The Great American Novel Flashcards

Grade 11 · English · Flashcards

Key novels, characters, themes, and critical concepts in the tradition of the Great American Novel.

Flashcards

The Great Gatsby (1925)

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jazz Age masterwork; follows Jay Gatsby's tragic pursuit of Daisy Buchanan as a critique of the empty promise of the American Dream

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

Mark Twain's novel of Huck and escaped slave Jim on the Mississippi River; revolutionary for its vernacular voice and moral interrogation of race and freedom

Beloved (1987)

Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Sethe, an escaped enslaved woman haunted by the ghost of the daughter she killed to save from slavery

The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the Joad family's Dust Bowl migration from Oklahoma to California; a definitive text of American social realism

Invisible Man (1952)

Ralph Ellison's novel about an unnamed Black narrator's journey through racist American institutions; begins 'I am an invisible man'

Moby-Dick (1851)

Herman Melville's epic: Captain Ahab's obsessive hunt for the white whale Moby Dick; themes of fate, obsession, and man's struggle against the indifferent universe

Jay Gatsby

Self-made bootlegger in Fitzgerald's novel whose relentless pursuit of the past (Daisy) and the American Dream ends in his murder; emblem of fatal idealism

Jim (Huckleberry Finn)

Huck's companion and an escaped enslaved man whose humanity and moral courage gradually reveal the injustice of slavery; one of American literature's most complex characters

The American Dream

Central American myth that hard work leads to success; novels like Gatsby and Grapes of Wrath critique its promise as illusory or available only to some

Nick Carraway

Narrator of 'The Great Gatsby'; Midwestern bond trader who observes East Egg society; his moral ambiguity makes him an unreliable but humanly credible witness

Social Realism

Literary movement depicting working-class struggles and social inequality without romanticization; key in Steinbeck and Dreiser's American fiction

The Valley of Ashes

Symbol in 'The Great Gatsby' — a grey industrial wasteland representing the human cost and moral rot beneath the glittering surface of Jazz Age prosperity

Tom Joad

Protagonist of 'The Grapes of Wrath'; his famous farewell speech — 'I'll be there' — articulates Steinbeck's vision of collective human dignity and solidarity

Doctor T.J. Eckleburg

The faded billboard eyes in 'The Great Gatsby' overlooking the Valley of Ashes; symbolize the absence of moral judgment, the death of God, or the eyes of commerce watching over America

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