Like a plough “black against the molten red” of the setting sun…
The year is 1918, and you cannot believe the coincidence. You have just finished devouring Willa Cather’s new novel My Ántonia, and you shake your head with wonder as you set the book down on your bedside table. Like Cather—and her narrator Jim Burden—you grew up in rural Nebraska in the 1880s and 1890s. The picture she paints of the prairie, the farm families, the townspeople, and the times strikes you as poignant and astonishingly well-observed. You are deep into your forties now and have had a few decades to reflect on the Nebraska of your youth. Reading My Ántonia leads you to recollect the era when folks like you settled the Great Plains and “closed” the frontier, as they say. Overcome with inspiration, you roll out of bed, shuffle over to your desk, and make out an envelope to your childhood best friend, the one now living in Chicago. Then you settle into your seat to write your friend a long letter about Cather’s new book. Tinged with nostalgia (“Optima dies… prima fugit,” Virgil wrote), you describe the rich characters and settings of the novel that remind you of your own experiences as a young person. You also tell your friend why My Ántonia is such a remarkable account of life on the prairie in the late nineteenth century.
To you, “as to most prosperous citizens of Zenith…”
The year is 1922, and you are eager to make your mark in this newspaper business. Your editor at the Apex Advocate-Times has assigned you, the newspaper’s freshly minted culture critic, to review Sinclair Lewis’s new novel Babbitt. As a resident of Apex (a mid-sized city much like the Zenith of the book) and as a budding literary taste-maker, you feel it is your duty to find insight into Lewis’s work. After all, you have met your share of George F. Babbitts motoring down Apex’s streets and slapping backs in Apex’s smoke-filled social clubs. The novel’s vividly detailed characters and scenes could be found here in affable Apex. You witnessed that transition from the reform-minded Progressive Era to the “normalcy” of these (admittedly rambunctious) Twenties here in all-American Apex. The social climbing, the materialistic desires, the pressure to conform have been the keys to a prosperous life here in agreeable Apex. Nestling into your desk on the newsroom floor, you click-clack away at your typewriter, banging out a review of Babbitt. You seek to explain what it is about this book that speaks to you as a modern, sophisticated reader. You try to convey why, even though Lewis’s satire zealously skewers middle-class striving, you cannot help but chuckle.
Guidelines:
Be creative. Try to inhabit your character and see the world—and your selected book—as they would have experienced it.
Draw only on lectures, discussions, and assigned readings from class. Do not consult outside sources. Do not plagiarize. Without exception, any act of plagiarism will result in a grade of F for the assignment.
Write at least 1000 words. Use 1-inch margins, a standard typeface, 12-point font, and double spacing. Consider giving your essay a title. Include a word count at the end of your essay. Do not include a title page, bibliography, or works-cited page. Be sure to proofread.
