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AMERICAN SUMMARIES

The Catcher in the Rye

Author: J.D. Salinger

Time period: Modernism

Language: English

 

Holden Caulfield is expelled from Pencey Prep, a boarding school in Pennsylvania, and aimlessly wanders the streets of New York City. Before his expulsion, Holden failed all of his classes at Pencey except English, left his fencing gear in a New York subway station angered his team, and was embarrassed by his history teacher, Mr. Spencer. Holden is perturbed by his roommate, Robert Ackley, and writes an English composition about his brother’s baseball glove to his enemy, Stradlater. Allie Caulfield is one of Holden’s brothers, who died from leukemia. Holden becomes increasingly annoyed at Pencey, with Stradlater going on a date with his crush, Jane Gallagher. After being upset with the “phonies” at his school he leaves to go on a subway to New York where he meets the obnoxious mother of Ernest Morrow and discusses where the ducks in Central Lagoon migrate to during the winter to a taxi driver. Holden calls up a prostitute named Sunny yet refuses her, causing her to come back with her pimp Maurice demanding money. Maurice takes Holden’s money and Holden dreams of him shooting him with an automatic pistol. Holden then meets at Biltmore Theater with his date Sally Hayes, buys a “Little Shirley Beans” record for his little sister, Phoebe Caulfield, and goes ice skating at Rockefeller Center. He goes to a bar where he encounters Carl Luce, one of Holden’s former classmates. However, Carl leaves uncomfortably after Holden perturbs him of his supposed homosexuality and goes to Central Park to investigate ducks, where he breaks his record. Holden sneaks back home to see Phoebe where he shares his fantasy to her about saving children through a field of rye. He explains to her how he would save them before they fall off the cliff, to which Phoebe corrects him, explaining that he misheard Robert Burns’ poem called “Comin’ Thro the Rye.” Holden breaks into tears and leaves to stay at his former English teacher, Mr. Antolini’s house. Mr. Antolini gives him life advice but Holden quickly leaves after waking up to him patting his head, interpreting it as a sexual advance. He goes to sleep at Grand Central Terminal and regrets leaving Mr. Antolini’s house. Holden decides to move out west and dreams of living in a log cabin with his “deaf-mute” girlfriend. Before leaving, he decides to visit Phoebe’s school and sees vulgar graffiti on the walls, symbolizing the tarnishment of innocence. He takes Phoebe to the zoo where the novel ends with Phoebe riding a carousel and giving Holden back the red hunting hat he gifted her with. He finally goes back to his parents to tell them that he is going to a different school in September. 

Moby Dick

Author: Herman Melville

Time Period: “The American Renaissance"

Language: English


The novel opens with the main protagonist famously stating, “Call me Ishmael.” It begins with Ishmael meeting his friend, Queequeg, in New Bedford Massachusetts. The two then go to Nantucket where they board the Pequod, a ship made with the bones and teeth of a sperm whale and led by Captain Ahab. Captain Ahab announces to the Pequod that his missing leg is due to the attack of a violent sperm whale, Moby Dick, and devotes his life to killing the whale. He nails a gold doubloon to the ship and announces it as a prize for the man who first sees Moby Dick. The Pequod travels through Africa and encounters other whaling ships such as the Jeroboam, led by the disillusioned fortune teller, Captain Gabriel. A cabin boy Pip jumps out of the Pequod and into the ocean, causing him to go insane and become a prophet jester. The Pequod also encounters the Samuel Enderby, led by Captain Boomer who also encountered Moby Dick and lost his arm. Queequeg then falls ill and dies whilst Fedallah, the leader of Ahab’s harpoon crew predicts three prophecies; that Ahab will not die until he has seen the three “hearses” of the sea, one will be “not made by mortal hands,” and that the other must be made of wood from America. All three prophecies prove to be true when a typhoon hits the Pequod, and a member on the ship, Starbuck, predicts it to be an omen. Ahab finally finds Moby Dick and fails at attacking it, accidentally killing Fedallah in the process. On the third day, Moby Dick attacks the Pequod, killing Ahab and the ship crew, leaving only Ishmael alive. Ishmael escapes the whirlpool by floating on top of his friend Queequeg's coffin until the ship Rachel finds him and rescues him.

To Kill a Mockingbird

Author: Harper Lee

Time period: 1960

Language: English


Scout Finch lives with her brother Jem and father Atticus Finch in Maycomb, Alabama during the Great Depression. A boy named Dill visits Maycomb for the summer, whom Scout and Jem befriend. Dill becomes fascinated by the Radley Place, a house on their street inhabited by Nathan Radley and Arthur (“Boo”) Radley. Later Scout attends school for the first time and collects gifts left for her and Jem in a knothole of a tree on the Radley Property, believing it to be for them. Dill returns the following summer where Scout and Jem continue speculating about Boo's presence and act out his story. The three sneak onto the Radley Property and Nathan Radley shoots at them, causing Jem to lose his pants whilst trying to escape, only for them to be mended and hung on the Radley fence upon his return. Meanwhile Atticus defends a Black man named Tom Robinson who was accused of raping a white woman in court. The dismay of Maycomb’s racist community makes Jem and Scout subject to abuse from other children. The next summer Dill returns along with Atticus’ sister, Alexandra. Tom Robinson’s trial begins and while he is placed in jail, a mob gathers to lynch him but is stopped by Scout when she questions a man in the mob about his son. During his trial Atticus provides clear evidence of the accusers, Mayella Ewell and her father Bob to be lying. However despite Tom’s clear innocence he is still convicted by the white jury and later shot to death, the situation becoming a traumatic memory for Jem. Bob Ewell feels that Atticus and the judge made a fool out of him and breaks into the judge’s house, menaces Tom’s widow, and attacks Scout and Jem on their way home from a Halloween party. Boo Radley intervenes and saves the children, stabbing and killing Ewell in the process. Scout later sympathizes with Boo and feels grateful for his kindness, embracing her father’s advice to not view the world through prejudice and hatred.

The Great Gatsby

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Time period: Modernism

Language: English

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Nick Carraway is from Minnesota and was educated at Yale before he moved to the West Egg district of Long Island where he meets his neighbor, Jay Gatsby, who lives in a large Gothic mansion and throws extravagant parties every weekend. Nick is invited to dinner in East Egg with his cousin, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband, Tom. Nick then begins a relationship with Jordan Baker, who tells Nick about Tom’s affair with Myrtle Wilson, who lives in an industrial dumping ground between West Egg and New York City called the Valley of Ashes. Intrigued by this information, Nick goes to New York City for a party with Tom and Myrtle in the apartment that Tom keeps for his affair with Myrtle, unbeknownst to Daisy. Myrtle taunts Tom about Daisy at the party, leading him to break her nose. Nick is then invited to one of Gatsby’s parties along with Jordan Baker, where he meets Gatsby himself and is nicknamed “old sport.” At the party, Jordan is spoken to by Gatsby alone, who later reports to Nick that Gatsby is in love with Daisy and that Gatsby’s extravagant lifestyle is only an attempt to impress her. Gatsby requests Nick to arrange a reunion between him and Daisy, which Nick executes by inviting Daisy for tea. After the reunion, Daisy and Gatsby begin their affair and Tom grows suspicious. After he sees Gatsby stare at Daisy longingly, Tom grows outraged and confronts Gatsby in a suite at the Plaza Hotel, where he asserts to Daisy that Gatsby is a criminal. When Nick, Jordan and Tom drive past the valley of ashes, they find Gatsby’s car and Myrtle dead. The three rush back to Long Island where Nick learns from Gatsby that it was Daisy who drove the car and killed Myrtle, but Gatsby insists on taking the blame. Tom then tells Myrtle’s husband, George, that Gatsby murdered Myrtle with his car. Outraged and assuming that Gatsby had an affair with Myrtle, George shoots Gatsby in his mansion pool and later shoots himself. Nick then stages a funeral for Gatsby and moves back to the Midwest out of disgust for the moral decay of the luxurious lives of the East Coast. Nick concludes that Gatsby’s dream of a romantic relationship with Daisy was corrupted by his pursuit of wealth and money and that the American dream, just like Gatsby’s dream, is dead.

The Raven

Author: Edgar Allan Poe

Time period: 1845, American Romanticism

Language: English

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“Once upon a midnight dreary” in a “bleak December,” the poem follows a sorrowful narrator who mourns the loss of his beloved Lenore. When he tries to distract himself by reading “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,” he hears a tapping at his chamber door. Upon investigating the sound, the poem’s title figure, a raven, appears perched on a “pallid bust of Pallas” above the door. 
The raven that only answers with the word “nevermore,” intensifies the narrator’s despair after every question he asks. The narrator visualizes “Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor” and begs for “nepenthe,” a drug to forget his suffering. He questions the raven about the possibility of reuniting with Lenore in the afterlife, asking, “is there balm Gilead?” and whether he will ‘clasp a sainted maiden,” in “the distant Aidenn.” The raven’s repetition of “nevermore” keeps crushing his hopes, leaving him to lament on and imploring the raven to “get back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore.”

A Raisin in the Sun

Author: Lorraine Hansberry

Time period: 1959, Social Realism

Language: English

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  • Takes place in the 1950s, in a small, worn apartment on the South Side of Chicago

  • The Younger family consists of three generations: Mama (Lena), her son Walter Lee, his wife Ruth, their son Travis, and daughter Beneatha

  • The family shares a hallway bathroom with neighbors (lack of independence)

  • Title comes from Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem” (“What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”)

  • Reflects racial segregation and housing discrimination, inspired by Hansberry’s own family’s legal battle (Hansberry v. Lee, 1940)

  • First play by a Black female playwright (Lorraine Hansberry) on Broadway (1959)

 

Act I 

  • The family awaits a $10,000 insurance check from the late Big Walter’s life insurance policy

  • Mama (Lena Younger) wants to buy a house with a yard and a garden, fulfilling her and Big Walter’s lifelong dream

    • She tends to a potted plant, symbolizing her deferred hopes that survive “without much light”

  • Walter Lee Younger (her son) wants to invest in a liquor store with Willy Harris and Bobo, seeing it as a path to independence and status

  • Ruth Younger (Walter’s wife) supports Mama’s housing plan. She’s exhausted, works as a domestic, and is emotionally disconnected from Walter

    • She discovers she’s pregnant and puts down $5 for an abortion, fearing the family can’t afford another child.

  • Beneatha Younger (Mama’s daughter) wants to use part of the money for medical school and seeks cultural identity beyond assimilation

    • Rejects religion (“There is no God!”), prompting Mama to slap her, demanding reverence for God

    • Experiments with African heritage and modern ideas

Obscure details:

  • Beneatha straightens her hair, which Asagai calls “mutilation," symbolizing assimilation into white beauty standards

  • Her later decision to wear it natural marks a reclaiming of identity and cultural pride

  • Walter and Ruth’s son Travis sleeps on the living room couch

  • Big Walter (deceased father) is said to have “worked himself to death” for his family, symbolizing the generational cost of dreams

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Act II 

  • Mama buys a house for $3,500 in Clybourne Park, an all-white neighborhood, a radical act in segregated 1950s Chicago.

    • She dreams of sunlight, a yard, and planting her garden

  • Walter feels emasculated that Mama spent the money without him. He spirals into depression, skipping work and drinking. To restore his pride, Mama gives Walter $6,500:

    • $3,000 to put aside for Beneatha’s education

    • $3,500 to invest as he sees fit.

  • Walter entrusts Willy Harris with the full sum

  • Willy runs off with all the money, including Beneatha’s medical school funds

  • Meanwhile, Beneatha becomes more radical:

    • Asagai (Nigerian student and suitor) calls her “Alaiyo”, meaning “one for whom bread is not enough,” showing her intellectual and spiritual hunger

    • George Murchison, her wealthy suitor, represents assimilation; Beneatha mocks his “white shoes” and materialism

  • The Clybourne Park house becomes a future connection to Bruce Norris’s 2010 play Clybourne Park

  • Mama uses the same wrapping paper for the plant and the house documents, connecting them symbolically

  • Bobo appears briefly to deliver the news that Willy has absconded with the money

 

Act III 

  • The family is devastated by the loss

  • Beneatha becomes bitter, denouncing Walter’s materialism and questioning whether “human race is worth saving”

  • Asagai offers philosophical comfort, urging her to return to Africa with him to help build a new nation and find purpose

  • Karl Lindner, representative of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, reappears

    • His polite racism masks a bribe as he offers to buy back the house so the Youngers won’t move into the white neighborhood

  • Walter initially plans to accept Lindner’s offer, saying pride can’t feed his son

  • In the final scene, Walter rejects the buyout, saying they are a proud family that deserves to live wherever they choose.

    • He tells Lindner, “We have decided to move into our house because my father—my father—he earned it for us brick by brick.”

  • Mama proudly affirms Walter’s manhood, saying, “He finally come into his manhood today”

  • As the family packs, Mama lingers to take her plant, whispering, “It expresses ME”

  • The play ends as they leave for Clybourne Park​

  • Travis’s presence in the final scene (Walter addressing Lindner in front of his son) demonstrates generational pride. The play ends before they physically move (the audience is in suspense)

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