This document provides biographical information on several female authors from early American history through the present. It discusses how women writers traditionally focused on moral instruction and documenting culture but also brought awareness to social issues. The document profiles authors such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Glaspell, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Justin Torres, Maia Kobabe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Alice Walker. It provides context on their works and literary styles and how they portrayed women and addressed issues of gender, race, and sexuality. The document also discusses the genre of creative nonfiction and debates the relationship between truth, facts, and creative works that

1. WEEK 2
AUTHORS
AND
READINGS
Keiser University
eCampus

2. Traditional Roles of Women
Writers
As explained in this week’s American Dream lecture, women
were traditionally considered to be keepers of culture. Much
of the writing of early American women had to do with moral
instruction or documentation of culture for future
generations.
As you also learned in this week’s American Dream lecture,
women also wrote to bring awareness of other social issues.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) wrote about themes of
inequality and the traditional gender role of women.
“The Yellow Wall-paper” is a story of a woman’s struggles with
post-partum depression, women’s role in society and
marriage, and the expectation that women needed to rely on
men to know what was best for them. Women had very little
authority to make decisions for themselves, and this story
shows what effects this lack of autonomy has on women.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

3. Kate Chopin
Other writers portrayed strong women in their work. Kate Chopin
(1850-1904) wrote about women who acted in ways that did not
adhere to societal norms.
In The Awakening, Chopin writes about a woman named Edna, who
moves out of her husband’s home and begins an adulterous affair. As
the title suggests, it is a story of self-discovery. However, the novella
was considered scandalous and was not well received in the 19th
century. Today, however, it is seen as a significant work of feminism
in American literature.
In her short stories “Désirée's Baby” and “The Story of an Hour,”
Chopin portrays women who seem to have achieved autonomy, only to
have this independence taken away, leading to tragic consequences.
As you read “Desiree’s Baby” this week, look for ways Désirée and the
other characters are limited by their gender and their racial identity.

4. Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), as you will learn in the
biography in your textbook, is widely considered to be one
of the greatest American poets, and her work continues to
influence writers today. The form and content of her poems
are vastly different from the “traditional” poets who write
before her.
Dickinson published very few of her own poems during her
lifetime; most were published after her death. She did not
actively seek to have her poems published, but she did
share them with family and friends, many of whom
encouraged her to publish.
She did begin to purposely group her poems and bind them
together. She called these collections fascicles, and these
groupings of poems were discovered after her death.

5. Dickinson is often thought of as a recluse or an “old maid.” While her
poetry includes themes of nature, spirituality and religion, and death, she
also wrote about love—not just the emotional element, but the physical
one as well.
As you read the assigned poem this week, think about they way in which
she portrays these ideas. Are they different? What symbols does she
use in the poem, and how do they relate to these themes? How might
this poem be seen from a feminist standpoint?
How might the ideas of the poem you’re reading this week result in
Dickinson being ostracized by her society?
Emily Dickinson

6. Elizabeth Cady
Stanton
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), as you learned in
this week’s American Dream lecture, was a leader in
the women’s suffrage movement in the United States.
She was well educated and studied law under her
father, who was an attorney and member of the US
House of Representatives. Her study of the law led her
to challenge the discriminatory laws in place.
In 1848, Cady had two important accomplishments:
she was instrumental in betting a bill passed in New
York to grant property rights to married women, and
she drafted the resolution that would be delivered at
the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New
York.

7. Susan Glaspell
Susan Glaspell (1876-1948), as you learned in the biography
printed in your textbook, had many talents. Her work tends to
reflect realism, a literary technique that focuses on the faithful
representation of reality (or verisimilitude). Realism tends to
portray members of the middle class.
Glaspell was well known in her day, but the canon of her works
(9 plays and more than 50 short stories) is not well known
today. She is best known today for her one-act play Trifles, which
is commonly seen as a statement about women’s equality. As in
many of Glaspell’s works, Trifles, which was written in 1916,
features women who push against boundaries. As you read the
play this week, think about ways in which all the women (even
Mrs. Wright, who never appears on stage in Glaspell’s original
script) face boundaries. How does each woman push against
them?

8. Audre Lorde
Women’s roles continued to evolve from keepers of culture to shapers of
culture. Women like Susan Glaspell wrote about women who did not have a
voice to stand up against violence.
In the decades that followed, women like Audre Lorde embraced their voices
and used them to speak out.
Audre Lorde (1934-1992),
described herself as “black,
lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.”
She used her poetry as a
platform to fight against racism,
sexism, and homophobia.
Lorde was concerned with the labels that are assigned to groups of people
and marginalization (to marginalize means to trivialize or disregard) that
results from those labels. How do you see these ideas reflected in the poem
we’re reading this week? How do you see them reflected in contemporary
society?

9. Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) worked in various state and
federal government positions until she relocated to
Maryland and became a writer in residence at Coppin
State College.
As the editors of your textbook explain, Clifton “allow[s]
us to hear the language of our daily lives as poetry and
to experience the poetry in our ordinary lives” (Levine
et al, 2017, Vol. 2 p. 1544). Her work often focuses on
strength through adversity.
How are these themes reflected in “homage to my
hips”?

10. Justin Torres
JUSTIN TORRES has published short fiction in The New Yorker,
Harper's, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, Glimmer Train,
Flaunt, and other publications, as well as non-fiction pieces in
publications like The Guardian and The Advocate. A graduate of the
Iowa Writers' Workshop, Justin's novel We the Animals has been
translated into fifteen languages and was recently adapted into a film.
It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for five
Independent Spirit Awards. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at
Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced
Study at Harvard, and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public
Library. The National Book Foundation named him one of the 2012's
5 under 35. He was the recipient of a grant from the National
Endowment of the Arts, a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United
States Artists, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. He lives in Los
Angeles, where he is an Assistant Professor of English at UCLA.
Taken from Torres’ website:
http://www.justin-torres.com/bio

11. Exclusion from the
American Dream
Maia Kobabe is a graduate of the first ever class in the MFA in Comics
program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Eir first full
length book, GENDER QUEER: A MEMOIR, came out from Lion Forge
Comics/Oni Press in May 2019. GENDER QUEER was a winner of an Alex
Award and Stonewall Book Award in 2020, and nominated for an Ignatz
Award and the Best Graphic Novels for Teens List from YALSA in 2019. It
recently received its fourth printing and its first foreign language translation
into Spanish. Maia's short comics have been published on The Nib and
included in the anthologies ALPHABET (2015), TABULA IDEM (2017), MINE!
(2018), GOTHIC TALES OF HAUNTED LOVE (2018), THE SECRET LOVES OF
GEEKS (2018), FASTER THAN LIGHT Y’ALL (2018), ADVANCED DEATH
SAVES (2019), HOW TO WAIT (2019), SHOUT OUT (2019), ROLLED AND
TOLD (2019), THEATER OF TERROR (2019) and BE GAY, DO COMICS
(2020). Before setting out to work freelance full-time, e worked for over ten
years in libraries. E has been self-publishing comics and zines since 2010,
and has attended over fifty comic conventions in that time. Eir work is
heavily influenced by fairy tales, homesickness, and the search for identity.
Taken from Kobabe’s website: https://redgoldsparkspress.com/about

12. Additional
authors for
this week
There are two additional
authors to learn about
this week to help you
select your topic for your
literary analysis essay.
They are important
American authors, and
you will need to know
about them for this
week’s quiz.

13. F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) is best
known for his novel The Great Gatsby,
which is often viewed as the finest
example of American modernism. He
is also the author of many short
stories, including “Babylon Revisited”
and “Winter Dreams.”
Fitzgerald’s writing chronicled the
1920s, which he called “The Jazz
Age.”

14. Alice Walker
The other writer to consider this week for
your literary analysis essay is Alice
Walker (b. 1944). Walker, the author of
The Color Purple and short stories such
as “Everyday Use,” was born in Eatonton,
Georgia, into a family of sharecroppers.
She was educated in the North but
returned to the South after college to
work in the civil rights movement. Her
work often focuses on the need for
strength.

15. Exclusion from the American Dream:
A Note about Creative Nonfiction
“Truth” with a capital T indicates complete adherence to actual facts. The lower-case “truth” indicates
an emotional truth where the writer may change some details, but the story conveys the emotions that
the writer wants to focus on while mostly adhering to facts. An example might be consolidating multiple
conversations between people and turning it into one conversation. The conversation still happened,
just not all at once.
Some writers, like Annie Dillard and David Sedaris, admit to fudging some details or embellishing
certain events to create a certain effect or establish a dramatic arc. There is a lot of controversy about
this; can such stories still be called nonfiction?
What do you think? Is it ever possible to tell the Truth?
We’ll be looking at some creative nonfiction this week in the
form of a graphic novel, and we’ll look at another in Week 4.
The term “creative nonfiction” is somewhat problematic. How
can nonfiction (truth) be creative? Shouldn’t nonfiction be
100% factual? Can it be 100% factual?
Let’s examine the issue of “Truth” (with a capital “T”) and
“truth.”