.... tactics the generals utilized in the attempted destruction of their enemies. The well-deserved rave reviews that litter the front and back covers drew me to it, but Shaara's powerful writing style and stunningly human characters drew me into it. Shaara has an amazing ability to portray the major players of the battle, whose real personalities must have since been lost over a century of historian analyzation, as real people. Shaara portrays the terrible butchery of the four days' fighting through the vividly rendered thoughts and emotions of such great men as General Robert E. .....

.... and purpose asking God, "what is this being which I have brought into the world, evil?" or inquiring to Pearl, "Child, what art thou?" Hester sees Pearl as a reminder of her sin, especially since as an infant Pearl is acutely aware of the scarlet letter A on her mother’s chest. When still in her crib, Pearl reached up and grasped the letter, causing "Hester Prynne [to] clutch the fatal token so infinite was the torture inflicted by the intelligent touch of Pearl's baby-hand" (Hawthorne 66). The torture Hester felt was reflected by the significant reminder of the .....

.... Steinbeck's fiction is not the most thoughtful, imaginative, and constructive aspects of humanity, but rather the process of life itself (Wilson 785). Steinbeck has been compared to a twentieth century Charles Dickens of California; a social critic with more sentiment than science or system. His writing is warm, human, inconsistent, occasionally angry, but more often delighted with the joys associated with human life on its lowest levels (Holman 20). This biological image of man creates techniques and aspects of form capable of conveying this image of man with esthetic power .....

.... ministers in the Church of England were unfit to guide people's souls. For this act of defiance, he was put in jail for one year. Undaunted, Francis Marbury continued to voice his radical opinions, including that many ministers were appointed haphazardly by high church officials to preach in any manner they wanted. Eventually, Anne's father did restrain his verbal attacks on the Church of England, choosing conformity with an imperfect church over constant arrests and inquisitions. (D. Crawford, Four Women in a Violent Time, pps. 11-15.) Being educated at home, Anne read many of .....

.... standards set forth by society, "where the family and the community...tend to coerce and even predetermine the volition and aspirations of the self"(Tanner 125). She is self-reliant and independent, while "contemptuous of all the conventions that restrict the individual's freedom"(Litz 65). Darcy observes Elizabeth as "...sick of civility, of deference, of officious attention...disgusted with the women who were always speaking, and looking and thinking for [men's] approbation alone"(Ghent 185). Elizabeth rejects Mr. Collin's proposal because she does not think that "marri .....

.... 70, Albee would have changed his own sad past if he could. An orphan raised in chauffeured luxury, Edward was packed off to the first of three boarding schools at age 11. At Trinity, "I discovered that the required courses were not the ones I required." So he cut the classes that bored him and audited the ones that didn't. "It tells you something about the management of Trinity at the time that they didn't catch up with me until the middle of the sophomore year," he recalls. "That ended my formal education, and I suppose it didn't matter much. I'd figured out how to educa .....

.... a dime to help American farmers…”(Nardo13). Lennie had trouble keeping out of mischief and so him and George were always looking for new jobs. This put a damper on their dream because they were unable to save up the money that they would need to purchase a farm. The downfall of America during this time made it very hard for anyone. Even those people who were upper class before the Great Depression lost almost all of their money and were having trouble surviving. Someone who was lower class, like Lennie and George, had a hard time saving the money to buy their own plot of .....

.... leaving those old lives behind for years at a time. They suffer knowing they are in a sense trapped. Paul Baumer says, “Beyond this our life did not extend. And of this nothing remains” (20). The army became the most important thing now. Nothing else counts. Nothing else can count. By enlisting in the army, they chose to give up everyday pleasures. No matter how bad they want out, they’ve made a commitment and must stick to it. It doesn’t mean the soldier’s are treated badly or even that they didn’t like the army. It just means nothing else could come close to having the sa .....