Writing Quick Start: Reading and Writing about Literature
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Reading and Writing about Literature
IN THIS CHAPTER YOU WILL LEARN TO
- develop a general approach to reading literature,
- understand the language of literature,
- analyze short stories,
- analyze poetry, and
- write a literary analysis.
WRITING QUICK START
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uppose your American literature instructor asks you to read carefully “The Bean Eaters,” a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000). Brooks was a major American writer of poetry as well as fiction and nonfiction prose. She was the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry (for Annie Allen, 1949). “The Bean Eaters” was originally published in 1960, in a collection of poems of the same title.
After reading “The Bean Eaters,” how would you describe the life of the elderly couple shown in the photo on this page? (Note that the couple in the photo is not the couple described in the poem.) Using information about the life of the elderly couple presented in “The Bean Eaters,” as well as your own experience with elderly people, write a paragraph describing what you think the couple’s relationship might be like. How does Brooks’s description of one elderly couple help you understand other elderly people like the man and woman in the photo?