Identify the author: Still alive and writing, this Vietnam veteran wrote about the Vietnam conflict as a surrealistic experience in his National Book Award- winning novel. He received a Purple Heart in action at My Lai and presents the absurdity of war through the experiences of the soldier on the ground.

Identify the character: He is constantly moving to different places in his wagon, earning what he can repairing items for people. He lives in his wagon. When he meets a woman at a farm where he stops for directions, he lies to her to get her to feel sorry for him and give him work. He discards the flowers he is given by the woman and throws them on the road, keeping the pot so he can sell it.

Who is the speaker?   “My father was a justice of the peace, and I suppose he possessed the power of life and death over all men, and could hang anybody that offended him. This was distinction enough for me as a general thing; but the desire to be a steamboatman kept intruding, nevertheless.”

A young man who is trying to recover from violence he had experienced and decompress mentally and spiritually by being in nature in this way.

Identify the character: This young man is harassed by his white employer and other white men until he is forced to fight another young Black man with whom he has no conflict, causing him to feel anger and shame at his loss of dignity.

We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties.   Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while        We wear the mask.   We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise,        We wear the mask!

Identify the title for the quote:Then took the other, as just as fair: And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear;Though as for that, the passing there,Had worn them really about the same,And both that morning equally layIn leaves no step had trodden black.

Identify the author: This writer spent his childhood moving often as his mother got work as a maid or cook. He had an uneven education but could read the write. His Mississippi birthplace and the southern states where they moved were segregated so that he could not use public libraries, but he knew he wanted to learn. He was able to get books from a public library in Memphis when he was a young man by using a white man’s library card. His story of the fear and violence of his youth is told in his autobiographical work Black Boy.

Name the character: This character muses on the naturalistic view of the absurdity of the human condition. Nature is completely indifferent to the existence of human beings, who have no importance in the universe as this character recognizes when he faces drowning in the Atlantic Ocean.

Identify the person: The wife of a famous literary person, this woman also wrote a novel as well as painted. She and her husband were associated with the Roaring Twenties and the decade after the end of World War I. She met her husband when he was stationed in Montgomery as a young soldier in 1917.