AMERICAN LITERATURE - SHORT STORIES OF EUDORA WELTY

AMERICAN LITERATURE - SHORT STORIES OF EUDORA WELTY AMERICAN LITERATURE - SHORT STORIES OF EUDORA WELTY

The Wide Net (and Other Waters)

Down in the Natchez Trace, where the old road sinks into the swamp and the cypress trees stand knee-deep in black water, the people know that a story doesn't begin or end—it just rises like mist off the river. Eudora Welty wrote about such places. She wrote about the smell of rain on a tin roof, about the way an old woman's hands remember the weight of a child even after the child is grown and gone, about the sound of a fiddle playing "Barbara Allen" from a cabin so deep in the woods that the moonlight has to fight its way through the leaves.

She knew that the most important things are never said. In "A Worn Path," old Phoenix Jackson walks to town for her grandson's medicine. She walks through brambles and barbed wire, past scarecrows and hunters, up hills that double back on themselves. She is old. She is forgetful. She talks to the animals and to the ghosts. When she finally reaches the doctor's office, the nurse asks her how the boy is. Phoenix opens her mouth. Her grandson swallowed lye years ago, and he cannot swallow food now. But what she says is: "He still the same." The nurse hands her the medicine. Phoenix walks back into the woods. The story does not say whether the boy will live. It does not have to.

Welty's Mississippi was not a postcard. It was a place where families kept secrets in china cabinets, where love looked like cruelty and kindness looked like interference, where a traveling salesman could knock on a door and find the whole history of a town written in the widow's eyes. She wrote the way people talk: circling, repeating, pausing for the sound of a train or the cry of a night bird. Her stories are not driven by plot. They are driven by listening. She put her ear to the South and never lifted it.

AMERICAN LITERATURE - SHORT STORIES OF JAMES THURBER

AMERICAN LITERATURE - SHORT STORIES OF JAMES THURBER AMERICAN LITERATURE - SHORT STORIES OF JAMES THURBER

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (and Other Daydreams)

Walter Mitty drove past the hospital on his way to the A&P, his wife's voice trailing behind him like a punctured balloon. "You're driving too fast," she had said, but that was blocks ago. In the real world, he eased the family car to a respectful twenty-eight miles per hour. In the real world, he wore a gray hat and a muffler that his mother-in-law had given him last Christmas. But Walter Mitty had long ago learned that the real world was simply the waiting room for the world he truly inhabited.

Commander Mitty piloted the hydroplane through the raging Pacific gale. "Full reverse starboard!" he barked, and the crew snapped to attention. The Navy had never seen his equal. He lit a cigarette with one hand while calculating wind shear with the other. The enemy submarine surfaced directly in his path. Mitty smiled.

"Pick up some puppy biscuits," his wife said, and Commander Mitty vanished. He was now, quite suddenly, a great surgeon standing before a packed medical amphitheater. A millionaire had entered his operating room with a faulty heart. "The core of the difficulty," Mitty whispered to his team, "is a rare ossification of the left ventricle. Forceps." The audience held its breath. He made the incision. The millionaire would live.

"Walter!" His wife's voice cracked through the ether. He was standing in the middle of the produce aisle, holding a bag of puppy biscuits and a single, bewildered turnip. "You forgot the damn turnips," she said. He had not forgotten the turnips. He had simply, for a moment, been somewhere else. Somewhere with submarines and scalpels and the quiet, undefeated dignity of a man who could park a car without his wife's instructions. He paid the cashier, tucked the turnip into his pocket, and walked toward the exit. In the parking lot, a firing squad awaited him. He faced them with the faint, ironic smile of the truly unconquerable.

AMERICAN LITERATURE - ERNEST HEMINGWAY: OLD MAN AND THE SEA

AMERICAN LITERATURE - ERNEST HEMINGWAY: OLD MAN AND THE SEA AMERICAN LITERATURE - ERNEST HEMINGWAY: OLD MAN AND THE SEA

The Old Man and the Sea

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish, the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally *salao*, which is the worst form of unlucky. The boy had gone in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty. He always went out to help him carry the coiled lines or the gaff or the harpoon.

The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. They ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

"Santiago," the boy said to him as they climbed the bank from where the skiff was hauled up. "I could go with you again. We've made some money."

The old man had taught the boy to fish and the boy loved him.

"No," the old man said. "You're with a lucky boat. Stay with them."

"But remember how you went eighty-seven days without fish and then we caught big ones every day for three weeks."

"I remember," the old man said. "I know you did not leave me because you doubted."

"It was papa who made me leave. I am a boy and I must obey him."

"I know," the old man said. "It is quite normal."

"He hasn't much faith."

"No," the old man said. "But we have. Haven't we?"

"Yes," the boy said. "Can I offer you a beer on the Terrace?"

"Why not," the old man said. "Between fishermen."

AMERICAN LITERATURE - WILLIAM FAULKNER: THE SOUND AND THE FURY

AMERICAN LITERATURE - WILLIAM FAULKNER: THE SOUND AND THE FURY AMERICAN LITERATURE - WILLIAM FAULKNER: THE SOUND AND THE FURY

The Sound and the Fury

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They came toward the flag, and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back, and they went to the table, and he hit, and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree, and we went along the fence, and they stopped, and we stopped, and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.

"Here, caddie." He hit. They went away across the pasture. I held to the fence and watched them going away.

"Listen at you, now." Luster said. "Aint you something, thirty-three years old, going on that way. I bet you won't go down to the branch with me and find that quarter. Coming on dark, folks going to be coming along soon. Then you'll be hollering."

Caddy smelled like trees. That was the thing I remembered when the shadows got long and the light went slanting through the window onto the floor. She smelled like trees, and she would hold me, and I would hold her, and the world would be quiet. Then she went away. They said she ran off, that she was bad, that she had a child and no husband. But I only knew that the trees stopped smelling like her. The branch was cold, and the water ran fast, and Luster was looking for his lost quarter, and I was looking for Caddy.

The golf players came again. "Here, caddie," one shouted. I began to bellow. The sound came up from somewhere deep, from before words, from the place where time folds in on itself and all the losses live. Luster hit me. "Hush up," he said. But I could not hush. The word was not her, but it was all I had. Caddie. Caddie. The dusk took the name and scattered it like ash.

AMERICAN LITERATURE - F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: THE GREAT GATSBY

AMERICAN LITERATURE - F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: THE GREAT GATSBY AMERICAN LITERATURE - F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: THE GREAT GATSBY

The Great Gatsby

In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." I've tried to live by that, though it gets harder every summer. Especially that summer I moved East to learn the bond business and found myself renting a bungalow next to a man who threw parties every Saturday night.

His name was Gatsby. I didn't know him at first. No one did. They came to his house by the hundreds—celebrities, chorus girls, stockbrokers, senators—and they drank his champagne, danced on his lawn, crashed his cars into his ornamental fountains. But no one was ever invited. They simply appeared, like moths to a light they could not name. And Gatsby himself would stand alone on his marble steps, watching the green dock light across the Sound, stretching his arms toward it as though it were a star he might pluck from the water.

I learned the truth slowly, in pieces, from Jordan Baker's low, careless voice. Gatsby was not born James Gatz of North Dakota. He had invented himself—every gesture, every "old sport," every white suit and pink tie. He had done it for Daisy Buchanan, the golden girl of Louisville, the one who had promised to wait and then married the brutal, wealthy Tom instead. Gatsby bought his mansion directly across from her dock. He threw those parties hoping she might wander in one night. She never did, until I brought her.

The afternoon they met again, the rain fell hard on his lawn, and Gatsby trembled like a man seeing his own soul. He had believed, with a romantic violence that would destroy him, that the past could be repeated. He was wrong. The green light receded. The boats against the current were borne back ceaselessly into the past.