the great Gatsby, Fitzgerald presents us to see Jay Gatsby as a superior character, Nick Carroway one of the characters in the book, is the narrators through out, telling the story of how Jay Gatsby tries to reach his disillusioned goal. Gatsby is living the America dream where happiness is acquired...

Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson's mystery-suspense novel, provides an immaculate interpretation of a small American coastal island's trial to conquer and expel the ongoing dogmatic narrow-mindedness synonymous with its inhabitants. A novel of love and destruction, Snow Falling on...

Gay Marriages - Why is Society Afraid? You meet someone special and start to form a connection. Soon the sharing of your hopes, joys, and fears begin. Soon after this friendship develops into love, and you realize that you want to spend the rest of your life with this person. They are not only y...

Supreme Court Judge, Oliver Wendell Holmes, once said, "In my thirty years of legal experience, I have never witnessed money helping a victim, although I have seen it pretending to help them." In F. Scott Fitzgerald's American masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, the main character, Jay Gatsby attempt...

Walt Whitman was looked upon as the forerunner of 20th Century poetry, praising democracy, and becoming a proclaimed poet of American democracy. He was known as the "Son of Long Island," and he loved his country and everything about it. (Current, Williams, Freidel- page 292-293). Whit...

Suicide refers to intentional self-inflicted acts that end in death. Derived from the Latin suicidium, which combines the pronoun for "self" and the verb for "to kill", the word suicide was first used in 1651, but self-initiated deaths have occurred throughout history. History tells us many stor...

Teen Suicide in the US "Suicide is the third leading cause of deaths among people 15 to 24..." (16) Although lately the rate of suicide is beginning to level off, it has tripled since the 1950's. The suicide rate varies with gender, race, sexuality, and environment. Males com...

In The Accidental Asian by Eric Liu, Liu is faced with the complexity of his heritage. Liu is a second-generation Chinese American. Throughout Liu's essays he speaks of the disadvantages of being an Asian American and how in his life he dealt with it. Liu also speaks of his family and their value...

Nothing has done more to perpetuate liberal myths about the Plains Indians than Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves, the beautifully done and ever politically correct film that was the Academy Awards 1991 "Best Picture". The historical inaccuracies of this film were so gross as to be amusing. (My wif...

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."1 Therefore, it makes sense that if mortals cannot bear the darkness, they [should not] not go there. If man dislikes "black night and yawning chasms,"2 then...

The Reality of Horse Slaughter From the childhood fascination of "Black Beauty" to the romantic appeal of "The Horse Whisperer", horses are widely regarded as symbols of beauty and pride. Unbeknownst to many Americans however, "Each year, more than 60,000 horses are slaugh...

Dreamers in the genies lamp For the past four years the greatest casualty has been the English language. As human beings it is our will to survive that make us thrive for information, communication is essential for our sense of safety, and thus essential for our lives to remain stable. For many o...

The 1960's was a special decade, not just emotionally but musically as well as politically. The early 1960's there was a slow beginning of protest songs but the escalating war in Vietnam made more musicians write songs with a message. It was a time of war, sex, drugs, rock and roll and m...

Brave New World opens in a technically advanced future world. In the beginning, we see the Director of World Hatcheries lead the new hatchery students on a tour of a Conditioning Center in London where babies are produced in bottles and pre-sorted to determine which class level they will be born in...

They fell in love when they were twenty years old. Kris and Michael were a perfect match for each other. Although their relatives did not like the relationship, Kris and Michael bought a house together. Fifty years after they fell in love, Michael suddenly passed away. In a normal situation, Kris wo...

The life of Phillip Morin Freneau. The hardships that he had to go through throughout his life. The type of essays and poetry he wrote. Where he began the interest of public writing and how he got that interest. Freneau was born in 1752, as a child Freneau had no idea that he was going to be a p...

Bruce Springsteen writes a majority of his songs about prolific times in the great American past, which most Americans have vowed to forget. He stresses the importance of the mindset we must have as Americans, throughout harsh and painful times we inevitably endure. Not many people find comfort in r...

Literature is sometimes written around important times in history. Klaus Mann, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison all write novels around historic times. Mann wrote Mephisto, which dealt with the Nazi regime. Wright wrote about America in the 1930's, in regards to the desperate state of Black...

"Dreams are the touchstones of our characters." This quote from Thoreau basically states that the dreams of a character define his or her life, whether it be their characteristics or their lifestyle. This statement is prevalent in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald's ...

In early American society the people were mostly agrarian and expected a certain amount of Voltairean tolerance in there religion, however time would reveal a less than tolerant view of the environment. Beginning 1492 when Columbus in the name of Spain made his way to the East Indies an immediate i...

Their homeland has the second largest population in the world, yet in America they form one of our smallest minorities. Americans were influenced by their beliefs long before the first immigrants arrived, and an important interchange of ideas has continued to the present day. Although many came to ...

Their homeland has the second largest population in the world, yet in America they form one of our smallest minorities. Americans were influenced by their beliefs long before the first immigrants arrived, and an important interchange of ideas has continued to the present day. Although many came t...

Latin Jazz Ensemble What do you know about Latin jazz? Latin jazz is the general term given to music that combines rhythms from African and Latin American countries with jazz harmonies from the United States. The two main categories of Latin Jazz are Brazilian, which included bossa nova and samb...