Eudora Welty and Sherman Alexie were born half a century apart, raised in completely different cultures, and had different financial lives. Eudora Welty was born in Mississippi and grew up in a middle-class house while Sherman Alexie was born on a tribal reservation in the state of Washington and grew up “middle-class by reservation standards (Alexie 496)” but was actually poor. Although they almost lived completely different lives, they shared many similarities. Throughout One Writer’s Beginnings and Superman and Me, both Eudora Welty and Sherman Alexie gained their love for books at a very young age. Every kid growing up looks to their parents for guidance and ends up inheriting many of their traits while growing up. Eudora Welty’s mom …show more content…
However they both look at it a different way. Sherman Alexie was surprised that he became a writer. “Despite all the books I read, I am still surprised I became a writer. I was going to be a pediatrician. These days, I write novels, short stories, and poems (Alexie 498).” When he was younger, Indian children were expected to be school stupid. He overcame that and today he visits schools and teaches creative writing to Indian kids. “I visit schools and teach creative writing to Indian kids. In all my years in the reservation school system, I was never taught how to write poetry, short stories, or novels. I was certainly never taught that Indians wrote poetry, short stories, and novels. Writing was something beyond Indians. I cannot recall a single time that a guest teacher visited the reservation (Alexie 498).” While Sherman Alexie uses his writing skills to help others, Welty uses her skills to help her hear her writing. “Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn’t hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn’t my mother’s voice, or the voice or any person I can identify, certainly not my own (Welty 495).” She also mentions this at the end of her story, “My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound
Award-winning American novelist Ann Hood states, “I was… an outsider growing up, and I preferred reading to being with other kids. When I was about seven, I started to write my own books. I never thought of myself as wanting to be a writer. “ Her statement is similar to that of Sherman Alexie’s life, where he was written off by society just because he was a Native American. Growing up he fell in love with literature, and ended up writing young adult literature. In his essay “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me”, Alexie successfully appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos while effectively employing several other literary devices in order to emphasize that one is capable of overcoming their individual obstacles.
Alexie shows a strong difference between the treatment of Indian people versus the treatment of white people, and of Indian behavior in the non-Indian world versus in their own. A white kid reading classic English literature at the age of five was undeniably a "prodigy," whereas a change in skin tone would instead make that same kid an "oddity." Non-white excellence was taught to be viewed as volatile, as something incorrect. The use of this juxtaposition exemplifies and reveals the bias and racism faced by Alexie and Indian people everywhere by creating a stark and cruel contrast between perceptions of race. Indian kids were expected to stick to the background and only speak when spoken to. Those with some of the brightest, most curious minds answered in a single word at school but multiple paragraphs behind the comfort of closed doors, trained to save their energy and ideas for the privacy of home. The feistiest of the lot saw their sparks dulled when faced with a white adversary and those with the greatest potential were told that they had none. Their potential was confined to that six letter word, "Indian." This word had somehow become synonymous with failure, something which they had been taught was the only form of achievement they could ever reach. Acceptable and pitiable rejection from the
Eudora Welty was born on April 13, 1909, Jackson, Mississippi. Her father's name is Christian Welty, and her mother's name was Chestina Welty. She has two brothers named Edward Welty and Walter Welty. Welty grew up in a house full of books. Her mother gave her the passion of reading and writing. Eudora went to Davis Elementary School. She attended and graduated from Jackson's Central High School. Eudora had graduated from the University of Wisconsin and studied business for a year at Columbia University. Eudora earned her Bachelors degree. She also attended Mississippi University for Women. Eudora was a short story writer, novelist, and photographer. Her major themes of her books extend beyond the south-loneliness, the pain of growing up, and the for people to understand themselves. Eudora Welty grew up during the Great Depression. She was able to travel around Mississippi taking pictures of people during the Great Deppression. " Endured series of misfortunes with stoicism and forbearance." (The New York Times, Prose, 2005). Eudora Welty faced several struggles in her life such as the lose of family and having a hard time finding a job.
Picture yourself in a town where you are underprivileged and sometimes miss a meal. In the novel, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” Sherman Alexie wrote the book to show hardships that Native Americans face today. Alexie shows us hardships such as poverty, alcoholism and education. In the novel, Junior goes against the odds to go to an all white school to get a better education to have a better life
As every well-read person knows, the background in which you grow up plays a huge role in how you write and your opinions. Fuller grew up with a very strict education, learning multiple classic languages before she was eight years old. Fern grew up with writers all throughout her family and had a traditional education and saw first hand the iniquities of what hard-working had to contend with. Through close analysis of their work, a reader can quickly find the connections between their tone, style, content, and purpose and their history of their lives and their educational upbringing.
When we think about Mississippi and all of its glory one cannot help but to feel oblige to rejoice at how far Mississippi has come over time. Since joining the Union in 1817, Mississippi has experienced its fair share adversity. Mississippi is a unique state because of many different reasons. Three things that has significantly help shaped modern Mississippi is the art, music, and literature. One could dwell on the pain of the past or go through countless stories about the wars. However, when I think of modern Mississippi I envision Eudora Welty writing her stories, BB King strumming Louise, and Leontyne Price melodic melodies filling the air. It is the culture, traditions, and way of life that has truly shaped modern Mississippi.
Alexie’s purpose is to communicate to the reader not to believe everything you read. He wants us to question and think deeply whatever we read so far. Alexie does this through the details of his story. It’s the details that separate the real writer from the fake. Alexie shows he is the true writer because he talks about personal aspects of his like on the Spokane Indian reservation. Alexie writes “my story, which features an autobiographical character named Thomas Builds-the fire who suffers a brain injury at birth and experience visionary seizures into his adulthood”. The details that Alexie uses to communicate his personal knowledge of a specific situation. His diction and phrasing speaks to understand the people that he was telling the
To begin, in “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” Sherman Alexie describes a moment in
Overall, Alexie shows us that the theme of assimilation plays a major part in the book, compared to the poem, which gives us little to no evidence of any assimilation at all. These two pieces of literature may have similar themes elsewhere, but as for assimilation, they are almost complete opposites.
After reading “Superman and Me,” by Sherman Alexie, I was shown how the author learned to read, and how he used his love for reading to impact his life and the lives of others. Alexie grew up with his family on an Indian reservation, relying on irregular paychecks and government surplus food. Alexie learned to read, on his own, at the young age of three. His love for reading originated from his father’s passion for books, and reading whatever books he could get access to. Alexie’s reading level reached such a high level to where he was reading Grapes of Wrath in kindergarten. He knew he was smart, and he didn’t want to take on the stereotype that all Indians are stupid. Unlike the other Indian children in his class on the reservation, Alexie tried to become as educated as he could, despite being teased by the other kids. Alexie came to describe himself as smart, lucky, and arrogant. This attitude of who he was and what he was capable of allowed ...
Sherman Alexie was a man who is telling us about his life. As an author he uses a lot of repetition, understatement, analogy, and antithesis. Alexie was a man of greater words and was a little Indian boy at the beginning of the story and later became a role model for other boys like him who were shy and alone. Alexie was someone who used his writing to inspire others such as other Indian kids like himself to keep learning and become the best that they can be.
Imagine growing up in a society where a person is restricted to learn because of his or her ethnicity? This experience would be awful and very emotional for one to go through. Sherman Alexie and Fredrick Douglas are examples of prodigies who grew up in a less fortunate community. Both men experienced complications in similar and different ways; these experiences shaped them into men who wanted equal education for all. To begin, one should understand the writers background. Sherman Alexie wrote about his life as a young Spokane Indian boy and the life he experienced (page 15). He wrote to encourage people to step outside their comfort zone and be herd throughout education. Similar to Alexie’s life experience, Fredrick
Living in hard conditions, can make the person understand the world better. Being disabled, can create from the person a novelist. Hearing another stories, can help the person to live satisfy. Learning history, can teach the person to be unjudged. Embodiment the author to his real experience in some of his stories, consider as the most tentacles talk that can touch reader's heart. Because he lived, heard, learned, embodied, and according to all of his written, Sherman Alexie classified as the most successful writer who his words represent the reality. The story “Flight Patterns,” which was written by Sherman Alexie was representing some perspectives from his own life, like being Native American, and person with disability. The story also was about the severe problems people in this world have with profiling. It doesn’t matter if you’re White, Black, Indian, Spanish, Muslim, Jewish, rich, or even poor everyone does it. The two character I would like to focus on in this story is called William and Fekadu.
...that so many children read and loved her books. But when she was seventy-six she decided to stop writing and spend more time with Almanzo on their farm.
In conclusion, Sherman Alexie created a story to demonstrate the stereotypes people have created for Native Americans. The author is able to do this by creating characters that present both the negative and positive stereotypes that have been given to Native Americans. Alexie has a Native American background. By writing a short story that depicts the life of an Indian, the reader also gets a glimpse of the stereotypes encountered by Alexie. From this short story readers are able to learn the importance of having an identity while also seeing how stereotypes are used by many people. In the end of the story, both Victor and Thomas are able to have an understanding of each other as the can finally relate with each other through Victor's father.