... and Company, Swift and Company , Brown, and Durham. Every week the managers of the trust got together and compared notes, and there was one scale for all the workers in the yards and one standard of efficiency. Brown and Durham were the two largest meat packing firms in ... with an A.B. degree. Following graduation, Sinclair went on to graduate study at Columbia University, where he began writing full-length novels with serious social themes. These novels such as King Midas, The Journal of Arthur Stirling, and Manassas, did not receive any critical recognition, but they showed ... or mo...

• Word Count: 4457
• Approx Pages: 18
• Grade Level: High School

... 's existential critique, Thompson's Stanislavskian reportage (that is, a kind of "method writing" conducive to great verisimilitude) involves him directly participating in the search for - and death of - the American Dream. Despite being markedly different in style, each book has a shared theme and each author's vitriolic arrow is ... philosophy that we cannot control what goes on around us, however hard we try. Heller once wrote about Closing Time; "In all my novels the central characters are extremely perplexed and at odds with their surroundings, and their surroundings do constitute Am...

• Word Count: 4213
• Approx Pages: 17

... informed US laws and social interaction. Many authors and literary critics saw connections between literary content and social influence. For example, in "Criticism and Fiction" (1891), William Dean Howells, a advocate of nineteenth-century American realism, warns readers to avoid sentimental or sensational novels, which he claims "hurt" by presenting "idle lies about human nature and the social fabric." He reminds us, "It ... Americans who had, before she wrote, little voice in American literature. Amy Ling characterizes Sui Sin Far's writing as among one of "the earliest attempts by A...

• Word Count: 2633
• Approx Pages: 11
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate