The American Dream in Literature Flashcards
Grade 12 · English · Flashcards
12 flashcards on the American Dream as depicted across key works of American literature.
Flashcards
- American Dream
- The belief that hard work and determination guarantee opportunity, prosperity, and upward mobility for all Americans.
- The Great Gatsby
- F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel depicting Gatsby's doomed pursuit of wealth and love as a critique of the Dream's hollowness.
- Green light
- Symbol in Gatsby of the perpetually unreachable Dream — always visible across the water, never attained.
- Willy Loman
- Protagonist of Death of a Salesman; his destruction illustrates what happens when a man builds his identity entirely on the Dream.
- Death of a Salesman
- Arthur Miller's 1949 play exposing the American Dream as a destructive myth for working-class men like Willy Loman.
- A Raisin in the Sun
- Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play about a Black family's fight for dignity and housing in a racist society.
- Dream Deferred
- Langston Hughes' 1951 poem asking what becomes of a dream that is denied — one of the most powerful interrogations of racial inequality in American poetry.
- Valley of Ashes
- The gray industrial wasteland in Gatsby between West Egg and New York, symbolizing the human cost of the wealthy's careless pursuit of pleasure.
- Social mobility
- Movement up or down the social ladder — the Dream's central promise, and the thing literature most often shows to be illusory.
- Disillusionment
- The collapse of idealized belief when experience fails to match the Dream's promise; a defining feature of 20th-century American literature.
- Materialism
- The equation of worth with wealth and possessions — a key target of Fitzgerald's, Miller's, and Steinbeck's critiques.
- Of Mice and Men
- Steinbeck's 1937 novella about two migrant workers whose dream of owning land is crushed by poverty and circumstance.
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