symbolism of Of Mice and Men  

Description: George and Lennie’s Farm represents an ideal of independence and self-reliance. Lennie's puppy symbolizes innocence and the fragility of dreams.

Topic: Potential Reading Challenges of Of Mice and Men 

Description: Understanding the Great Depression and its impact on American society is essential for fully grasping the novel's themes.

Topic: Controversies of Of Mice and Men 

Description: Keep in mind that the novel contains racial slurs and controversial depictions of race and disability.

Topic: Genre of Of Mice and Men  

Description: Novel

Topic: Publish Date of Of Mice and Men 

Description: 1937

Topic: Setting (location) of Of Mice and Men
  
Description: California

Topic: Setting (time period) of Of Mice and Men 
 
Description: 1930

Topic: Summary of Of Mice and Men
 
Description: In Depression-era California, two displaced ranch workers, George and Lennie, strive to make a life for themselves and pursue their dream of owning a piece of land, facing challenges along the way.

Topic: Similar Books of Of Mice and Men 

Description: "The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies"

Topic: Themes of To Kill a Mockingbird
 
Description: Themes in To Kill a Mockingbird include good vs. evil, the importance of moral education, and the existence of social inequality.

Topic: Historical Context of To Kill a Mockingbird 

Description: Harper Lee, known as Nelle, was born in the Alabama town where the novel is set. She drew from her own experiences and observations of racial injustice.

Topic: Symbolism of To Kill a Mockingbird   

Description: Mockingbirds represent innocence, and by killing a mockingbird, one destroys innocence. The rabid dog symbolizes the spread of racism.

Topic: Potential Reading Challenges of To Kill a Mockingbird  

Description: The novel's exploration of racism and social justice may be difficult for some readers to confront, especially younger audiences.

Topic: Controversies of To Kill a Mockingbird 

Description: The novel addresses racism and injustice in the American South, sparking discussions and sometimes controversy regarding its portrayal of race relations.

Topic: Genre of To Kill a Mockingbird  

Description: Novel

Topic: Publish Date of To Kill a Mockingbird 

Description: 1960

Topic: Setting (location) of To Kill a Mockingbird  

Description: Alabama

Topic: Setting (time period) of To Kill a Mockingbird  
 
Description: 1933

Topic: Summary of To Kill a Mockingbird 
 
Description: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee centers on Scout Finch, her brother Jem, and their father Atticus, who stands against racial injustice in their Alabama town during the 1930s.

Topic: Similar Books of To Kill a Mockingbird 

Description: "The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm"

Topic: Themes of Romeo and Juliet

Description: Themes in Romeo and Juliet include love and destiny, the power of fate, the individual vs. society, the inevitability of conflict, and the fleeting nature of time.

Topic: Historical Context of Romeo and Juliet
 
Description: William Shakespeare was an English playwright, and his works, including Romeo and Juliet, were influenced by the cultural and social dynamics of the Elizabethan era.

Topic: Symbolism  of Romeo and Juliet

Description: Symbolism in Romeo and Juliet can be found in light and darkness, poison, and dreams. These symbols underscore the play's themes of love, conflict, and fate.

Topic: Potential Reading Challenges of Romeo and Juliet

Description: Similar to "Hamlet," the language is challenging due to the use of Early Modern English, which may require readers to use footnotes or annotations.

Topic: Controversies of Romeo and Juliet 

Description: The play's depiction of teenage sexuality and its tragic ending have sparked debates about its appropriateness for young audiences.

Topic: Genre of Romeo and Juliet 

Description: Play

Topic: Publish Date of Romeo and Juliet
 
Description: 1608

Topic: Setting (location) of Romeo and Juliet
 
Description: Italy

Topic: Setting (time period) of Romeo and Juliet
 
Description: 1590

Topic: Summary of Romeo and Juliet 
 
Description: "Romeo and Juliet" is a tragic love story set in Verona, Italy, where two young lovers, Romeo and Juliet, are caught between their feuding families, leading to their untimely deaths.

Topic: Similar Books of Romeo and Julie
t 
Description: "Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, The Fault in Our Stars, Twilight"



Topic: Themes of Catcher in the Rye 

Description: Themes in The Catcher in the Rye include lack of authenticity in the adult world, alienation, the challenges of growing up, and the protection of innocence.

Topic: Historical Context of Catcher in the Rye
   
Description: The Catcher in the Rye was published at a time when America was experiencing post-war changes, influencing its themes of adolescent rebellion and societal expectations.

Topic: Symbolism of Catcher in the Rye
  
Description: The title of “Catcher in the Rye” is a symbol for Holden's desire to protect children from losing their innocence. The red hunting hat represents Holden's uniqueness and individuality.

Topic: Potential Reading Challenges of Catcher in the Rye
   
Description: The novel uses colloquial language and 1950s slang, which might be unfamiliar to contemporary readers.

Topic: Controversies of Catcher in the Rye
 
Description: Over the years, the book has faced numerous attempts to ban it due to its language, sexual content, and rebellious protagonist.

Topic: Genre of Catcher in the Rye
  
Description: Novel

Topic: Publish Date of Catcher in the Rye
 
Description: 1951

Topic: Setting (location) of Catcher in the Rye
   
Description: New York

Topic: Setting (time period) of Catcher in the Rye
   
Description: 1949

Topic: Summary of Catcher in the Rye 
 
Description: "The Catcher in the Rye" follows the story of Holden Caulfield, a teenager who has been expelled from school and spends a few days in New York City grappling with his own mental health and distaste for adult society.

Topic: Similar Books of Catcher in the Rye 
 
Description: "The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Of Mice and Men, A Separate Peace"

Topic: Themes of Pride and Prejudice

Description: The themes present in Pride and Prejudice are love and marriage, class, reputation, and the contrast between appearance and reality.

Topic: Historical Context of Pride and Prejudice

Description: Since its immediate success in 1813, Pride and Prejudice has remained a popular and beloved novel, offering a critique of the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century.

Topic: Symbolism of Pride and Prejudice

Description: Pemberley, Darcy's estate, is a key symbol in Pride and Prejudice, representing not just wealth but also character and integrity.

Topic: Potential Reading Challenges of Pride and Prejudice

Description: The 19th-century English can be challenging, with its long sentences and formal dialogue, which may require readers to adjust to its style.

Topic: Controversies of Pride and Prejudice
 
Description: Some critics argue that the novel perpetuates class distinctions and traditional gender roles.

Topic: Genre of Pride and Prejudice
 
Description: Novel

Topic: Publish Date of Pride and Prejudice 

Description: 1813

Topic: Setting (location) of Pride and Prejudice
 
Description: England

Topic: Setting (time period) of Pride and Prejudice
 
Description: 1795

Topic: Summary of Pride and Prejudice

Description: "Pride and Prejudice" centers on Elizabeth Bennet, a spirited young woman who navigates issues of manners, upbringing, and marriage in the landed gentry of early 19th-century England.

Topic: Similar Books of Pride and Prejudice

Description: "Sense and Sensibility, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Emma"

Topic: Themes of Lord of the Flies 

Description: Lord of the Flies delves into how the veneer of civilization can quickly erode under the pressures of survival, leading to the emergence of mankind's inherent savagery.

Topic: Historical Context of Lord of the Flies

Description: William Golding's experiences working with unruly boys as a teacher and his service in World War II influenced his grim view of human nature in "Lord of the Flies."

Topic: Symbolism of Lord of the Flies

Description: The conch shell represents rules and civilization, while the "beast" symbolizes the primal fear within humans. The signal fire represents hope and connection to civilization.

Topic: Potential Reading Challenges of Lord of the Flies 

Description: The novel is rich in symbolism, and students may struggle with its dark themes and the violent behavior of the characters.

Topic: Controversies of Lord of the Flies

Description: The book has been criticized for its portrayal of the dark aspects of human nature and the extreme behaviors of the boys stranded on the island.

Topic: Genre of Lord of the Flies 

Description: Novel

Topic: Publish Date of Lord of the Flies

Description: 1954

Topic: Setting (location) of Lord of the Flies 

Description: Deserted Island

Topic: Setting (time period) of Lord of the Flies

Description: 1950

Topic: Summary of Lord of the Flies

Description: "Lord of the Flies" tells the story of a group of British boys stranded on a deserted island who attempt to govern themselves with disastrous results, highlighting the inherent evil within humanity.

Topic: Similar Books of Lord of the Flies

Description: "The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm"

Topic: Themes of Hamlet

Description: In Hamlet, the theme of death pervades the play, explored through murder, suicide, and the afterlife. Other themes include madness, betrayal, and revenge.

Topic: Historical Context of Hamlet

Description: Among Shakespeare's plays, "Hamlet" is considered one of the most powerful and influential tragedies in English literature, reflecting the political and social anxieties of Elizabethan England.

Topic: Symbolism of Hamlet

Description: In Hamlet, symbolism such as Yorick’s skull and Ophelia’s flowers are pivotal in exploring themes of mortality and madness.

Topic: Potential Reading Challenges of Hamlet

Description: In Hamlet, as in all of Shakespeare's writing, the use of Early Modern English can be a significant barrier to understanding for modern readers.

Topic: Controversies of Hamlet

Description: Throughout history, the play has been seen as controversial for its intense exploration of themes such as revenge, incest, and madness.

Topic: Genre of Hamlet

Description: Play

Topic: Publish Date of Hamlet

Description: 1601

Topic: Setting (location) of Hamlet

Description: Denmark

Topic: Setting (time period) of Hamlet

Description: 1300

Topic: Summary of Hamlet 

Description: "Hamlet" is a tragedy that follows Prince Hamlet as he seeks revenge against his uncle, who has murdered Hamlet's father, taken the throne, and married Hamlet's mother.

Topic: Similar Books of Hamlet

Description: "Macbeth, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, King Lear, Othello"

Topic: Reading Level
Description: Title, Grade Level
The Great Gatsby, 12th
The Crucible, 9th
Fahrenheit 455, 10th
Of Mice and Men, 9th
To Kill a Mockingbird, 9th
Romeo and Juliet, 9th
The Catcher in the Rye, 11th
Pride and Prejudice, 12th
Lord of the Flies, 10th
Hamlet, 11th