Literary Sources

Like professional writers, you can use poetry and fiction as evidence to support an argument or as sources in a synthesis essay. Sometimes professional writers cite poets, novelists, and playwrights whose work is well-known enough that their names, and the names of their characters, carry weight; of course, name-dropping isn’t enough. Literary sources can help writers establish ethos by presenting themselves as educated and well-read. They acknowledge common ground between reader and writer. They provide depth, nuance, and interest. In a March 2013 New York Times op-ed piece, for instance, Jennifer Glass challenges Yahoo chairperson Marissa Mayer’s dictate that employees can no longer work from home.

[E]mployees, creative or not, get older, marry, bear children, watch their parents grow infirm, and want lives outside the workplace. And despite companies’ best efforts to replace family and simulate home life by providing cafeterias, game rooms, and concierge services for dry cleaning, most people eventually learn the hard way that companies will not care for you when times are hard; they will cut your pay or forgo your 401(k) match in economic downturns, and will dispose of you when you become ill or disabled. As Robert Frost reminds us, home is the place where they have to take you in. Work is not that place.

(2013)

Glass paraphrases lines from Robert Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man”—which reads, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in”—to support her claim that work is not the same as home. She assumes her audience is familiar with the poem and uses it as a cultural touchstone. More important, the lines’ meaning is an apt and succinct addition to Glass’s argument.

Literary texts can be used to introduce an idea or issue. In “The End of White America,” published in the Atlantic magazine in January/February 2009, writer Hua Hsu argues that Caucasians becoming the minority is “a cultural and demographic inevitability.” He opens his essay with a scene from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Civilization’s going to pieces,” he remarks. He is in polite company, gathered with friends around a bottle of wine in the late-afternoon sun, chatting and gossiping. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?” They hadn’t. “Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

He is Tom Buchanan, a character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a book that nearly everyone who passes through the American education system is compelled to read at least once. Although Gatsby doesn’t gloss as a book on racial anxiety—it’s too busy exploring a different set of anxieties entirely—Buchanan was hardly alone in feeling besieged. The book by “this man Goddard” had a real-world analogue: Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, published in 1920, five years before Gatsby. Nine decades later, Stoddard’s polemic remains oddly engrossing. He refers to World War I as the “White Civil War” and laments the “cycle of ruin” that may result if the “white world” continues its infighting. The book features a series of foldout maps depicting the distribution of “color” throughout the world and warns, “Colored migration is a universal peril, menacing every part of the white world.”

(2009)

This scene from Gatsby is the hook Hsu uses to grab his reader’s attention. His readers will be drawn in by the familiar Gatsby reference. It helps him establish that this issue has history, and it allows him to note that the Lothrop Stoddard book actually existed. So, this literary source serves several functions for Hsu. But notice how Hsu qualifies his literary example: “Gatsby doesn’t gloss as a book on racial anxiety.” He will move in his essay into real-life examples, using interviews, anecdotes, and quantitative evidence to develop his argument. Hsu can use Gatsby to introduce the idea that the 1920s were a time when Caucasians were “feeling besieged” by the “rising tide of color” (to borrow Stoddard’s title), but he has to move on to real-life examples because a fictional character alone is not sufficient evidence.

In Lincoln at Gettysburg, a book-length analysis of the Gettysburg Address, author Gary Wills illustrates Abraham Lincoln’s tendency to use “one prejudice against another”—in this case the American prejudice against monarchies to fight against slavery—with an example from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn:

One cannot own human beings, and one should not be in the position of king over human beings. Mark Twain, too, relied on this latter prejudice when he introduced fake royalty onto Huck’s raft, to deepen the relationship between Huck and Jim. The King and the Dauphin demand servile labor from their “subjects,” who must kneel to their “betters” when bringing them food. Paradoxically, the man already a slave is the first to rebel: “Dese [two] is all I kin stan.” Huck and Jim are made allies yearning for a joint freedom from “royalty,” and it is in this situation that Huck, hearing the story of Jim’s deaf daughter, first makes the startling admission: “I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their’n.”

(1992)

While Wills acknowledges that the purpose of this scene in the novel is to strengthen Huck and Jim’s relationship, he uses the literary source to comment on Lincoln’s understanding of human nature and how it helped him achieve his goals. Wills uses many types of sources in his book, both primary and secondary, but an iconic and well-known character like Huck Finn can certainly provide credible evidence of the values and beliefs of a particular time period. Literature is very useful for acknowledging common ground, commenting on culture, and introducing or illustrating key issues, but it should not be your only evidence. You need real-life examples from several different types of primary and secondary sources, such as the ones we’ve talked about above.