American Dream Literature Reviews Samples For Students

American literature knows many authors who had a tragic destiny, who quit early and did not implement what their gift engaged for. Amid an American life, these authors were perishing from loneliness and alcoholism. They stayed with no help and without a word of participation, as if they were in an abandoned desert. Every event like this repeatedly calls the attention of intellectual people all over the world to vice of American capitalistic culture and American lifestyle, which is extremely indifferent to people’s destinies. In the period of time “amid two wars”, there was the most evident drama – the tragic ...

Family, Identity and the “American Dream” in Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller's 1949 play, Death of a Salesman tackles the issues of identity, family dynamics and the pursuit of the “American Dream” using the Loman family as a model to illustrate these concepts. The play starts with Willy Loman, a traveling salesman, returning from a botched business trip. Willy expresses disgust towards his oldest son, Biff, who has failed to do anything substantial with his life. Biff and his younger brother Happy take their father out to dinner where Biff has a flashback to the time he visited his father in Boston and discovered Willy was having an affair with a receptionist. He confronts his ...

The American dream is a set of values, ideals and freedoms. These values also include success achieved through determination and hard work. James Adams Truslow in 1931 defined the American dream as the effort to make people’s life better and richer giving them an opportunity to exploit their abilities and enjoy their achievements The American dream is rooted in the declaration of independence by Thomas Jefferson, which agitates that all men are equal. This essay will look at the theme of the American dream as was envisioned in the Declaration of Independence.
On July 1776, the second constitutional ...

I think this text is an incredible display of human anguish and desperation - I think it is a brilliant play because of the real and relatable emotions it elicits in its audience. The play itself evoked feelings of sadness, envy, and frustration in me during my reading - I felt bad for the characters in the work, as this family was constantly tortured by the difficulties of living life in America, as well as the difficulty of achieving the American Dream. I particularly identified with the character of Tom, who uses the movies and the fire escape as a means ...

The American Dream lured wave after wave of immigration, primarily from Europe, in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. This dream taught that if you came to America and worked hard enough, you would succeed. There was enough room, enough of a market, enough hope, and enough freedom for everyone who came to the United States to do well. This dream enticed so many people to come to the country from overseas that the government decided to put quotas in place to limit the number of immigrants from each country in the years before World ...

All American Sestina by Florence Cassen Myers

This remarkable poem is surely one of the finest which has ever been written to describe the American Dream and all its fallacies and controversies. First of all it manages to create a situation where the American Dream is constantly invoked and described as something which is full of ambiguities. In one of the passages, Myers describes a ‘six pack Bud’ in the sense that this epitomizes the obvious imbalances that there are with fantasy and reality.
Myers also has other interesting aspects in the poem which create a sense of archaic dominance and there are some rather negative views of ...

There was a slightly divisive view of how many authors in the 19th century viewed the West, and how it pertained to the American Dream. Mark Twain looks at the West with an innocent eye; he saw it as a vast frontier that was filled with boredom, but punctuated with moments of adventure; that is clear from his retellings as a boy of the steamboatmen who came through in a flash through his hometown. –“When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try ...

The national ethos of Americans everywhere is no better represented than by the ever-present, American Dream that has captivated a worldwide imagination since its inception along with the beginning of the Unites States’ existence as a country. For many years, the American Dream has described a world of opportunity in which people of varying cultures and backgrounds enjoy equality in their pursuit of richer, fuller lives. It was this dream that brought the first immigrants to America in the first place, and it was again this dream that gave them the necessary impetus to stay and to improve the conditions of their ...

The Grapes of Wrath is a novel written by John Steinbeck as he gives the story revolving around the family of Joad. The novel illustrates oppression and hardship that faced the migrants’ workers during the great depression. In depth it is a political tract that governed collectivist action on oppressing those looking for jobs. In the same sense, the speech that was delivered by Martin Luther King on the oppression of the black people has a lot of similarities as compared to the The Grapes of Wrath. Martin Luther speech covers the oppression nature of the blacks as well.
The Declaration's ...

Plot Summary

The Great Gatsby is a book that focuses and tries to give the events of a fictional town and characters. The plot is focused on Nick a former graduate scholar and a war veteran who is the narrator of the story that the novel aims at putting across. Nick takes up employment as a salesperson in the City of New York, where he settles and takes up residence in long island near the exclusive mansion of the rich mysterious jay Gatsby. Jay Gatsby is known in the town due to the exclusive and huge parties that he holds in his residence. During Nick’s ...

Question 1

In the poem, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by the renowned poet Randal Jarrell, the poet tells about an unnamed gunner serving in war for his nation. The poem is one of the works about war and its horror. The protagonist of the poem is a gunner serving in the war. He was forcefully made to come to war by the government, disturbing his satisfied life.
Three characteristics of the protagonist are discussed as follows. First of all, the protagonist is not much of a patriot. The protagonist is not in the war on his own will, or ...

Willy Loman and Amanda Wingfield are the main characters in to great American tragedies that both suffer from a tragic flaw. A tragic flaw is a misperception or a lack of insight due to one’s strengths. Both Willy and Amanda cannot see their worlds fully and understand those around them because of their own pride which blinds them. Amanda’s pride keeps her rooted in a past that she can never recreate for her daughter and results in her inability to see her children for who they really are. Willy’s pride in his work prevents him from truly seeing his sons ...

Tragedy is among the common productions of drama. This means that some dramas take the form of tragedy, which basically means that they portray the downfall of a protagonist. Tragedy occurs as a result of some error in judgment or any other fatal error, leading to major suffering, but also important insights gained by the leading character. The main purpose of such tragedy is to elicit some emotions, fear or sympathy, in the audience. “Oedipus the King” and “Death of a Salesman” are among the most intriguing tragedies that have been produced. This paper is an analysis and comparison of the two ...

Dishonesty in Relationships Dishonesty is one of the most challenging things that occur in relationship. It is so challenging that it brings out a sign of betrayal to the second party; this happens especially when the relationship is incorporates a man and woman who intend to marry in the near future or are already into marriage. Dishonesty and betrayal breaks relationships by cheating, lying, and manipulating. Relationships cannot build on lies. Neither can they survive without trust and respect. Ideally, morals are among the most important elements of life according to the themes of the American dream. Engagement is behaviour that ...

This essay aims at comparing and contrasting the theme of fantasy and wishful thinking as presented in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) and also in Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie (1945). Both playwrights have intensively used characters who resort into habits of escapism into fantasy and wishful thinking to free themselves from their miserable existence. The main sources of their predicaments are their consistent failures in achieving their dreams, little interaction and communication with family members coupled with personal insecurities. Due to these facts, they all have a common problem which is frustration and boredom. They resort ...

Difficulties ESL Students Face When They Come to America

English as a Second Language or ESL students, study in the United States to fulfill more of their dreams. As what have mentioned, there are difficulties and challenges that ESL students are experiencing in which they need to face along with their native speakers classmates.
Yasuko Kanno and Sheila Dermer Apple Baum (1995) claim that ESL students are having an issue of raising their concerns in the classroom as they have limited vocabulary or some students may have not the awareness that they have the same right to raise their concerns (Kanno & Baum, 1995). This kind of issue is ...

Hector St. John de Crevecœur, the author of Letters from an American Farmer, was born in Normandy, France in 1735; he lived and traveled throughout America from 1759 to 1780, when he returned to Europe (22). He and his wife spent the latter half of their time in America on a farm on Orange County, New York (22). Because of his travels and experience in America, he had an excellent idea about the many ways the immigrants to America from Europe were conducting life and business in contrast to what they had experienced before as poor, landless people across ...