Tag: Author

American Lit Resources at your Fingertips

Great public media resources at your fingertips.  West Virginia LearningMedia is free digital library with over 118 thousand pubic media resources from over 200 content providers.  Resources are suitable for pre-K through adults and are searchable by grade level, content area and type of resources. 

To provide a glimpse into one area we have provided links to several of the resources teachers use to help them bring American Literature alive.  There are over 1.8 million registered users on the LearningMedia platform.  Join those taking advantage of this resource to bring your classroom to life.

American Literature Resources

In which John Green reads Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and talks to you about it. You’ll learn about Zora Neale Hurston’s life, and we’ll also look at how the interpretations of the book have changed over time. Also, this book will give you a healthy appreciation for the rabies vaccine, and the terrible dilemmas you’ve avoided thanks to that modern development.

Credit Edward Steichen, 1879-1973
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This primary source set showcases five prominent American authors and includes examples of the different media that promoted, and sometimes significantly altered, their public images and literary works. Looking at these primary sources provides an opportunity to explore both the authors’ literary texts and the ways in which those works, and the authors themselves, were portrayed in the media at the time of their renown.

 

Meet F. Scott Fitzgerald’s iconic character Jay Gatsby in this video from the American Masters film Novel Reflections on the American Dream. Learn about the spectacle of Gatsby, the techniques the author uses to present Gatsby, and the role of perspective and narration in shaping a reader or viewer’s interpretation of a character or event.

Visit the American Masters Collection for additional resources on the American dream and other American writers.

Alice Walker shares stories from her childhood that highlight the strong female figures in her family, particularly her mother who stood her ground against the white landowner and insisted on an education for her children. These experiences inform her views on what it means to be a Southern black writer.

The Color Purple | American Masters: Alice Walker

This video from American Masters: Harper Lee: Hey, Boo highlights the social climate in the South when To Kill a Mockingbird was first published and a few years later, when the film premiered. The video highlights the reactions to the issues presented in the story. The account by Diane McWhorter, a classmate of Mary Badham (the actress who played Scout in the movie), is given special attention.

Character Study: Scout Finch

This video from American Masters: Salinger examines Salinger’s purpose for writing The Catcher in the Rye and how, by inhabiting his character, he was able to find a compelling authorial voice that allowed him to channel his critique of the adult world.

 
 

The Path to “The Catcher in the Rye”

May 31, 1946: Author Meredith Sue Willis Born in Clarksburg

Author Meredith Sue Willis was born in Clarksburg on May 31, 1946. She was raised in Shinnston, where both her parents were educators. After graduating from Shinnston High School, she attended Bucknell University for two years before dropping out to become a VISTA volunteer. She later earned undergraduate and graduate degrees and became an artist-in-residence in New York public schools and in New Jersey. She was also adjunct assistant professor of creative writing at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies.

Willis has authored four books on writing: Personal Fiction Writing, Blazing Pencils, Deep Revision, and Ten Strategies to Write Your Novel. All are used widely in classrooms.

She’s written three children’s books: The Secret Super Powers of Marco, Marco’s Monster, and Billie of Fish House Lane. Her adult fiction, which is mainly set in West Virginia, includes A Space Apart, Higher Ground, Only Great Changes, Quilt Pieces, In The Mountains of America, Trespassers, Oradell at Sea, Dwight’s House and Other Stories, The City Built of Starships, and Out of the Mountains.

Meredith Sue Willis lives in New Jersey with her husband.

Eastern Panhandle Author Shows Diversity in Coffee-Table Book Set

If you’re out-and-about West Virginia bookstores or gift shops this Christmas, you may come across a coffee-table book set titled, Panhandle Portraits: a Glimpse at the Diverse Residents of West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle.

The two-volume set features 77 portraits of people and groups in the 8 Eastern Panhandle counties – Berkeley, Grant, Hampshire, Hardy, Jefferson, Mineral, Morgan, and Pendleton.

Author & Photographer Katherine Cobb is originally from California, but 25 years ago, she followed a friend out to West Virginia and never left.

Cobb lives in Jefferson County and works as a columnist for the Martinsburg Journal. Two years ago, she published her first novel, and now Panhandle Portraits.

Statement from Katherine Cobb:

“I wanted to show the breadth and depth of West Virginians. We have such an interesting population, both people who have lived here for several generations and others who arrived at various junctures but who have made a significant contribution in some way,” said Cobb. “It’s also no secret West Virginians are often negatively stereotyped, and I find that frustrating. The people here are like anyone in any other state. I enjoyed putting something positive about our citizens into print, and putting something positive into the world, period. There’s so much negativity and tension this past year — this is something that will make people feel good when they open it up.”

Panhandle Portraits is available for purchase at select bookstores and gifts shops across the state. It is also available on Amazon.

LISTEN: Author Charles Frazier Speaks on Women in Appalachia & Cold Mountain

Award-winning author Charles Frazier is 2016’s Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence at Shepherd University. Frazier was born in Asheville, North Carolina and spent time as a teacher before he published his first novel, Cold Mountain, in 1997.

The novel is based on his great-great uncle; a wounded confederate soldier who deserted to journey back home to his loved ones. Cold Mountain would go on to win the National Book Award for Fiction, top the New York Times Best Seller list, and be turned into an award-winning feature film in 2003.

The Appalachian Heritage Writer’s Award and the Appalachian Heritage Writer-in-Residence Project were developed by Shepherd University, the Shepherd University Foundation, and the West Virginia Humanities Council in 1998 to celebrate and honor the work of a distinguished contemporary Appalachian writer.

To encourage aspiring West Virginia writers and to promote the kind of networking that fosters literary achievement Shepherd University and the West Virginia Center for the Book developed, in fall 2001, the West Virginia Fiction Competition.

Frazier is the 18th recipient of the Appalachian Heritage Writer’s Award.

Morgantown Synagogue Releases Book of Oral Histories

The first Jewish residents moved to Morgantown in 1879. Since then, the community has made quite a mark on the city. A few years ago, the then-president of the Tree of Life Congregation and Synagogue in Morgantown asked now-President Ed Gerson to write a history of the congregation for a time capsule. Instead, Gerson interviewed about 20 members of the Jewish community and documented their stories in a book of oral histories. The book, called Morgantown Jewish Heritage, was released this month. 

Ed Gerson Interview Highlights

On Forming Friendships with Other Communities in Morgantown

In business, you have to recognize people, acknowledge somebody else besides you. They have needs and you have needs. There’s more to it than a transaction. It’s a social transaction. It’s a social contract. The essential factor being the humanity. At some point we have to cross paths. Those cross-points is what make human life meaningful and possible if you collaborate together. And sometimes it doesn’t have to be verbal. 

On the Loss of Jewish Identity 
 

With my own father, I certainly can say that he was – and all those who knew him would tell me – he’s a mystical-type man. There was a longing, a yearning, for something that had been lost in my father. He would sometimes talk about Russia. I would say, “Pop! You were born in the United States!” And he would tell me these stories about Russia. And of course, the reasons for leaving Russia were not pleasant. But the memory of Russia is.

On Anti-Semitism

I noticed that the responses to anti-semitism were longstanding in some people. They remembered it very well. But they basically went on with their lives. 

On Asking Readers to Complete the Mitzvah, or Good Deed 
 

You make the world a decent a place for God to reside in. 

The audio was updated to reflect that Shirley Levine, not Max Levine, provided the story about her father for the book. 

Pearl S. Buck Grapevine Travels to Michigan

A grapevine clipping from the home of Pearl S. Buck, a world renowned author with West Virginia roots, just arrived in Michigan and soon will be planted at a high school literary garden.

It began as an idea last summer. Jennifer McQuillan teaches literature at West Bloomfield High School in Michigan, and she wanted to give her students something that would get them off their phones- and become better connected to the writing in decades old books.

“There are gardens that are devoted to Emily Dickinson or to Shakespeare, but there’s not been a garden in a secondary school setting that brings together important plants from American authors like this anywhere, to our knowledge,” said McQuillan.

Since last August, the garden has grown. Thirty-four plants have been sent from the homesteads of American authors, including Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemingway and Alice Walker.

McQuillan says she wasn’t quite sure if the students would connect the garden with the literature she was teaching them.

“The turning point came around December, when we were reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Buds and Bird Voices”. And he writes about a lilac bush out of his window. And we had that lilac bush growing in the literary garden. And that was the moment when the kids went, ‘oh my gosh, we have something really special here.’”

Fast forward to this summer. McQuillan’s garden will soon include a clipping from a 120-year-old grapevine that drapes across the front entrance to the birthplace of writer Pearl S. Buck

Kirk Judd, a board member for the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace Foundation, says Buck wrote about the grapevine. “She remembers being 9 years old, sitting on the upper level porch, reading her Charles Dickens, and eating grapes from the grapevine.”

Grapevine at Stulting House, Pearl S. Buck’s grandparents’ home where she was born,

Judd says that even though she spent most of her childhood abroad, Pearl S. Buck always thought of West Virginia as home.

Born at her grandparents’ home in Hillsboro, West Virginia, Buck was the first American woman awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, and her bestselling novel The Good Earth won the Pulitzer Prize.

She passed away in 1973. But the grapevine that she remembered so vividly from her West Virginia birthplace is very much still alive.

Jennifer McQuillan says it’s the first plant they’ve received from West Virginia. She teaches Pearl Buck’s writing in both her American and World Literature classes. McQuillan says she’s really happy to add Buck to the literary garden- both as an American and a world author who wrote extensively about China, her other home away from West Virginia.  

“Because she’s sought both as a native author and as an author who is making her mark in another country as well. So I think that’s a really compelling story and I’m really excited to share that story with my students this fall.”

McQuillan will be working with her students to connect Buck’s writing to the grapevine they’ll be planting this summer, with the help of master gardeners in Michigan. She hopes both the grapevine, and a love for literature, will take root and grow.

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