American Literature / Unit 16 AML 1542 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Matching Author to Character: The Method
The idea
The board asks you to pair a character with the writer who made him, and the postwar novelists supply the pairs most often confused. Fix five. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom belongs to John Updike, across five novels and four decades. Alexander Portnoy belongs to Philip Roth, talking at a silent analyst. Holden Caulfield belongs to J. D. Salinger, leaving the boarding school. Augie March belongs to Saul Bellow, the Chicago entrepreneur with the energetic voice. The unnamed narrator of Invisible Man belongs to Ralph Ellison, in a cellar lit by stolen electricity. The trap the board sets is Bigger Thomas, who belongs to Richard Wright and not to Ellison, because the two men are the period's two famous Black novelists and their books are ten years apart. Learn the pairs as pairs, and learn the one wrong pair the board likes to offer.
In practice
Five right pairs, and one wrong one.
Where people slip
Ellison wrote one novel and Wright wrote Native Son. Any option pairing Ellison with Bigger Thomas is the distractor.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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