American Literature books summary

but instead goes to the Biltmore for his date with Sally.

Chapter Seventeen:

Holden meets Sally at the Biltmore, and when he sees her he immediately

feels like marrying her, even though he doesn't particularly like her.

After the play, when Sally keeps mentioning that she thinks she knows

people she sees, Holden replies "Why don't you go on over and give him a

big soul kiss, if you know him? He'll enjoy it." Finally, Sally does go to

talk to the boy she knows, George from Andover. Holden notes how phony the

conversation between Sally and George is. Holden and Sally go ice skating

at Radio City, then to eat. Sally asks Holden if he is coming over to help

her trim the Christmas tree. Holden asks her if she ever gets fed up. He

tells her that he hates everything: taxicabs, living in New York, phony

guys who call the Lunts angels. Sally tells him not to shout. He tells her

that she is the only reason that he is in New York right now. If not for

her, he would be in the woods, he claims. He complains about the cliques at

boarding schools, and tells her that he's in lousy shape. He suggests that

they borrow a car from a friend in Greenwich Village and drive up to New

England where they can stay in a cabin camp until their money runs out.

They could get married and live in the woods. Sally tells him that the idea

is foolish, for they are both practically children who would starve to

death. She tells him that they will have a lot of time to do those things

after college and marriage, but he claims that there wouldn't be "oodles"

of places to go, for it would be entirely different. He calls her a "royal

pain in the ass," and she starts to cry. Holden feels somewhat guilty, and

realizes that he doesn't even know where he got the idea about going to New

England.

Chapter Eighteen:

Holden once again considers giving Jane a call to invite her to go dancing.

He remembers how she danced with Al Pike from Choate. Although Holden

thought that he was "all muscles and no brains," Jane claimed that he had

an inferiority complex and felt sorry for him. Holden thinks that girls

divide guys into two types, no matter what their personality: a girl will

justify bad behavior as part of an inferiority complex for those she likes,

while claim those that she doesn't like are conceited. Holden calls Carl

Luce, a friend from the Whooton School who goes to Columbia, and plans to

meet him that night. He then goes to the movies and is annoyed when a woman

beside him becomes too emotional. The movie is a war film, which makes

Holden think about D.B.'s experience in the war. He hated the army, but had

Holden read A Farewell to Arms, which in Holden's view celebrates soldiers.

Holden thinks that if there is a war, he is glad that the atomic bomb has

been invented, for he would volunteer to sit right on top of it.

Chapter Nineteen:

Holden meets Carl Luce at the Wicker Bar. Carl Luce used to gossip about

people who were "flits" (homosexuals) and would tell which actors were

actually gay. Holden claims that Carl was a bit "flitty" himself. When Carl

arrives, he asks Holden when he is going to grow up, and is not amused by

Holden's jokes. Carl is annoyed that he is having a "typical Caulfield

conversation" about sex. Carl admits that he is seeing an older woman in

the Village who is a sculptress from China. Holden asks questions that are

too personal about Carl's sex life with his girlfriend until Carl insists

that he drop the subject. Carl reminds him that the last time he saw Holden

he told him to see his father, a psychiatrist.

Chapter Twenty:

Holden remains in the Wicker Bar getting drunk. He continues to pretend

that he has been shot. Finally, he calls Sally, but her grandmother answers

and asks why he is calling so late. Finally, Sally gets on the phone and

realizes that Holden is drunk. In the restroom of the Wicker Bar, he talks

to the "flitty-looking" guy, asking if he will see the "Valencia babe" who

performs there, but he tells Holden to go home. Holden finally leaves. As

he walks home, Holden drops Phoebe's record and nearly starts to cry. He

goes to Central Park and sits down on a bench. He thinks that he will get

pneumonia and imagines his funeral. He is reassured that his parents won't

let Phoebe come to his funeral because he is too young. He thinks about

what Phoebe would feel if he got pneumonia and died, and figures that he

should sneak home and see her, in case he did die.

Chapter Twenty-One:

Holden returns home, where he is very quiet as not to awake his parents.

Phoebe is asleep in D.B.'s room. He sits down at D.B.'s desk and looks at

Phoebe's stuff, such as her math book, where she has the name "Phoebe

Weatherfield Caulfield" written on the first page (her middle name is

actually Josephine). He wakes up Phoebe and hugs her. She tells about how

she is playing Benedict Arnold in her school play. She tells about how she

saw a movie called The Doctor, and how their parents are out for the night.

Holden shows Phoebe the broken record, and admits that he got kicked out.

She tells him that "Daddy's going to kill you," but Holden says that he is

going away to a ranch in Colorado. Phoebe places a pillow over her head and

refuses to talk to Holden.

Chapter Twenty-Two:

Phoebe tells Holden that she thinks his scheme to go out to Colorado is

foolish, and asks why he failed out of yet another school. He claims that

Pencey is full of phonies. He tells her about how everyone excluded Robert

Ackley as a sign of how phony the students are. Holden admits that there

were a couple of nice teachers, including Mr. Spencer, but then complains

about the Veterans' Day ceremonies. Phoebe tells Holden that he doesn't

like anything that happens. She asks Holden for one thing that he likes a

lot. He thinks of two things. The first is the nuns at Grand Central. The

second is a boy at Elkton Hills named James Castle, who had a fight with a

conceited guy named Phil Stabile. He threatened James, who responded by

jumping out the window, killing himself. However, he tells Phoebe that he

likes Allie, and he likes talking to Phoebe right now. Holden tells Phoebe

that he would like to be a catcher in the rye: he pictures a lot of

children playing in a big field of rye around the edge of a cliff. Holden

imagines that he would catch them if they started to go over the cliff.

Holden decides to call up Mr. Antolini, a former teacher at Elkton Hills

who now teaches English at NYU.

Chapter Twenty-Three:

Holden tells that Mr. Antolini was his English teacher at Elkton Hills and

was the person who carried James Castle to the infirmary. Holden and Phoebe

dance to the radio, but their parents come home and Holden hides in the

closet. When he believes that it is safe, Holden asks Phoebe for money and

she gives him eight dollars and change. He starts to cry as he prepares to

leave, which frightens Phoebe. He gives Phoebe his hunting hat and tells

her that he will give her a call.

Chapter Twenty-Four:

Mr. Antolini had married an older woman who shared similar intellectual

interests. When he arrives at his apartment, Holden finds Mr. Antolini in a

bathrobe and slippers, drinking a highball. Holden and Mr. Antolini discuss

Pencey, and Holden tells how he failed Oral Expression (debate). He tells

Holden how he had lunch with his father, who told him that Holden was

cutting classes and generally unprepared. He warns Holden that he is riding

for some kind of terrible fall. He says that it may be the kind where, at

the age of thirty, he sits in some bar hating everyone who comes in looking

as if he played football in college or hating people who use improper

grammar. He tells Holden that the fall that he is riding for is a special

and horrible kind, and that he can see Holden dying nobly for some highly

unworthy cause. He gives Holden a quote from the psychoanalyst Wilhelm

Stekel: "The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a

cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for

one." He finally tells Holden that once he gets past the things that annoy

him, he will be able to find the kind of information that will be dear to

his heart. Holden goes to sleep, and wakes up to find Mr. Antolini's hand

on his head. He tells Holden that he is "simply sitting here, admiring‹"

but Holden interrupts him, gets dressed and leaves, claiming that he has to

get his bags from Grand Central Station and he will be back soon.

Chapter Twenty-Five:

When Holden gets outside, it is getting light out. He walks over to

Lexington to take the subway to Grand Central, where he slept that night.

He thinks about how Mr. Antolini will explain Holden's departure to his

wife. Holden feels some regret that he didn't come back to the Antolini's

apartment. Holden starts reading a magazine at Grand Central; when he reads

an article about hormones, he begins to worry about hormones, and worries

about cancer when he reads about cancer. As Holden walks down Fifth Avenue,

he feels that he will not get to the other side of the street each time he

comes to the end of a block. He feels that he would just go down. He makes

believe that he is with Allie every time he reaches a curb. Holden decides

that he will go away, never go home again and never go to another prep

school. He thinks he will pretend to be a deaf-mute so that he won't have

to deal with stupid conversations. Holden goes to Phoebe's school to find

her and say goodbye. At the school he sees "fuck you" written on the wall,

and becomes enraged as he tries to scratch it off. He writes her a note

asking her to meet him near the Museum of Art so that he can return her

money. While waiting for Phoebe at the Museum, Holden chats with two

brothers who talk about mummies. He sees another "fuck you" written on the

wall, and is convinced that someone will write that below the name on his

tombstone. Holden, suffering from diarrhea, goes to the bathroom, and as he

exits the bathroom he passes out. When he regains consciousness, he feels

better. Phoebe arrives, wearing Holden's hunting hat and dragging Holden's

old suitcase. She tells him that she wants to come with him. She begs, but

he refuses and causes her to start crying. She throws the red hunting hat

back at Holden and starts to walk away. She follows Holden to the zoo, but

refuses to talk to him or get near him. He buys Phoebe a ticket for the

carousel there, and watches her go around on it as "Smoke Gets in Your

Eyes" plays. Afterwards, she takes back the red hunting hat and goes back

on the carousel. As it starts to rain, Holden cries while watching Phoebe.

Chapter Twenty-Six:

Holden ends his story there. He refuses to tell what happened after he went

home and how he got sick. He says that people are concerned about whether

he will apply himself next year. He tells that D.B. visits often, and he

often misses Stradlater, Ackley, and even Maurice. However, he advises not

to tell anybody anything, because it is this that causes a person to start

missing others.

A FAREWELL TO ARMS

SOME INFO ON ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The first son of Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a doctor, and Grace Hall

Hemingway, Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in a suburb of Chicago. He was

educated in the public schools and began to write in high school, where he

was active and outstanding, but the parts of his boyhood that mattered most

were summers spent with his family on Walloon Lake in upper Michigan. On

graduation from high school in 1917, impatient for a less sheltered

environment, he did not enter college but went to Kansas City, where he was

employed as a reporter for the Star. He was repeatedly rejected for

military service because of a defective eye, but he managed to enter World

War I as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. On July 8, 1918,

not yet 19 years old, he was injured on the Austro-Italian front at

Fossalta di Piave. Decorated for heroism and hospitalized in Milan, he fell

in love with a Red Cross nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who declined to marry

him. These were experiences he was never to forget.

After recuperating at home, Hemingway renewed his efforts at writing,

for a while worked at odd jobs in Chicago, and sailed for France as a

foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. Advised and encouraged by other

American writers in Paris--F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound--

he began to see his nonjournalistic work appear in print there, and in 1923

his first important book, a collection of stories called In Our Time, was

published in New York City. In 1926 he published The Sun Also Rises, a

novel with which he scored his first solid success. A pessimistic but

sparkling book, it deals with a group of aimless expatriates in France and

Spain--members of the postwar "lost generation," a phrase that Hemingway

scorned while making it famous. This work also introduced him to the

limelight, which he both craved and resented for the rest of his life.

Hemingway's The Torrents of Spring, a parody of the American writer

Sherwood Anderson's book Dark Laughter, also appeared in 1926.The writing

of books occupied him for most of the postwar years. He remained based in

Paris, but he traveled widely for the skiing, bullfighting, fishing, or

hunting that by then had become part of his life and formed the background

for much of his writing. His position as a master of short fiction had been

advanced by Men Without Women in 1927 and thoroughly established with the

stories in Winner Take Nothing in 1933.

Among his finest stories are "The Killers," "The Short Happy Life of

Francis Macomber," and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." At least in the public

view, however, the novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) overshadowed such works.

Reaching back to his experience as a young soldier in Italy, Hemingway

developed a grim but lyrical novel of great power, fusing love story with

war story. While serving with the Italian ambulance service during World

War I, the American lieutenant Frederic Henry falls in love with the

English nurse Catherine Barkley, who tends him during his recuperation

after being wounded. She becomes pregnant by him, but he must return to his

post. Henry deserts during the Italians' disastrous retreat after the

Battle of Caporetto, and the reunited couple flee Italy by crossing the

border into Switzerland. There, however, Catherine and her baby die during

childbirth, leaving Henry desolate at the loss of the great love of his

life.

Hemingway's love of Spain and his passion for bullfighting resulted in

Death in the Afternoon (1932), a learned study of a spectacle he saw more

as tragic ceremony than as sport. Similarly, a safari he took in 1933-34 in

the big-game region of Tanganyika resulted in The Green Hills of Africa

(1935), an account of big-game hunting. Mostly for the fishing, he bought a

house in Key West, Florida, and bought his own fishing boat. A minor novel

of 1937 called To Have and Have Not is about a Caribbean desperado and is

set against a background of lower-class violence and upper-class decadence

in Key West during the Great Depression.By now Spain was in the midst of

civil war. Still deeply attached to that country, Hemingway made four trips

there, once more a correspondent. He raised money for the Republicans in

their struggle against the Nationalists under General Francisco Franco, and

he wrote a play called The Fifth Column (1938), which is set in besieged

Madrid. As in many of his books, the protagonist of the play is based on

the author. Following his last visit to the Spanish war he purchased Finca

Vigia ("Lookout Farm"), an unpretentious estate outside Havana, Cuba, and

went to cover another war--the Japanese invasion of China.

The harvest of Hemingway's considerable experience of Spain in war and

peace was the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a substantial and

impressive work that some critics consider his finest novel, in preference

to A Farewell to Arms. It was also the most successful of all his books as

measured in sales. Set during the Spanish Civil War, it tells of Robert

Jordan, an American volunteer who is sent to join a guerrilla band behind

the Nationalist lines in the Guadarrama Mountains. Most of the novel

concerns Jordan's relations with the varied personalities of the band,

including the girl Maria, with whom he falls in love. Through dialogue,

flashbacks, and stories, Hemingway offers telling and vivid profiles of the

Spanish character and unsparingly depicts the cruelty and inhumanity

stirred up by the civil war. Jordan's mission is to blow up a strategic

bridge near Segovia in order to aid a coming Republican attack, which he

realizes is doomed to fail. In an atmosphere of impending disaster, he

blows up the bridge but is wounded and makes his retreating comrades leave

him behind, where he prepares a last-minute resistance to his Nationalist

pursuers.All of his life Hemingway was fascinated by war--in A Farewell to

Arms he focused on its pointlessness, in For Whom the Bell Tolls on the

comradeship it creates--and as World War II progressed he made his way to

London as a journalist. He flew several missions with the Royal Air Force

and crossed the English Channel with American troops on D-Day (June 6,

1944).

Attaching himself to the 22nd Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, he

saw a good deal of action in Normandy and in the Battle of the Bulge. He

also participated in the liberation of Paris and, although ostensibly a

journalist, he impressed professional soldiers not only as a man of courage

in battle but also as a real expert in military matters, guerrilla

activities, and intelligence collection.Following the war in Europe,

Hemingway returned to his home in Cuba and began to work seriously again.

He also traveled widely, and on a trip to Africa he was injured in a plane

crash. Soon after (in 1953), he received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for

The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short, heroic novel about an old Cuban

fisherman who, after an extended struggle, hooks and boats a giant marlin

only to have it eaten by voracious sharks during the long voyage home.

This book, which played a role in gaining for Hemingway the Nobel

Prize for Literature in 1954, was as enthusiastically praised as his

previous novel, Across the River and into the Trees (1950), the story of a

professional army officer who dies while on leave in Venice, had been

damned.By 1960 Fidel Castro's revolution had driven Hemingway from Cuba. He

settled in Ketchum, Idaho, and tried to lead his life and do his work as

before. For a while he succeeded, but, anxiety-ridden and depressed, he was

twice hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he

received electroshock treatments. Two days after his return to the house in

Ketchum, he took his life with a shotgun. Hemingway had married four times

and fathered three sons.He left behind a substantial amount of manuscript,

some which has been published. A Moveable Feast, an entertaining memoir of

his years in Paris (1921-26) before he was famous, was issued in 1964.

Islands in the Stream, three closely related novellas growing directly out

of his peacetime memories of the Caribbean island of Bimini, of Havana

during World War II, and of searching for U-boats off Cuba, appeared in

1970.Hemingway's characters plainly embody his own values and view of life.

The main characters of The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For

Whom the Bell Tolls are young men whose strength and self-confidence

nevertheless coexist with a sensitivity that leaves them deeply scarred by

their wartime experiences. War was for Hemingway a potent symbol of the

world, which he viewed as complex, filled with moral ambiguities, and

offering almost unavoidable pain, hurt, and destruction. To survive in such

a world, and perhaps emerge victorious, one must conduct oneself with

honour, courage, endurance, and dignity, a set of principles known as "the

Hemingway code."

To behave well in the lonely, losing battle with life is to show "grace

under pressure" and constitutes in itself a kind of victory, a theme

clearly established in The Old Man and the Sea.Hemingway's prose style was

probably the most widely imitated of any in the 20th century. He wished to

strip his own use of language of inessentials, ridding it of all traces of

verbosity, embellishment, and sentimentality. In striving to be as

objective and honest as possible, Hemingway hit upon the device of

describing a series of actions using short, simple sentences from which all

comment or emotional rhetoric have been eliminated. These sentences are

composed largely of nouns and verbs, have few adjectives and adverbs, and

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