The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea is a short novel written by the American author Ernest Hemingway in
1951 in Cuba, and published in 1952. It was the last major work of fiction by Hemingway that was
published during his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it tells the story of Santiago, an
aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Cuba.[2]
In 1953, The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it was cited by
the Nobel Committee as contributing to their awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hemingway in
1954.
Written in 1951, and published in 1952 , The Old Man and the Sea is Hemingway's final full-length
work published during his lifetime. The book, dedicated to "Charlie Scribner" and to Hemingway's literary
editor "Max Perkins", was featured in Life magazine on September 1, 1952, and five million copies of the
magazine were sold in two days.
The Old Man and the Sea became a Book of the Month Club selection, and made Hemingway a
celebrity. Published in book form on September 1, 1952, the first edition print run was 50,000 copies. The
illustrated edition featured black and white pictures by Charles Tunnicliffe and Raymond Sheppard.
In May 1953, the novel received the Pulitzer Prize and was specifically cited when in 1954 he was
awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature which he dedicated to the Cuban people. The success of The Old Man
and the Sea made Hemingway an international celebrity. The Old Man and the Sea is taught at schools
around the world and continues to earn foreign royalties.
The Old Man and the Sea tells the story of a battle between an aging, experienced fisherman,
Santiago, and a large marlin. The story opens with Santiago having gone 84 days without catching a fish,
and now being seen as "salao", the worst form of unluckiness. He is so unlucky that his young apprentice,
Manolin, has been forbidden by his parents to sail with him and has been told instead to fish with successful
fishermen. The boy visits Santiago's shack each night, hauling his fishing gear, preparing food, talking about
American baseball and his favorite player, Joe DiMaggio. Santiago tells Manolin that on the next day, he
will venture far out into the Gulf Stream, north of Cuba in the Straits of Florida to fish, confident that his
unlucky streak is near its end.
On the eighty-fifth day of his unlucky streak, Santiago takes his skiff into the Gulf Stream, sets his
lines and by noon, has his bait taken by a big fish that he is sure is a marlin. Unable to haul in the great
marlin, Santiago is instead pulled by the marlin, and two days and nights pass with Santiago holding onto
the line. Though wounded by the struggle and in pain, Santiago expresses a compassionate appreciation for
his adversary, often referring to him as a brother. He also determines that, because of the fish's great dignity,
no one shall deserve to eat the marlin.
On the third day, the fish begins to circle the skiff. Santiago, worn out and almost delirious, uses all
his remaining strength to pull the fish onto its side and stab the marlin with a harpoon. Santiago straps the
marlin to the side of his skiff and heads home, thinking about the high price the fish will bring him at the
market and how many people he will feed.
On his way in to shore, sharks are attracted to the marlin's blood. Santiago kills a great mako
shark with his harpoon, but he loses the weapon. He makes a new harpoon by strapping his knife to the end
of an oar to help ward off the next line of sharks; five sharks are slain and many others are driven away. But
the sharks keep coming, and by nightfall the sharks have almost devoured the marlin's entire carcass, leaving
a skeleton consisting mostly of its backbone, its tail and its head. Santiago knows that he is defeated and
tells the sharks of how they have killed his dreams. Upon reaching the shore before dawn on the next day,
Santiago struggles to his shack, carrying the heavy mast on his shoulder, leaving the fish head and the bones
on the shore. Once home, he slumps onto his bed and falls into a deep sleep.
A group of fishermen gather the next day around the boat where the fish's skeleton is still attached.
One of the fishermen measures it to be 18 feet (5.5 m) from nose to tail. Pedrico is given the head of the fish,
and the other fishermen tell Manolin to tell the old man how sorry they are. Tourists at the nearby café
mistakenly take it for a shark. The boy, worried about the old man, cries upon finding him safe asleep and at
his injured hands. Manolin brings him newspapers and coffee. When the old man wakes, they promise to
fish together once again. Upon his return to sleep, Santiago dreams of his youth—of lions on an African
beach.
 The Great Gatsby
Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald that follows a cast
of characters living in the fictional towns of West Egg and East Egg on prosperous Long Island in the
summer of 1922. The story primarily concerns the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and
his quixotic passion and obsession with the beautiful former debutante Daisy Buchanan. Considered to be
Fitzgerald's magnum opus, The Great Gatsby explores themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change,
social upheaval, and excess, creating a portrait of the Roaring Twenties that has been described as a
cautionary tale regarding the American Dream.
Fitzgerald—inspired by the parties he had attended while visiting Long Island's North Shore—began
planning the novel in 1923, desiring to produce, in his words, "something new—something extraordinary
and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned." Progress was slow, with Fitzgerald completing his first
draft following a move to the French Riviera in 1924. His editor, Maxwell Perkins, felt the book was vague
and persuaded the author to revise over the following winter. Fitzgerald was repeatedly ambivalent about the
book's title and he considered a variety of alternatives, including titles that referred to the Roman
character Trimalchio; the title he was last documented to have desired was Under the Red, White, and Blue.
First published by Scribner's in April 1925, The Great Gatsby received mixed reviews and sold
poorly; in its first year, the book sold only 20,000 copies. Fitzgerald died in 1940, believing himself to be a
failure and his work forgotten. However, the novel experienced a revival during World War II, and became a
part of American high school curricula and numerous stage and film adaptations in the following decades.
Today, The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be a literary classic and a contender for the title "Great
American Novel."
In the summer of 1922, Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate from the Midwest and veteran of the Great
War —who serves as the novel's narrator—takes a job in New York as a bondsalesman. He rents a small
house on Long Island, in the fictional village of West Egg, next door to the lavish mansion of Jay Gatsby, a
mysterious multi-millionaire who holds extravagant parties but does not participate in them. Nick drives
around the bay to East Egg for dinner at the home of his beautiful cousin, Daisy Fay Buchanan, and her
husband, Tom, a college acquaintance of Nick's. They introduce Nick to Jordan Baker, an attractive, cynical
young golfer. She reveals to Nick that Tom has a mistress, Myrtle Wilson, who lives in the "valley of
ashes,"[10] an industrial dumping ground between West Egg and New York City. Not long after this
revelation, Nick travels to New York City with Tom to a garage owned by Myrtle's husband George Wilson,
before heading to an apartment that Tom uses like a hotel room for Myrtle, as well as other women with
whom he also sleeps. At Tom's New York apartment, a vulgar and bizarre party takes place. It ends with
Tom physically abusing Myrtle, breaking her nose in the process, after she says Daisy's name several times,
which makes him angry.
Nick eventually receives an invitation to one of Gatsby's parties. Nick encounters Jordan Baker at the
party and they meet Gatsby himself, an aloof and surprisingly young man who recognizes Nick because they
were in the same division in the Great War. Through Jordan, Nick later learns that Gatsby knew Daisy
through a purely chance meeting in 1917 when Daisy and her friends were doing volunteer service work
with young officers headed to Europe. From their brief meetings and casual encounters at that time, Gatsby
became (and still is) deeply in love with Daisy. Gatsby had hoped that his wild parties would attract an
unsuspecting Daisy, who lived across the bay, to appear at his doorstep and allow him to present himself as
a man of wealth and position.
Having developed a budding friendship with Nick, Gatsby uses him to arrange a reunion between
himself and Daisy. Nick invites Daisy to have tea at his house without telling her that Gatsby will also be
there. After an initially awkward reunion, Gatsby takes Nick and Daisy to his large mansion in an attempt to
show Daisy his wealth and sophistication. Daisy, Nick and Gatsby spend the day enjoying all the activities
Gatsby can provide and Nick realizes Daisy is still in love with Gatsby. Soon, the two begin an affair. At a
luncheon at the Buchanan estate, Daisy speaks to Gatsby with such undisguised intimacy that Tom realizes
their affair. Though Tom is himself an adulterer, he is outraged by his wife's infidelity. The group decides to
drive to the Plaza Hotel, where Tom confronts Gatsby in his suite, asserting that he and Daisy have a history
that Gatsby could never understand. In addition to that, he announces to his wife that Gatsby is a criminal
whose fortune comes from bootlegging alcohol and other illegal activities. Daisy decides to stay with Tom,
and Tom contemptuously sends her back to East Egg with Gatsby, attempting to prove that Gatsby cannot
hurt him.
On the way back, Gatsby's car strikes and kills Tom's mistress, Myrtle. Nick later learns that Daisy,
not Gatsby himself, was driving the car at the time of the accident. George falsely concludes that the driver
of the yellow car is the secret lover he suspects his wife had. George learns from Tom that the yellow car is
Jay Gatsby's. He fatally shoots Gatsby at his pool, and then turns the gun on himself. Nick organizes a
funeral for Gatsby, but only one of Gatsby's party-goers and his estranged father, Henry Gatz, attend. None
of Gatsby's business associates come nor does Daisy. Nick runs into Tom in New York and learns it was
Tom who told George the yellow car belonged to Gatsby, and gave him Gatsby's address. Disillusioned with
the East, Nick moves back to the Midwest, having decided not to tell Tom that it was Daisy behind the
wheel of the car that killed Myrtle.
The cover of the first printing of The Great Gatsby is among the most celebrated pieces of art in
American literature. It depicts disembodied eyes and a mouth over a blue skyline, with images of naked
women reflected in the irises. A little-known artist named Francis Cugat was commissioned to illustrate the
book while Fitzgerald was in the midst of writing it. The cover was completed before the novel; Fitzgerald
was so enamored with it that he told his publisher he had "written it into" the novel. Fitzgerald's remarks
about incorporating the painting into the novel led to the interpretation that the eyes are reminiscent of those
of fictional optometrist Dr. T. J. Eckleburg (depicted on a faded commercial billboard near George Wilson's
auto repair shop), which Fitzgerald described as "blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They
look out of no face, but instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent
nose." Although this passage has some resemblance to the painting, a closer explanation can be found in the
description of Daisy Buchanan as the "girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and
blinding signs." Ernest Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast that when Fitzgerald lent him a copy of The
Great Gatsby to read, he immediately disliked the cover, but "Scott told me not to be put off by it, that it had
to do with a billboard along a highway in Long Island that was important in the story. He said he had liked
the jacket and now he didn't like it."
In 1940, Fitzgerald suffered a third and fatal heart attack, and died believing his work forgotten. His
obituary in The New York Times mentioned Gatsby as Fitzgerald "at his best." A strong appreciation for the
book had developed in underground circles; future writers Edward Newhouse and Budd Schulberg were
deeply affected by it and John O'Harashowed the book's influence. The republication of Gatsby in Edmund
Wilson's edition of The Last Tycoon in 1941 produced an outburst of comment, with the general consensus
expressing the sentiment that the book was an enduring work of fiction.
In 1942, a group of publishing executives created the Council on Books in Wartime. The Council's purpose
was to distribute paperback books to soldiers fighting in the Second World War. The Great Gatsby was one
of these books. The books proved to be "as popular as pin-up girls" among the soldiers, according to
the Saturday Evening Post's contemporary report. 155,000 copies of Gatsby were distributed to soldiers
overseas.
By 1944, full-length articles on Fitzgerald's works were being published, and the following year, "the
opinion that Gatsby was merely a period piece had almost entirely disappeared." This revival was paved by
interest shown by literary critic Edmund Wilson, who was Fitzgerald's friend.  In 1951, Arthur
Mizener published The Far Side of Paradise, a biography of Fitzgerald. He emphasized The Great Gatsby's
positive reception by literary critics, which may have influenced public opinion and renewed interest in it.
By 1960, the book was steadily selling 50,000 copies per year, and renewed interest led by now The
New York Times editorialist Mizener to proclaim the novel "a classic of twentieth-century American
fiction." The Great Gatsby has sold over 25 million copies worldwide as of 2013, annually sells an
additional 500,000 copies, and is Scribner's most popular title; in 2013, the e-book alone sold 185,000
copies.
Scribner's copyright will expire on January 1, 2021, when all works published in 1925 enter
the public domain in the United States.
 The Gold-Bug
Edgar Allan Poe

"The Gold-Bug" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe published in 1843. The plot follows William
Legrand, who was bitten by a gold-colored bug. His servant Jupiter fears that Legrand is going insane and
goes to Legrand's friend, an unnamed narrator, who agrees to visit his old friend. Legrand pulls the other two
into an adventure after deciphering a secret message that will lead to a buried treasure.
The story, set on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, is often compared with Poe's "tales
of ratiocination" as an early form of detective fiction. Poe became aware of the public's interest in secret
writing in 1840 and asked readers to challenge his skills as a code-breaker. He took advantage of the
popularity of cryptography as he was writing "The Gold-Bug", and the success of the story centers on one
such cryptogram. Modern critics have judged the characterization of Legrand's servant Jupiter as racist,
especially because of his comical dialect speech.
Poe submitted "The Gold-Bug" as an entry to a writing contest sponsored by the Philadelphia Dollar
Newspaper. His story won the grand prize and was published in three installments, beginning in June 1843.
The prize also included $100, probably the largest single sum that Poe received for any of his works. "The
Gold-Bug" was an instant success and was the most popular and most widely read of Poe's works during his
lifetime. It also helped popularize cryptograms and secret writing.
William Legrand has relocated from New Orleans to Sullivan's Island in South Carolina after losing
his family fortune, and has brought his African-American servant Jupiter with him. The story's narrator, a
friend of Legrand, visits him one evening to see an unusual scarab-like bug he has found. The bug's weight
and lustrous appearance convince Jupiter that it is made of pure gold. Legrand has lent it to an officer
stationed at a nearby fort, but he draws a sketch of it for the narrator, with markings on the carapace that
resemble a skull. As they discuss the bug, Legrand becomes particularly focused on the sketch and carefully
locks it in his desk for safekeeping. Confused, the narrator takes his leave for the night.
One month later, Jupiter visits the narrator on behalf of his master and asks him to come
immediately, fearing that Legrand has been bitten by the bug and gone insane. Once they arrive on the
island, Legrand insists that the bug will be the key to restoring his lost fortune. He leads them on an
expedition to a particular tree and has Jupiter climb it until he finds a skull nailed at the end of one branch.
At Legrand's direction, Jupiter drops the bug through one eye socket and Legrand paces out to a spot where
the group begins to dig. Finding nothing there, Legrand has Jupiter climb the tree again and drop the bug
through the skull's other eye; they choose a different spot to dig, this time finding two skeletons and a chest
filled with gold coins and jewelry. They estimate the total value at $1.5 million, but even that figure proves
to be below the actual worth when they eventually sell the items.
Legrand explains that on the day he found the bug on the mainland coastline, Jupiter had picked up a
scrap piece of parchment to wrap it up. Legrand kept the scrap and used it to sketch the bug for the narrator;
in so doing, though, he noticed traces of invisible ink, revealed by the heat of the fire burning on the hearth.
The parchment proved to contain a cryptogram, which Legrand deciphered as a set of directions for finding
a treasure buried by the infamous pirate Captain Kidd. The final step involved dropping a slug or weight
through the left eye of the skull in the tree; their first dig failed because Jupiter mistakenly dropped it
through the right eye instead. Legrand muses that the skeletons may be the remains of two members of
Kidd's crew, who buried the chest and were then killed to silence them.
"The Gold-Bug" inspired Robert Louis Stevenson in his novel about treasure-hunting, Treasure
Island (1883). Stevenson acknowledged this influence: "I broke into the gallery of Mr. Poe... No doubt the
skeleton [in my novel] is conveyed from Poe."
Poe played a major role in popularizing cryptograms in newspapers and magazines in his time
period and beyond. William F. Friedman, America's foremost cryptologist, initially became interested in
cryptography after reading "The Gold-Bug" as a child—interest that he later put to use in
deciphering Japan's PURPLE code during World War II. "The Gold-Bug" also includes the first use of the
term cryptograph (as opposed to cryptogram).
The story proved popular enough in its day that a stage version opened on August 8, 1843. The
production was put together by Silas S. Steele and was performed at the American Theatre in
Philadelphia. The editor of the Philadelphia newspaper The Spirit of the Times said that the performance
"dragged, and was rather tedious. The frame work was well enough, but wanted filling up".
 In film and television, an adaptation of the work appeared on Your Favorite Story on February 1,
1953 (Season 1, Episode 4). It was directed by Robert Florey with the teleplay written by Robert Libott. A
later adaptation of the work appeared on ABC Weekend Special on February 2, 1980 (Season 3, Episode 7).
This version was directed by Robert Fuestwith the teleplay written by Edward Pomerantz. A Spanish feature
film adaptation of the work appeared in 1983 under the title En busca del dragón dorado. It was written and
directed by Jesús Franco, using the alias "James P. Johnson".
The 1956 film Manfish was adapted from "The Gold-Bug."
Poe originally sold "The Gold-Bug" to George Rex Graham for Graham's Magazine for $52 but
asked for it back when he heard about a writing contest sponsored by Philadelphia's Dollar
Newspaper. Incidentally, Poe did not return the money to Graham and instead offered to make it up to him
with reviews he would write. Poe won the grand prize; in addition to winning $100, the story was published
in two installments on June 21 and June 28, 1843, in the newspaper. His $100 payment from the newspaper
may have been the most he was paid for a single work. Anticipating a positive public response, the Dollar
Newspaper took out a copyright on "The Gold-Bug" prior to publication.
 Moby-Dick
Herman Melville

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book is
sailor Ishmael's narrative of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for revenge
on Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that on the ship's previous voyage bit off Ahab's leg at the knee.
A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, the work's genre classifications range from
late Romantic to early Symbolist. Moby-Dick was published to mixed reviews, was a commercial failure,
and was out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891. Its reputation as a "Great American Novel"
was established only in the 20th century, after the centennial of its author's birth. William
Faulkner confessed he wished he had written the book himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the
strangest and most wonderful books in the world" and "the greatest book of the sea ever
written". Its opening sentence, "Call me Ishmael", is among world literature's most famous.
Melville began writing Moby-Dick in February 1850, and would eventually take 18 months to write
the book, a full year more than he had first anticipated. Writing was interrupted by his making the
acquaintance of Nathaniel Hawthorne in August 1850, and by the creation of the "Mosses from an Old
Manse" essay as a first result of that friendship. The book is dedicated to Hawthorne, "in token of my
admiration for his genius".
The basis for the work is Melville's 1841 whaling voyage aboard the Acushnet. The novel also draws
on whaling literature, and on literary inspirations such as Shakespeare and the Bible. The white whale is
modeled on the notoriously hard-to-catch albino whale Mocha Dick, and the book's ending is based on the
sinking of the whaleship Essex in 1820. The detailed and realistic descriptions of whale hunting and of
extracting whale oil, as well as life aboard ship among a culturally diverse crew, are mixed with exploration
of class and social status, good and evil, and the existence of God. In addition to narrative prose, Melville
uses styles and literary devicesranging from songs, poetry, and catalogs to Shakespearean stage
directions, soliloquies, and asides.
In October 1851, the chapter "The Town Ho's Story" was published in Harper's New Monthly
Magazine. The same month, the whole book was first published (in three volumes) as The Whale in London,
and under its definitive title in a single-volume edition in New York in November. There are hundreds of
differences between the two editions, most slight but some important and illuminating. The London
publisher, Richard Bentley, censored or changed sensitive passages; Melville made revisions as well,
including a last-minute change to the title for the New York edition. The whale, however, appears in the text
of both editions as "Moby Dick", without the hyphen. One factor that led British reviewers to scorn the book
was that it seemed to be told by a narrator who perished with the ship: the British edition lacked the
Epilogue, which recounts Ishmael's survival. About 3,200 copies were sold during the author's life.
Ishmael is the narrator, shaping his story with use of many different genres including sermons, stage
plays, soliloquies, and emblematical readings. Repeatedly, Ishmael refers to his writing of the book: "But
how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all
these chapters might be naught." Scholar John Bryant calls him the novel's "central consciousness and
narrative voice." Walter Bezanson first distinguishes Ishmael as narrator from Ishmael as character, whom
he calls "forecastle Ishmael", the younger Ishmael of some years ago. Narrator Ishmael, then, is "merely
young Ishmael grown older." A second distinction avoids confusion of either of both Ishmaels with the
author Herman Melville. Bezanson warns readers to "resist any one-to-one equation of Melville and
Ishmael."
Moby-Dick is based on Melville's experience on the whaler Acushnet, however even the book's most
factual accounts of whaling are not straight autobiography. On December 30, 1840, he signed on as a green
hand for the maiden voyage of the Acushnet, planned to last for 52 months. Its owner, Melvin O. Bradford,
resembled Bildad, who signed on Ishmael, in that he was a Quaker: on several instances when he signed
documents, he erased the word "swear" and replaced it with "affirm". But the shareholders of
the Acushnet were relatively wealthy, whereas the owners of the Pequod included poor widows and
orphaned children. Its captain was Valentine Pease, Jr., who was 43 years old at the start of the voyage.
 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is an 1876 novel about a young boy growing up

along the Mississippi River. It is set in the 1840s in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, inspired
by Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain lived as a boy.[2] In the novel Tom Sawyerhas several adventures, often
with his friend, Huckleberry Finn. Originally a commercial failure, the book ended up being the best selling
of any of Twain's works during his lifetime.
Although The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is sometimes overshadowed by its sequel, Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, the book is considered a masterpiece of American literature, and was one of the first
novels to be written on a typewriter.
The novel has elements of humour, satire and social criticism; features that later made Mark
Twain one of the most important authors of American literature. Mark Twain describes some
autobiographical events in the book. The novel is set around Twain's actual boyhood home of Hannibal, near
St. Louis, and many of the places in it are real and today support a tourist industry as a result.
To help show how mischievous and messy boyhood was, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of
Art, Prints and Photographs, shows a picture of a young boy smoking a pipe, sawing furniture, climbing all
over the place, and sleeping. In Twain's novel, Tom and his friend are young when they decided they want
to learn how to smoke a pipe. Tom and Joe do this to show just how cool they are to the other boys. 
In November 1875 Twain gave the manuscript to Elisha Bliss of the American Publishing Company,
who sent it to True Williams for the illustrations. A little later, Twain had the text also quickly published
at Chatto and Windus of London, in June 1876, but without illustration. Pirate editions appeared very
quickly in Canada and Germany. The American Publishing Company finally published its edition in
December 1876, which was the first illustrated edition of Tom Sawyer.
These two editions differ slightly. After completing his manuscript, Twain had a copy made of it. It
is this copy which was read and annotated by his friend William Dean Howells. Twain then made his own
corrections based on Howells comments which he later incorporated in the original manuscript, but some
corrections escaped him. The English edition was based on this corrected copy, while the illustrated
American edition was based on the original manuscript. To further complicate matters, Twain was
personally concerned with the revision of the proofs of the American edition, which he did not do for the
English edition. The American edition is therefore considered the authoritative edition.
Tom Sawyer, an orphan, lives with his Aunt Polly and his half-brother Sid in the fictional town of
St. Petersburg, Missouri sometime in the 1840s. A fun-loving boy, Tom skips school to go swimming and is
made to whitewash his aunt's fence for the entirety of the next day, Saturday, as punishment.
In one of the most famous scenes in American literature, Tom cleverly persuades the various
neighborhood children to trade him small trinkets and treasures for the "privilege" of doing his tedious work,
using reverse psychology to convince them it is an enjoyable activity. Tom later trades the trinkets with
other students for various denominations of tickets, obtained at the local Sunday school for memorizing
verses of Scripture; he cashes these in to the minister in order to win a much-coveted Bible offered to
studious children as a prize, despite being one of the worst students in the Sunday school and knowing
almost nothing of Scripture, eliciting envy from the students and a mixture of pride and shock from the
adults.
Tom falls in love with Becky Thatcher, a new girl in town and the daughter of a prominent judge.
Tom wins the admiration of the judge in church by obtaining the Bible as a prize, but reveals his ignorance
when he cannot answer basic questions about Scripture. Tom pursues Becky, eventually persuading her to
get "engaged" by kissing him. However, their romance soon collapses when she learns that Tom had been
previously "engaged" to another schoolgirl, Amy Lawrence, and that Becky was not his first girlfriend.
Shortly after Becky shuns him, Tom accompanies Huckleberry Finn, a vagrant boy whom all the other boys
admire, to a graveyard at midnight to perform a superstitious ritual designed to heal warts. At the graveyard,
they witness a trio of body snatchers, Dr. Robinson, Muff Potter, and Injun Joe, robbing a grave. Muff Potter
is drunk and eventually blacks out, while Injun Joe gets into a fight with Dr. Robinson and murders him.
Injun Joe then appears to frame Muff Potter for the murder. Tom and Huckleberry Finn swear a blood oath
not to tell anyone about the murder, fearing Injun Joe would somehow discover it was them and murder
them in turn. Muff Potter is eventually jailed, assuming he committed the killing in an act of drunkenness
and accepting of his guilt and fate.
Tom grows bored by school, and along with his best friend Joe Harper and Huckleberry Finn, they
run away to Jackson's Island in the Mississippi river to begin life as "pirates." While enjoying their new-
found freedom, they become aware that the community is sounding the river for their bodies, as the boys are
missing and presumed dead. Tom sneaks back home one night to observe the commotion, and after a brief
moment of remorse at his loved ones' suffering, he is struck by the grand idea of appearing at his own
funeral. The trio later carries out this scheme, making a sensational and sudden appearance at church in the
middle of their joint funeral service, winning the immense respect of their classmates for the stunt. Back in
school, Tom regains Becky's favor after he nobly accepts the blame and caning punishment for a book she
has ripped.
In court, Injun Joe pins the murder on Muff Potter, although Tom and Huckleberry Finn know he is
innocent. At Potter's trial, Tom decides to defy his blood oath with Huck and speaks out against Injun Joe,
who quickly escapes through a window before he can be apprehended. Henceforth, the boys live in constant
fear of Joe's revenge on them for incriminating him.
Summer arrives, and Tom and Huck decide to hunt for buried treasure in a haunted house. After
venturing upstairs, they hear a noise below, and peering through holes in the floor, they see the deaf-
mute Spaniard who had showed up in the village some weeks before reveal himself to be Injun Joe.
Speaking freely, Injun Joe and a companion plan to bury some stolen treasure of their own in the house.
From their hiding spot, Tom and Huck wriggle with delight at the prospect of digging it up. However, by
chance, the villains discover an even greater gold hoard buried in the hearth, and carry it off to a better secret
hiding place. The boys are determined to find where it has gone, and one night, Huck spots them and follows
them. He overhears Injun Joe's plans to break into the house of the wealthy Widow Douglas and mutilate her
face, an act of revenge for her late husband, a justice of the peace, having once ordered him to be publicly
whipped for vagrancy. Running to fetch help, Huck prevents the crime and requests his name not be made
public, for fear of Injun Joe's retaliation, thus becoming an anonymous hero.
In the meantime, Tom goes on a picnic to McDougal's Cave with Becky and their classmates.
However, Tom and Becky get lost and end up wandering in the extensive cave complex for the several days,
facing starvation and dehydration. Becky becomes extremely dehydrated and weak, and Tom's search for a
way out grows more desperate. He accidentally encounters Injun Joe in the caves one day, but is not seen by
his nemesis. Eventually, Tom finds a way out, and they are joyfully welcomed back by their community. As
a preventive measure, Judge Thatcher, Becky's father, has McDougal's Cave sealed off with an iron door.
When Tom hears of the sealing two weeks later, he is horror-stricken, knowing that Injun Joe is still inside.
He directs a posse to the cave, where they find Injun Joe's corpse just inside the sealed entrance, starved to
death after having desperately consumed raw bats and candle stubs as a last resort. The place of his death,
and specifically the in situ cup he used to collect water from a dripping stalactite, becomes a local tourist
attraction. Tom and others in the town feel pity at the horribly cruel death, despite Injun Joe's wickedness,
and a petition is started to the governor to posthumously pardon him.
A week later, having deduced from Injun Joe's presence at McDougal's Cave that the villain must
have hidden the stolen gold inside, Tom takes Huck to the cave and they find the box of gold, the proceeds
of which are invested for them. The Widow Douglas adopts Huck, but he finds the restrictions of a civilized
home life painful, attempting to escape back to his vagrant life. Tom tricks him into thinking that he can
later join Tom's new scheme of starting a robber band if he returns to the widow. Reluctantly, Huck agrees
and goes back to the widow.
 American literature
American literature is literature written or produced in the United States of America and
its preceding colonies (for specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United
States and Theater in the United States). Before the founding of the United States, the British colonies on the
eastern coast of the present-day United States were heavily influenced by English literature. The American
literary tradition thus began as part of the broader tradition of English literature.
The revolutionary period is notable for the political writings of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander
Hamilton, and Thomas Paine. Thomas Jefferson's United States Declaration of Independence solidified his
status as a key American writer. It was in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that the nation's first novels
were published. An early example is William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy published in 1791.
Brown's novel depicts a tragic love story between siblings who fall in love without knowing they are related.
With an increasing desire to produce uniquely American literature and culture, a number of key new
literary figures emerged, perhaps most prominently Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe. In 1836, Ralph
Waldo Emerson started an influential movement known as Transcendentalism. Inspired by that
movement, Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden, which celebrates individualism and nature and urges
resistance to the dictates of organized society. The political conflict surrounding abolitionism inspired the
writings of William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe in her famous novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.
These efforts were supported by the continuation of the slave narratives such as Frederick
Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Nathaniel Hawthorne published his magnum opus The Scarlet Letter, a novel
about adultery. Hawthorne influenced Herman Melville, who is notable for the books Moby-Dick and Billy
Budd. America's greatest poets of the nineteenth century were Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Mark
Twain (the pen name used by Samuel Langhorne Clemens) was the first major American writer to be born
away from the East Coast. Henry James put American literature on the international map with novels
like The Portrait of a Lady. At the turn of the twentieth century a strong naturalist movement emerged that
comprised writers such as Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London.
American writers expressed disillusionment following World War I. The short stories and novels
of F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the mood of the 1920s, and John Dos Passos wrote too about the war. Ernest
Hemingway became famous with The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms; in 1954, he won the Nobel
Prize in Literature. William Faulkner became one of the greatest American writers with novels like The
Sound and the Fury. American poetry reached a peak after World War I with such writers as Wallace
Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, and E. E. Cummings. American drama attained international
status at the time with the works of Eugene O'Neill, who won four Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize. In the
mid-twentieth century, American drama was dominated by the work of playwrights Tennessee
Williams and Arthur Miller, as well as by the maturation of the American musical.
Depression era writers included John Steinbeck, notable for his novel The Grapes of Wrath. Henry
Miller assumed a distinct place in American Literature in the 1930s when his semi-autobiographical novels
were banned from the US. From the end of World War II until the early 1970s many popular works in
modern American literature were produced, like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. America's involvement
in World War II influenced works such as Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948), Joseph
Heller's Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The main literary movement
since the 1970s has been postmodernism, and since the late twentieth century ethnic and minority literature
has sharply increased.
Unique American style
After the War of 1812, there was an increasing desire to produce a uniquely American literature and
culture, and a number of literary figures emerged, among them Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant,
and James Fenimore Cooper. Irving wrote humorous works in Salmagundi and the satire A History of New
York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809). Bryant wrote early romantic and nature-inspired poetry, which
evolved away from their European origins.
Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales about Natty Bumppo (which includes The Last of the Mohicans)
were popular both in the new country and abroad. In 1832, Edgar Allan Poe began writing short stories –
including "The Masque of the Red Death", "The Pit and the Pendulum", "The Fall of the House of Usher",
and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" – that explore previously hidden levels of human psychology and
push the boundaries of fiction toward mystery and fantasy.
Humorous writers were also popular and included Seba Smith and Benjamin Penhallow
Shillaber in New England and Davy Crockett, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson J. Hooper, Thomas
Bangs Thorpe, and George Washington Harris writing about the American frontier.
The New England Brahmins were a group of writers connected to Harvard University and Cambridge,
Massachusetts. They included James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Sr.
In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a former minister, published his essay Nature, which argued that
men should dispense with organized religion and reach a lofty spiritual state by studying and interacting
with the natural world. Emerson's work influenced the writers who formed the movement now known
as Transcendentalism, while Emerson also influenced the public through his lectures.
Among the leaders of the Transcendental movement was Henry David Thoreau, a nonconformist and
a close friend of Emerson. After living mostly by himself for two years in a cabin by a wooded pond,
Thoreau wrote Walden, a memoir that urges resistance to the dictates of society. Thoreau's writings
demonstrate a strong American tendency toward individualism. Other Transcendentalists included Amos
Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, and Jones Very.
As one of the great works of the Revolutionary period was written by a Frenchman, so too was a
work about America from this generation. Alexis de Tocqueville's two-volume Democracy in
America described his travels through the young nation, making observations about the relations between
American politics, individualism, and community.
The political conflict surrounding abolitionism inspired the writings of William Lloyd Garrison and
his paper The Liberator, along with poet John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe in her world-
famous Uncle Tom's Cabin. These efforts were supported by the continuation of the slave narrative
autobiography, of which the best known examples from this period include Frederick Douglass's Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl.
At the same time, American Indian autobiography develops, most notably in William Apess's A Son
of the Forest and George Copway's The Life, History and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh. Moreover,
minority authors were beginning to publish fiction, as in William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's
Daughter, Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends, Martin Delany's Blake; or, The Huts of
America and Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig as early African American novels, and John Rollin Ridge's The
Life and Adventures of  Joaquin Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit, which is considered the first
Native American novel but which also is an early story about Mexican American issues.
In 1837, the young Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) collected some of his stories as Twice-Told Tales, a
volume rich in symbolism and occult incidents. Hawthorne went on to write full-length "romances", quasi-
allegorical novels that explore the themes of guilt, pride, and emotional repression in New England. His
masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, is a drama about a woman cast out of her community for committing
adultery.
Hawthorne's fiction had a profound impact on his friend Herman Melville (1819–1891), who first
made a name for himself by turning material from his seafaring days into exotic sea narrative novels.
Inspired by Hawthorne's focus on allegories and psychology, Melville went on to write romances replete
with philosophical speculation. In Moby-Dick, an adventurous whaling voyage becomes the vehicle for
examining such themes as obsession, the nature of evil, and human struggle against the elements.
In the short novel Billy Budd, Melville dramatizes the conflicting claims of duty and compassion on board a
ship in time of war. His more profound books sold poorly, and he had been long forgotten by the time of his
death. He was rediscovered in the early 20th century.
American dramatic literature, by contrast, remained dependent on European models, although many
playwrights did attempt to apply these forms to American topics and themes, such as immigrants, westward
expansion, temperance, etc. At the same time, American playwrights created several long-lasting American
character types, especially the "Yankee", the "Negro" and the "Indian", exemplified by the characters
of Jonathan, Sambo and Metamora. In addition, new dramatic forms were created in the Tom Shows,
the showboat theater and the minstrel show. Among the best plays of the period are James Nelson
Barker's Superstition; or, the Fanatic Father, Anna Cora Mowatt's Fashion; or, Life in New York.
 Cinema of the United States
The cinema of the United States, often metonymously referred to as Hollywood, has had a large effect on
the film industry in general since the early 20th century. The dominant style of American cinema is classical
Hollywood cinema, which developed from 1917 to 1960 and characterizes most films made there to this
day. While Frenchmen Auguste and Louis Lumière are generally credited with the birth of modern
cinema, American cinema soon came to be a dominant force in the industry as it emerged. It produces the
total largest number of films of any single-language national cinema, with more than 700 English-language
films released on average every year. While the national cinemas of the United Kingdom
(299) , Canada (206), Australia, and New Zealand also produce films in the same language, they are not
considered part of the Hollywood system. Hollywood has also been considered a transnational cinema.
Classical Hollywood produced multiple language versions of some titles, often in Spanish or French.
Contemporary Hollywood offshores production to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Hollywood is considered the oldest film industry where earliest film studios and production
companies emerged, it is also the birthplace of various genres of cinema—among
them comedy, drama, action, the musical, romance, horror, science fiction, and the war epic—having set an
example for other national film industries.
In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge demonstrated the power of photography to capture motion. In 1894,
the world's first commercial motion-picture exhibition was given in New York City, using Thomas
Edison's kinetoscope. The United States produced the world's first sync-sound musical film, The Jazz
Singer, in 1927, and was at the forefront of sound-film development in the following decades. Since the
early 20th century, the US film industry has largely been based in and around the 30 Mile
Zone in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California. Director D.W. Griffith was central to the development of
a film grammar. Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) is frequently cited in critics' polls as the greatest film of
all time.
The major film studios of Hollywood are the primary source of the most commercially
successful and most ticket selling movies in the world, such as The Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone with the
Wind (1939), The Sound of Music (1965), The Godfather (1972), Jaws(1975), Star Wars (1977), E.T. the
Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Jurassic Park (1993), Titanic (1997), and Avatar (2009). Moreover, many of
Hollywood's highest-grossing movies have generated more box-office revenue and ticket sales outside the
United States than films made elsewhere.
Today, American film studios collectively generate several hundred movies every year, making the
United States one of the most prolific producers of films in the world and a leading pioneer in motion
picture engineering and technology.
The first recorded instance of photographs capturing and reproducing motion was a series of
photographs of a running horse by Eadweard Muybridge, which he took in Palo Alto, California using a set
of still cameras placed in a row. Muybridge's accomplishment led inventors everywhere to attempt to make
similar devices. In the United States, Thomas Edison was among the first to produce such a device,
the kinetoscope.
The history of cinema in the United States can trace its roots to the East Coast where, at one
time, Fort Lee, New Jersey was the motion-picture capital of America. The industry got its start at the end of
the 19th century with the construction of Thomas Edison's "Black Maria", the first motion-picture
studio in West Orange, New Jersey. The cities and towns on the Hudson River and Hudson Palisades offered
land at costs considerably less than New York City across the river and benefited greatly as a result of the
phenomenal growth of the film industry at the turn of the 20th century.
The industry began attracting both capital and an innovative workforce, and when the Kalem
Companybegan using Fort Lee in 1907 as a location for filming in the area, other filmmakers quickly
followed. In 1909, a forerunner of Universal Studios, the Champion Film Company, built the first
studio. Others quickly followed and either built new studios or who leased facilities in Fort Lee. In the 1910s
and 1920s, film companies such as the Independent Moving Pictures Company, Peerless Studios, The Solax
Company, Éclair Studios, Goldwyn Picture Corporation, American Méliès (Star Films), World Film
Company, Biograph Studios, Fox Film Corporation, Pathé Frères, Metro Pictures Corporation, Victor Film
Company, and Selznick Pictures Corporationwere all making pictures in Fort Lee. Such notables as Mary
Pickford got their start at Biograph Studios.
 In New York, the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, was built during the silent film era, was used
by the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields. The Edison Studios were located in the Bronx. Chelsea,
Manhattan was also frequently used. Picture City, Florida was also a planned site for a movie picture
production center in the 1920s, but due to the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane, the idea collapsed and Picture
City returned to its original name of Hobe Sound. Other major centers of film production also
included Chicago, Texas, California, and Cuba.
The film patents wars of the early 20th century led to the spread of film companies across the US
Many worked with equipment for which they did not own the rights and thus filming in New York could be
dangerous; it was close to Edison's Company headquarters, and to agents the company set out to seize
cameras. By 1912, most major film companies had set up production facilities in Southern California near or
in Los Angeles because of the region's favorable year-round weather.
Classical Hollywood cinema is defined as a technical and narrative style characteristic of film from
1917 to 1960. During the Golden Age of Hollywood, which lasted from the end of the silent era in American
cinema in the late 1920s to the early 1960s, thousands of movies were issued from the Hollywood studios.
The start of the Golden Age was arguably when The Jazz Singer was released in 1927, ending the silent era
and increasing box-office profits for films as sound was introduced to feature films.
Most Hollywood pictures adhered closely to a formula – Western, slapstick
comedy, musical, animated cartoon, biographical film (biographical picture) – and the same creative teams
often worked on films made by the same studio. For example, Cedric Gibbons and Herbert Stothart always
worked on MGMfilms, Alfred Newman worked at 20th Century Fox for twenty years, Cecil B. De Mille's
films were almost all made at Paramount, and director Henry King's films were mostly made for 20th
Century Fox.
At the same time, one could usually guess which studio made which film, largely because of the
actors who appeared in it; MGM, for example, claimed it had contracted "more stars than there are in
heaven." Each studio had its own style and characteristic touches which made it possible to know this – a
trait that does not exist today.
For example, To Have and Have Not (1944) is famous not only for the first pairing of
actors Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957) and Lauren Bacall (1924–2014), but also for being written by two
future winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature: Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), the author of the novel on
which the script was nominally based, and William Faulkner (1897–1962), who worked on the screen
adaptation.
After The Jazz Singer was released in 1927, Warner Bros. gained huge success and were able to
acquire their own string of movie theaters, after purchasing Stanley Theaters and First NationalProductions
in 1928. MGM had also owned the Loews string of theaters since forming in 1924, and the Fox Film
Corporation owned the Fox Theatre strings as well. Also, RKO (a 1928 merger between Keith-Orpheum
Theaters and the Radio Corporation of America) responded to the Western Electric/ERPI monopoly over
sound in films, and developed their own method, known as Photophone, to put sound in films.
Paramount, which already acquired Balaban and Katz in 1926, would answer to the success of Warner Bros.
and RKO, and buy a number of theaters in the late 1920s as well, and would hold a monopoly on theaters
in Detroit, Michigan. By the 1930s, almost all of the first-run metropolitan theaters in the United States were
owned by the Big Five studios – MGM, Paramount Pictures, RKO, Warner Bros., and 20th Century Fox.
 Music of the United States
The music of the United States reflects the country's pluri-ethnic population through a diverse array
of styles. It is a mixture of music influenced by West African, Irish, Scottish and mainland European
cultures among others. The country's most internationally
renowned genres are jazz, blues, country, bluegrass, rock, rhythm and blues, soul, ragtime, hip
hop, barbershop, pop, experimental, techno, house, dance, boogaloo, and salsa. The United States has the
world's largest music market with a total retail value of 4.9 billion dollars in 2014, and its music is heard
around the world. Since the beginning of the 20th century, some forms of American popular musichave
gained a near global audience.
Native Americans were the earliest inhabitants of the land that is today known as the United States
and played its first music. Beginning in the 17th century, immigrants from the United Kingdom, Ireland,
Spain, Germany, and France began arriving in large numbers, bringing with them new styles and
instruments. African slaves brought their own musical traditions, and each subsequent wave of immigrants
contributed to a melting pot.
Much of modern popular music can trace its roots to the emergence in the late 19th century
of African American blues and the growth of gospel music in the 1920s. The African American basis for
popular music used elements derived from European and indigenous musics. There are also strong African
roots in the music tradition of the original white settlers, such as country and bluegrass. The United States
has also seen documented folk music and recorded popular music produced in the ethnic styles of
the Ukrainian, Irish, Scottish, Polish, Hispanic, and Jewish communities, among others.
Many American cities and towns have vibrant music scenes which, in turn, support a number of
regional musical styles. Along with musical centers such as Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland, New York
City, San Francisco, New Orleans, Detroit, Minneapolis, Chicago, Miami, Atlanta, Nashville, Austin,
and Los Angeles, many smaller cities such as Asbury Park, New Jersey have produced distinctive styles of
music. The Cajun and Creole traditions in Louisiana music, the folk and popular styles of Hawaiian music,
and the bluegrassand old time music of the Southeastern states are a few examples of diversity in American
music.
The United States is often said to be a cultural melting pot, taking in influences from across the world
and creating distinctively new methods of cultural expression. Though aspects of American music can be
traced back to specific origins, claiming any particular original culture for a musical element is inherently
problematic, due to the constant evolution of American music through transplanting and hybridizing
techniques, instruments and genres. Elements of foreign musics arrived in the United States both through the
formal sponsorship of educational and outreach events by individuals and groups, and through informal
processes, as in the incidental transplantation of West African music through slavery, and Irish music through
immigration. The most distinctly American musics are a result of cross-cultural hybridization through close
contact. Slavery, for example, mixed persons from numerous tribes in tight living quarters, resulting in a
shared musical tradition that was enriched through further hybridizing with elements of indigenous, Latin,
and European music. American ethnic, religious, and racial diversity has also produced such intermingled
genres as the French-African music of the Louisiana Creoles, the Native, Mexican and European
fusion Tejano music, and the thoroughly hybridized slack-key guitar and other styles of modern Hawaiian
music.
The process of transplanting music between cultures is not without criticism. The folk revival of the
mid-20th century, for example, appropriated the musics of various rural peoples, in part to promote certain
political causes, which has caused some to question whether the process caused the "commercial
commodification of other peoples' songs ... and the inevitable dilution of mean" in the appropriated musics.
The use of African American musical techniques, images, and conceits in popular music largely by and for
white Americans has been widespread since at least the mid-19th century songs of Stephen Foster and the rise
of minstrel shows. The American music industry has actively attempted to popularize white performers of
African American music because they are more palatable to mainstream and middle-class Americans. This
process has been related to the rise of stars as varied as Benny Goodman, Eminem, and Elvis Presley, as well as
popular styles like blue-eyed soul and rockabilly.
 American cuisine
American cuisine reflects the history of the United States, blending the culinary contributions of
various groups of people from around the world, including indigenous American Indians, African
Americans, Asians, Europeans, Pacific Islanders, and South Americans. Early Native Americans utilized a
number of cooking methods in early American cuisine that have been blended with early European cooking
methods to form the basis of what is now American cuisine. The European settlement of the
Americas introduced a number of ingredients, spices, herbs, and cooking styles to the continent. The various
styles of cuisine continued expanding well into the 19th and 20th centuries, proportional to the influx
of immigrants from many different nations; this influx nurtured a rich diversity in food preparation
throughout the country.
When the colonists came to the colonies, they farmed animals for clothing and meat in a similar
fashion to what they had done in Europe. They had cuisine similar to their
previous Dutch, Swedish, French and British cuisines. The American colonial diet varied depending on the
region settled. Commonly hunted game included deer, bear, bison, and wild turkey. A number
of fats and oils made from animals served to cook much of the colonial foods. Prior to the Revolution, New
Englanders consumed large quantities of rum and beer, as maritime trade provided them relatively easy
access to the goods needed to produce these items: rum was the distilled spirit of choice, as the main
ingredient, molasses, was readily available from trade with the West Indies. In comparison to the northern
colonies, the southern colonies were quite diverse in their agricultural diet; the growing season was longer.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, Americans developed many new foods. During the Progressive
Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, circa 1890s–1920s, food production and presentation became
more industrialized.
One characteristic of American cooking is the fusion of multiple ethnic or regional approaches into
completely new cooking styles. A wave of celebrity chefs began with Julia Child and Graham Kerr in the
1970s, with many more following after the rise of cable channels such as the Food Network and Cooking
Channel in the late 20th century.
Native American cuisine includes all food practices of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Modern-day native peoples retain a varied culture of traditional foods, some of which have become iconic of
present-day Native American social gatherings (for example, frybread). Foods
like cornbread , turkey, cranberry, blueberry, hominy and mush are known to have been adopted into the
cuisine of the United States from Native American groups. In other cases, documents from the early periods
of contact with European, African, and Asian peoples allow the recovery of food practices which passed out
of popularity. The most important native American crops include corn, beans, squash, pumpkins,
sunflowers, wild rice, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, peanuts, avocados, papayas, potatoes and
chocolate.
Modern-day Native American cuisine is varied. The use of indigenous domesticated and wild food
ingredients can represent Native American food and cuisine. North American native cuisine can differ
somewhat from Southwestern and Mexican cuisine in its simplicity and directness of flavor. The use
of ramps, wild ginger, miners' lettuce, and juniper berry can impart subtle flavours to various dishes.
In the 20th century highly industrialized processed foods became a dominant feature of American
diets. Fusion of the food traditions of various immigrant groups to the US contributed to development of
distinct ethnic-American dishes. "Dainty" fare became the norm at fashionable luncheons and teas in areas
like New York City including dishes like grapefruit with cherries, fruit served in cantaloupe, strawberry tarts
or egg soufflé, other types of tea sandwiches, small decorated cakes or gelatin based desserts. This style of
dainty fare was highly decorated and ladylike and it was intended to be consumed only by women. The
decorative and ornate foods were a symbol of distinction between men and women, as the former were
associated with less refined foods. Tea parties were fashionable for well-to-do women and dainty fare
remained a symbol of upper middle class luxury. Dozens of articles published in women's magazines
promoted the "dainty" quality of tea parties. From one 1911 issue of Good Housekeeping: "the secret of a
successful tea room is daintiness, first in the service, and then in the quality of the food served".
 Sports in the United States
Sports in the United States are an important part of American culture. American football is the
most popular sport to watch in the United States, followed by baseball, basketball, and soccer. Hockey,
tennis, golf, wrestling, auto racing, arena football, field lacrosse, box lacrosse and volleyball are also popular
sports in the country.
Based on revenue, the four major professional sports leagues in the United States are Major League
Baseball (MLB), the National Basketball Association (NBA), the National Football League (NFL), and
the National Hockey League (NHL). The market for professional sports in the United States is roughly $69
billion, roughly 50% larger than that of all of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa combined. All four enjoy
wide-ranging domestic media coverage and are considered the preeminent leagues in their respective sports
in the world, although American football does not have a substantial following in other nations. Three of
those leagues have teams that represent Canadian cities, and all four are the most financially lucrative sports
leagues of their sport. Major League Soccer (MLS), which also includes teams based in Canada, is
sometimes included in a "top five" of leagues. With an average attendance of over 20,000 per game, MLS
has the third highest average attendance of any sports league in the U.S. after the National Football
League (NFL) and Major League Baseball (MLB), and is the seventh highest attended professional soccer
league worldwide.
Professional teams in all major sports in the United States operate as franchises within a league,
meaning that a team may move to a different city if the team's owners believe there would be a financial
benefit, but franchise moves are usually subject to some form of league-level approval. All major sports
leagues use a similar type of regular-season schedule with a post-season playoff tournament. In addition to
the major league–level organizations, several sports also have professional minor leagues, active in smaller
cities across the country. As in Canada and Australia, sports leagues in the United States do not
practice promotion and relegation, unlike many sports leagues in Europe.
Sports are particularly associated with education in the United States, with most high
schools and universities having organized sports, and this is a unique sporting footprint for the U.S. College
sports competitions play an important role in the American sporting culture, and college
basketball and college football are as popular as professional sports in some parts of the country. The major
sanctioning body for college sports is the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).
Unlike most other nations, the United States government does not provide funding for sports nor for
the United States Olympic Committee.
Most sports in the United States evolved out of European practices.
However, basketball, volleyball, skateboarding, and snowboarding are American inventions, some of which
have become popular in other countries and worldwide. Lacrosse and surfing arose from Native American
and Native Hawaiian activities that predate Western contact.
In colonial Virginia and Maryland sports occupied a great deal of attention at every social level. In
England, hunting was severely restricted to landowners. In America, game was more than plentiful.
Everyone—including servants and slaves—could and did hunt, so there was no social distinction to be had.
In 1691, Sir Francis Nicholson, the governor of Virginia, organized competitions for the “better sort of
Virginians onely who are Batchelors,” and he offered prizes “to be shot for, wrastled, played at backswords,
& Run for by Horse and foott.”
Horse racing remained the leading sport in the 1780-1860 era, especially in the South. It involved
owners, trainers and spectators from all social classes and both races. However, religious evangelists were
troubled by the gambling dimension, and democratic elements complained that it was too aristocratic, since
only the rich could own very expensive competitive horses.
The United States Olympic Committee (USOC) is the National Olympic Committee for the United
States. U.S. athletes have won a total of 2,522 medals (1,022 of them being gold) at the Summer Olympic
Games and another 305 at the Winter Olympic Games. Most medals have been won in athletics (track and
field) (801, 32%) and swimming (553, 22%). American swimmer Michael Phelps is the most decorated
Olympic athlete of all time, with 28 Olympic medals, 23 of them gold.
The United States has sent athletes to every celebration of the modern Olympic Games except
the 1980 Summer Olympics hosted by the Soviet Union in Moscow, which it boycotted because of
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
 The United States has won gold at every games in which it has competed, more gold and overall
medals than any other country in the Summer Games and also has the second-most gold and overall medals
in the Winter Games, trailing only Norway. From the mid-20th century to the late 1980s, the United States
mainly competed with the Soviet Union at the Summer Games and with the Soviet Union, Norway, and East
Germany at the Winter Games. However, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it now primarily
contends with China and Great Britain at the Summer Games for both the overall medal count and the gold
medal count and with Norway and Canada at the Winter Games for the overall medal count.
The United States hosted both Summer and Winter Games in 1932, and has hosted more Games than any
other country – eight times, four times each for the Summer and Winter Games:
the 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis, 1932 Summer Olympics and 1984 Summer Olympics in Los
Angeles; and the 1996 Summer Olympicsin Atlanta; the 1932 Winter Olympics and 1980 Winter
Olympics in Lake Placid , New York; the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California; and the 2002
Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Los Angeles will host the Summer Olympics for a third time in 2028, marking the ninth time the
U.S. hosts the Olympic Games.