American Iiterature study guide--Students competing in the American literature section of the tournament will complete a
100-question multiple choice test. They will have 50 minutes to complete this test. There
will be a tie-breaker discussion question that students may choose to answer.
The questions on the test will be based on works chosen from the following list.
“The World on the Turtle’s Back” –Iroquois Myth
“Song of the Sky Loom” –Tewa Song
“Hunting Song” –Navajo Song
“Coyote and the Buffalo” and “Fox and Coyote and Whale” –Okanogan Folk Tales
“The Man to Send Rain Clouds” –Leslie Marmon Silko
The Way to Rainy Mountain –N. Scott Momaday
La Relacion –Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca
Of Plymouth Plantation –William Bradford
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano –Olaudah Equiano
Blue Highways –William Least Heat-Moon
“My Sojourn in the Lands of My Ancestors” –Maya Angelou
“To My Dear and Loving Husband” and “Upon the Burning of Our House” –Anne Bradstreet
The Examination of Sarah Good –Salem Court Documents, 1692
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” –Jonathan Edwards
The Crucible –Arthur Miller
Speech in the Virginia Convention –Patrick Henry
The Declaration of Independence –Thomas Jefferson
“Letter to the Rev. Samson Occom” –Phillis Wheatley
“Letter to John Adams” –Abigail Adams
“What Is an American?” –Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur
“Lecture to a Missionary” –Red Jacket
Stride Toward Freedom –Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Necessary to Protect Ourselves” –Malcolm X
“I Am Joaquin/Yo Soy Joaquin” –Rodolfo Gonzales
“A Psalm of Life” –Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“The Devil and Tom Walker” –Washington Irving
Self-reliance –Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Civil Disobedience” and Walden – Henry David Thoreau
“I Hear America Singing,” “I Sit and Look Out,” Song of Myself, and “O Captain! My
Captain!” –Walt Whitman
“Ode to Walt Whitman” –Pablo Neruda
“Danse Russe” –William Carlos Williams
“anyone lived in a pretty how town” –E. E. Cummings
“Ending Poem” –Aurora Levins Morales and Rosario Morales
“Tia Chucha” –Luis J. Rodriguez
“Gary Keillor” –Garrison Keillor
“The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Raven,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher –Edgar
Allan Poe
Danse Macabre –Stephen King
“Spleen LXXXI” –Charles Baudelaire
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“Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” –Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Monody” –Herman Melville
“A Rose for Emily” –William Faulkner
“The Life You Save May Be Your Own” –Flannery O’Connor
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass –Frederick Douglass
“Stanzas on Freedom” –James Russell Lowell
“Free Labor” –Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” –Ambrose Bierce
“A Mystery of Heroism” –Stephen Crane
The Gettysburg Address –Abraham Lincoln
Coming of Age in Mississippi –Anne Moody
“Ballad of Birmingham” –Dudley Randall
“The Indians and the Hundred Cows”and “El Indito de las Cien Vacas” –Folk Tales retold by
Jose Griego Y Maestas
“High Horse’s Courting” –Black Elk
The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, and “The Notorious Jumping
Frog of Calaveras County” –Mark Twain
“A Wagner Matinee” –Willa Cather
“The Legend of Gregorio Cortez” –Americo Paredes
“This Is My Letter to the World,” “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers,” “Success Is Counted
Sweetest,” and “Much Madness Is Divinest Sense, “Letter to Thomas Wentworth
Higginson,” “My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close,” “After Great Pain, a Formal
Feeling Comes,” “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died,” and “Because I Could Not Stop for
Death” –Emily Dickinson
“The Yellow Wallpaper” –Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“The Story of an Hour” –Kate Chopin
“Seventeen Syllables” –Hisaye Yamamoto
“Adoloscense---III” –Rita Dove
“I Stand Here Ironing” –Tillie Olsen
“Chicago” –Carl Sandburg
“Lucinda Matlock” –Edgar Lee Masters
“Richard Cory” and “Miniver Cheevy” –Edwin Arlington Robinson
“We Wear the Mask” and “Sympathy” –Paul Laurence Dunbar
“Winter Dreams” –F. Scott Fitzgerald
“America and I” –Anzia Yezierska
“In the American Society” –Gish Jen
“Defining the Grateful Gesture” –Yvonne Sapia
“Refugee Ship” –Lorna Dee Cervantes
“I, Too,” “Harlem,” “The Weary Blues,” and “When the Negro Was in Vogue”
–Langston Hughes
“My City” –James Weldon Johnson
“Any Human to Another” –Countee Cullen
“If We Must Die” –Claude McKay
“A Black Man Talks of Reaping” –Arna Bontemps
“How It Feels to Be Colored Me” –Zora Neale Hurston
“My Dungeon Shook” –James Baldwin
“Life for My Child Is Simple” and “Primer for Blacks” –Gwendolyn Brooks
“Thoughts on the African-American Novel” –Toni Morrison
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“Acquainted with the Night,” “Mending Wall,” “The Death of a Hired Man,” and
“Out, Out---” –Robert Frost
“The End of Something” –Ernest Hemingway
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” –T.S. Eliot
“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” –Katherine Anne Porter
“The Man Who Was Almost a Man” –Richard Wright
“Armistice” –Bernard Malamud
“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” –Randall Jarrell
“Why Soldiers Won’t Talk” –John Steinbeck
“Letter from Paradise, 21°19’ N., 157° 52’ W.” –Joan Didion
“In Response to Executive Order 9066” –Dwight Okita
“Ambush” –Tim O’Brien
“Camouflaging the Chimera” –Yuseff Komunyakaa
“Deciding” –Wendy Wilder Larsen and Tran Thi Nga
“At the Justice Department, November 15, 1969” –Denise Levertov
“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” –Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Wandering” –Lanford Wilson
“The Writer in the Family” –E. L. Doctorow
“Teenage Wasteland” –Anne Tyler
“Separating” –John Updike
“Mexicans Begin Jogging” –Gary Soto
“Legal Alien” –Pat Mora
“Hostage” –Joyce Carol Oates
“Mother Tongue” –Amy Tan
“The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica” –Judith Ortiz Cofer
“Straw into Gold: The Metamorphosis of the Everyday” –Sandra Cisneros
“A Worn Path” –Eudora Welty
The Scarlet Letter –Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn –Mark Twain
Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man –Fannie Flagg
“Barn Burning,” “Dry September,” and As I Lay Dying –William Faulkner
“The Black Cat,” “William Wilson,” and “The Tell-tale Heart” –Edgar Allan Poe
“Good Country People” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” –Flannery O’Connor
“Why I Live at the P.O.” –Eudora Welty
“Hills like White Elephants” and The Sun Also Rises –Ernest Hemingway
“At the ‘Cadian Ball,” “The Storm,” “Desiree’s Baby,” and The Awakening –Kate Chopin
“Everyday Use” –Alice Walker
“Shiloh” –Bobbie Ann Mason
“The Lottery” –Shirley Jackson
“The Outsider” –H. P. Lovecraft
The Great Gatsby –F. Scott Fitzgerald
Of Mice and Men –John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird –Harper Lee
“A Streetcar Named Desire” –Tennessee Williams
A Raisin in the Sun –Lorraine Hansberry
“Sweat” and Their Eyes Were Watching God –Zora Neale Hurston
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter –Carson McCullers
The Call of the Wild –Jack London
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“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “The Road Not Taken” –Robert Frost