Chester Himes: Who To Blame?

The novel Monster by Walter Dean Myers is the book I chose to read and do my essay on. The genre Walter chose for the book Monster is realistic fiction. The novel was published in 1999 which is a year after I was borning. The reason why I chose this Novel is because a teacher recommended the book to me a couple year ago but, I never got a chance to read it. I always assumed the book was good because it won three awards. The first award the book won was the National Book Award for young people’s literature. The second award the book won was the Michael L. Printz Awards. The third award the book won was called the Coretta Scott King Award Honor all in which the book won in the same year 2000. The book is told from the perspective of a young african american teenager named steve harmon. Steve lives in harlem where the story takes place. One night steve chose to hang with a bad group of friends and was in a robbery. During the robbery one of Steve’s friend kills the cashier. Now Steve is in jail and going back and forth to court hoping to be proven not guilty of felony murder. Steve and I lives are alike in many different ways although we come from different backgrounds.

In the article “The Prisoner” by Skip Hollandsworth tells the life story of Edwin Debrow, a young boy who grows up in the streets and fell into an out of control spiral when he joined the neighborhood gang. Edwin Debrow will go on to kill a taxi driver at the age of 12 and would now spend most of his life in jail. The author who has done numerous stories about kids and their tragic life has now focused on the case of Edwin

He explains that if his life went differently, he’d probably ended up at some college, somewhere. He feels that being in prison is what made him become so knowledgable because he had no distractions. “ Where else but in prison could I have attacked my ignorance by being able to study intensely sometimes as much as 15 hours a day.”

As Edgar’s Time at The Literary Messenger came to a close, Poe began to publishing more works like Tales of the Grotesque Arabesque and then would continue to work in the presidential election (Padgett 57,63). Edgar would soon become “Struck by illness” (Tilton 58); this illness was caused simply by Poe’s over use of alcohol. Edgar Allen Poe would soon being a new job at Graham’s Magazine (Tilton 60). Throughout Poe’s time at Graham’s Magazine he spent time with the most influential writers and publishers of his life, Clinton Bradshaw and Howard Pinckney (Tilton 60). With such amazing inspiration Poe’s audience would respond more to what he was publishing. With the publication of “The Murders in Rue Morgue,” the first modern detective story, Poe would create a new level of fame for himself (Tilton 61). The year 1841 would be the one of the last periods of time when Poe is truly happy.

The Baltimore Sun newspaper supplied an article about Wes Moore, a local who had just earned a Rhodes Scholarship. The same paper also ran a series of stories about four men who had robbed a jewelry store and allegedly been involved in the killing of a police officer. The police were still on the hunt for two of the suspects, who were also brothers. One of the two was named Wes Moore. After the newspaper ran the stories about the robbery, the manhunt, and the trial, Wes, the scholar, wrote a letter to the other Wes, a now convicted murderer who was serving a life sentence at Jessup Correctional Institution. His letter contained a jarring question: How did their lives end up so different? That first letter led to an ongoing correspondence in which the two discovered that a teens’ success is decided by his environment, education, and the expectations held to him.

Imagine a South Central fourteen-year-old who is a multiple offender that faked a kidnapping then shot at the police officers trying to stop him. Now imagine a young boy growing up in a violent area always fearful of his life and going through traumatic experiences such as getting shot, seeing his brother killed, and being abused. This same young man, unknowingly, shot at undercover cops. In this instance, a general audience would be more likely to sympathize with the young boy that went through the many hardships. Bryan Stevenson tells this story of Antonio Nuñez with descriptive language in order to justify his argument of Nuñez by appealing strongly to the audience's emotions. Because of sympathy that humans naturally feel, the young boy

Victor Hassine was a life without parole inmate that was convicted of a capital offence in 1981. Shortly after Hassine graduated from Law School in New York, he was placed into a new home for the rest of his life, Graterford Prison. He was from Egypt and immigrated to New Jersey becoming a naturalized citizen in 1966. In his book, Life without Parole: Living and Dying in Prison Today, Hassine gives insight of the everyday life of being an inmate in a prison today. He threw himself into making prisons have better living conditions for the other inmates and himself. Hassines tries to tell the world about the truth of an American prisons by telling the reader what he had to go through while in a men’s maximum security prison. Entering the Graterford Prison in Pennsylvania, with only the thought of fear on his mind he quickly adapted to his new home. He tells about how he is processed through the system and expresses the amount of fear he is feeling.

Many people enjoy the detective and crime shows, but what they may not realize is that Edgar Allan Poe was the one to pioneer this genre. For the short stories, poems, and a few books he wrote, Edgar Allan Poe is a recognized American writer. He lived in the era of westward expansion, slavery laws beginning to become an issue, and most influential to Poe, Tuberculosis(TB) was a major issue. There was not yet a cure for people with TB, in fact, there wouldn’t be a known cure for another 100 years after his life. He lost many people during his life; his father left before Poe was 3 years old, his mother died from TB when Poe was three. He moved into a foster home, but stories tell that his foster father did not like him so he struggled to find the support he needed both as a child and as a broke college student. Although many myths state that Poe was a drunkard and incapable of love, he was married. His outsiderness in his foster home likely influenced his writing, as well as his irregularity and uniqueness, and his horrid memories of how TB had taken some of his closes family. Poe’s unique literary techniques enhance his macabre writing style.

The writer, Jeremiah Torres, took the path of releasing the angry by showing how unjustly he was treated in the school newspaper. He also moved on with his life once he had exposed it. His friend, Carlos, took a path that allowed his anger to fester and it slowly ruined his life. He became a convict, because he threw a quarter at the back window of a Suburban.

Edmund Emil Kemper III grew up in a setting similar to that of many serial killers we hear about in the mainstream media. Although Kemper displayed signs of high intelligence as a child, he also showed other, troubling signs that are typical of many serial killers. For example, in his early years Kemper played games in which he forced his sisters to sit and watch him pretend to suffer and die and even killed his pet cat when he observed that the animal had imprinted on his two sisters. After his parents' divorce, Kemper moved with his mother and sisters to Montana, where he suffered psychological abuse from his alcoholic mother. Eventually, Kemper’s mother sent him to live with his father and shortly after, with his grandparents on their farm in North Fork, California.

Winston Moseley’s life can be characterized by three major settings: his family life, his crimes, and his imprisonment.

On a Stormy night in the slums of Boston, Massachusetts in 1884, Xavier Lansford was was born. He was raised in a house with barely any life in it, the damp, cold, dark environment was brutal on him and his family. His parents barely had enough money to scrape by with the worst of a bottom feeders lifestyle, but they took a risky loan from a shady man in a laundromat. They used that money to put their only son through law school to become a lawyer. The day that Xavier left his parents were murdered. He made it his life goal to find the man that had his parents killed. After three years of searching he had heard that the man was going to be a local pub near his apartment. He planned it out, everything, but they were just one step ahead of him. They were waiting for him at the door. Knocked him out cold. He

Nathaniel Hathorne, the greatest writer in American Fiction, was originally born in Massachusetts; July 4th, 1804 (which, later-on he added a ‘w’ in his name). The American novelist was the only Son of Nathaniel and Elizabeth Clark Hathorne. He lost his father at a young age from the yellow fever in 1808 while at sea. Nathaniel believed that his own Puritan Heritage was what caused all his down falls and reoccurring tragedies, like the death of his father. He felt like he carried the burdens and sins of his forefathers and had no escape to this divine retribution. He became immobile for several months after injuring his leg, the tragedy led him to believe it was the sins of his ancestors that made him live his life struggling. Likewise, in

While American and British authors developed the two distinct schools of detective fiction, known as “hard-boiled and “golden age,” simultaneously, the British works served to continue traditions established by earlier authors while American works formed their own distinct identity. Though a niche category, detective works reflect the morality and culture of the societies their authors lived in. Written in the time period after World War I, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and “The Gutting of Couffignal”, and Raymond Chandler’s “Trouble Is My Business” adapt their detectives to a new harsh reality of urban life. In “hard-boiled” works, the detective is more realistic than the detective in “golden age” works according to the

As the United States became a flourishing nation in the 1800’s, American entertainment such as poetry and short stories began to unfold by up-and-coming writers. Among these artists of text, Edgar Allan Poe is without a doubt an incredibly prominent figure when discussing American literature. A celebrity after his critically acclaimed poem, “The Raven,” he was one of the earliest American authors to craft and perfect the short story. Furthermore, Poe is credited to contribute much to the horror and science-fiction genres, as well as being the inventor of the detective-fiction genre, as his novel The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841, predates the most famous character of the genre, Sherlock Holmes, in 1887 (Genesis: 1841). Under a constant struggle to make ends meet, he was among the first American authors to make a living strictly off his pieces of literature, which was not exactly a successful money-making career path (Graves). Which made matters even worse, several of his closest family members, relatives, and relationships all fell to tuberculosis, the final of which he attempted to take care of by himself, even though he was essentially penniless up to his mysterious death in 1849 (Hossick). With great success, however, it is important to analyze how this legendary writer came to be.