Some of the world's most-studied works of literature are deeply entwined with a significant social issue, and viewing such works through the lens of this issue enriches and broadens a reader's understanding and helps students navigate the intersection between literature and sociology.
Wolff's account of his boyhood and the process of growing up includes paper routes, whiskey, scouting, fistfights, friendship, betrayal, and America in the fifties.
Author Walter Dean Myers describes his childhood in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s, discussing his loving stepmother, his problems in school, his reasons for leaving home, and his beginnings as a writer.
The author describes how the 1970s game Dungeons and Dragons effected his teenage development and how millions of boys broke away from everything normal in order to become of part of the craze of fantasy role-playing associated with the game.
Presents the collected short stories of twentieth-century American writer Eudora Welty, and includes a selection of nine literary and personal essays, as well as a memoir of the author's childhood.
a student casebook to issues, sources, and historical documents
Felgar, Robert
1998
Presents a variety of documents which have been chosen to help readers understand the political, racial, literary, social, and general cultural contexts of the fictional autobiography "Black Boy.".
The author reflects on his days at a South Carolina military college. He recalls his love of basketball and its value to him as a means of self-expression, and shares experiences that shed new light on his novel "The Great Santini.".
The author discusses her idyllic childhood in Shirley, New York, a typical American working-class town, and considers how attitudes toward the town changed when neighbors began getting sick from waste from a nearby nuclear laboratory.
A memoir in which the author recalls her childhood growing up in a reportedly haunted house in Pennsylvania, discusses how the situation reflected her own feelings of alienation, and tells about coming back to the house with a team of local ghostbusters as an adult, years after the surgery that changed her from male to female.
