Branford High School

American Literature Honors
Summer Reading Assignment 2023

From the outset of this country’s founding, the Declaration of Independence has helped spell out the ideals and values that America was to be built upon. It was to be a country in which “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” In the 1930s during the Great Depression, historian James Truslow Adams coined the term “The American Dream” and defined it as “a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” The possibilities of the dream have attracted those seeking more opportunity and freedom. A belief in such an “American Dream” has also shaped our identity as Americans and what we promise to everyone in this country -- equality, freedom, and opportunity. However, America has often failed to live up to these promises for all Americans. Even the term “all men are created equal” was written at a time when women had few to no rights and one in six people in America were enslaved. In other times, those promises of equality, freedom and opportunity have been similarly out of reach for some citizens due to economic or social inequities. This summer, as you read the novel, please think about how these American ideals and promises have endured. Keep in mind, too, the realities of America that often contradict those lofty ideals. Pay attention as you read to how the authors of these titles explore and examine these very same issues.

Throughout the school year, much of our readings and discussions will focus on how various authors throughout American history have grappled with these same ideas and themes. What kind of America do the authors describe in their books? What does it mean to be American? What ideals does America stand for? How have those ideals played out (or not) in reality?

This summer reading assignment is the first step in that learning and thinking process. You are given a choice of six (6) novels that address some aspect of the American Dream, its lofty promises, and the ugly realities. In addition, there are supplemental readings of poetry that also address similar and different aspects of America and the American Dream. Taken as a whole, the assignment will provide you with a general introduction to some ideas we will explore further during the school year.

American Literature Honors Summer Reading Assignment Overview

Part I
Choose one of six books
Use the graphic organizer to take structured notes on the “American” thematic lenses for the texts
Write 10 journal entries in response to passages directly from the book

Part II
Read the four supplemental poetry readings
Take notes on the “American” thematic lenses from the texts

Part III
Study the 60 vocabulary words

PART I: BOOK CHOICES
Read one of the following classic or contemporary American novels.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. Set in a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist about 20 years before the work was published, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing satire on entrenched attitudes, particularly racism. Perennially popular with readers, the novel has also been the continued object of study by literary critics since its publication.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into haves and have-nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. With wit and wisdom, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between these four women and their American-born daughters as all navigate the realities of their heritage and their pursuit of the American Dream. As each reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined.

Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
Set on and around a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation, Love Medicine -- the first novel by National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich -- is the epic story about the intertwined fates of two Native American families: the Kashpaws and the Lamartines. With astonishing virtuosity, each chapter draws on a range of voices to limn its tales. Black humor mingles with magic, injustice bleeds into betrayal, and through it all, bonds of love and family marry the elements into a tightly woven whole that pulses with the drama of life. First published in 1984, the novel has been revised and reorganized by the author.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Underground Railroad chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi’s past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle. Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power, and limitations, of the bonds of family. Rich with Ward’s distinctive, musical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an essential contribution to American literature.

Note-taking assignment for PART I:

1. Use the graphic organizer to take notes while reading your selected novel, using the following Thematic Lens categories to help focus your thinking and responses to the ideas in the text. The notes in each box can be bullet points, details, and/or passages but should also contain a sentence or two of your own that explains what the author may be trying to say in regard to each Thematic Lens category bulleted below. These notes will be used to guide text-based discussions at the start of the year.

• Striving for the American Dream: Where you see the challenges related to striving for the American Dream in society where life should be “better and richer and fuller for everyone.”

• Promises of America: Where you see the positive promises of America in the text -- its lofty ideals and positive values such as equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

• Contradictions and ugly realities of America: Where you see the contradictions and ugly realities of America in the text, where it is shown America falling short of its promises to all its citizens or contradicting its own ideals about equality or opportunity.

• Struggle for identity: Where you see the struggle for identity, both as individual characters and as part of a group in America.

2. Select at least 10 significant passages that illustrate the different big ideas in the novel or you consider to be important for other reasons. Your passages must come from different parts of the text -- not from a single chapter or cluster of chapters.

3. Write thoughtful and well-developed journal responses to each passage. Your response should explain your thinking about two or more of the following:

   1. How does the passage reflect one or more of the ideas from the thematic lenses?

   2. What do you think is valuable to understand about America and how is that seen in the text? 

   3. What makes the ideas from the passage -- and the novel as a whole -- still relevant to you today?

   4. How do the ideas from the novel and those in one or more of the poems converge or diverge? Or compare? Or build upon or contradict one another?

4. Hand in the graphic organizer and the 10 journal responses on the first day of class.
   Insightful and informed participation is critical in an honors class; good notes will give you a springboard into discussion. Consider the following suggestions when you take notes and write your responses:

• Avoid simply summarizing.  Do not respond to a quotation by restating it in your own words. Do not retell the story from around your quote. What counts is how you respond to the ideas in the quote with your own thinking.

• Take notes from the entire book.  The authors do not drop themes and ideas randomly as the book progresses; if anything, the ideas related to the themes grow stronger as the novel goes along, leading to the final, culminating scenes.  The most insightful responses will reference developing ideas from different parts of the text.

• Do not use Sparknotes, ChatGPT, or any other “aid” to understand the novel.  These are long books, but you can handle it. Trust yourself and your ability, confront the text boldly, and don’t deprive yourself of an opportunity to tangle with a great book by a great American author.

• And remember, academic honesty is a serious matter. It is important that the work you hand in is your own. The consequences for plagiarism or other forms of academic dishonesty can be quite severe and can include a failing grade, a mark on your academic record, disqualification from the National Honor Society, or another penalty.

Thematic Lens Graphic Organizer

Book Title

PART II: Read the Supplementary Poetry Readings listed below:
Copies of these will be posted on the Google Classroom page. You are responsible for printing them out and bringing hard copies to class in the fall.

Poetry

1. “I Hear America Singing” by Walt Whitman (1860)

2. “I, Too” by Langston Hughes (1926) 

3. “38” by Layli Long Soldier (2017)

4. “The Hill We Climb” by Amanda Gorman (2021)

Note-taking Assignments for PART II

1. Read the poems listed above and take notes as you read (ideally right on a hard copy of the poem).

2. Your notes should be ideas and text examples related to the following bulleted focus areas. When you return to school in the fall, be prepared to intelligently discuss your ideas, compare the different texts, and write about them.

• What point is the author trying to make about America? How is it similar or different from another author?

• What might be the American Dream for the writer? What is it that he/she is arguing about what promise that America holds? What underlying values, beliefs, or ideas are celebrated in the poem?

• What criticism, if any, is the poet trying to convey about the flaws and contradictions that may exist in America? Is the poet speaking for an underrepresented group? How so?

3. Compile your notes and submit them at the beginning of school. You should have different notes for each selection. For each text, submit your notes. Your thinking can also be completed in thoughtful margin notes on a copy of the text. Your notes should provide evidence of your thinking and how the author’s ideas are reflected in the bulleted areas above.

PART III: Learn the vocabulary words and the definitions below and be ready to be quizzed on them the first weeks of school: