But I should get married I should be good
How nice it'd be to come home to her
and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen
aproned young and lovely wanting my baby
and so happy about me she burns the roast beef
and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, New York (1938). She's known for novels and short stories in which people's lives are torn apart by violence. She's the author of books such as Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990) and We Were the Mulvaneys (1996).
She grew up in a rural part of New York, which she later used as the basis for the fictional Eden County, where many of her stories and novels are set. She began making up stories as a child, even before she knew how to write, and drew pictures to record them. The book that had the most profound influence on her life and her writing was Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. She read it when she was about 10 years old, and loved how Alice was calm and rational when facing nightmarish situations. She said that Alice's calmness made a strong impression, and ever since she has tried to write about nightmares and bizarre things in a coherent, calm way.
She published her first story, "In the Old World," in Mademoiselle magazine (1959) just before her senior year of college, and she published her first book of short stories, By the North Gate, a few years later, in 1963. She has gone on to become one of the most prolific writers of her generation, writing more than 70 books in 40 years, including novels, short stories, plays, poetry, and essays. She writes almost everything in long hand before typing, and she usually cuts out a few hundred pages from every novel before it is published.

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Gregory Nunzio Corso 1930 – 2001

But I should get married I should be good
How nice it'd be to come home to her
and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen
aproned young and lovely wanting my baby
and so happy about me she burns the roast beef
and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair

John Kenneth Galbraith, 1908 - 2006

Economist and writer JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH was born in Iona Station, Ontario, 1908. He taught economics at Harvard for 30 years, 1945-75, and during that time also served as an advisor to two presidents, Kennedy and Johnson, and wrote his books espousing a liberal outlook toward economics: American Capitalism: the Concept of Countervailing Power (1952); The Age of Uncertainty (1977); and The Affluent Society (1958), in which he faulted the conventional wisdom of U.S. economics and called for more emphasis on public services than on production of goods.

*The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

*The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.

*Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

*Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects.

*If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.

*In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.

*In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

*In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.

*In economics, the majority is always wrong.

*In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.

*Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

*Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

*Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.

*More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.

*People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.

*Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Tips for the Oral Exam

1) Be prepared to answer questions on Kate Chopin and her short story The Story of an Hour

2) Choose one poem from the poems we studied in class and be prepared to talk about it at length

3) Be ready to discuss some major themes of American literature such as Sense of Place (Robert Frost) The Individual (Emerson), American Dream (F. Scott Fitzgerald)