Heavily influenced by social and scientific theories, including those of Darwin, writers of naturalism described"”usually from a detached or journalistic perspective"”the influence of society and surroundings on the development of the individual. In the following lesson plan, students will learn the key characteristics that comprise American literary naturalism as they explore London's "To Build a Fire" and Crane's "The Open Boat."

Known as both a Southern and a Catholic writer, Flannery O'Connor wrote stories that explore the complexities of these two identities. In this lesson, students will challengethese dichotomieswhile closely reading and analyzing "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Students will learn about the impact of enjambment in Gwendolyn Brooks' short but far-reaching poem "We Real Cool." One element of this lesson plan that is bound to draw students in is a compelling video of working-class Bostonian John Ulrich reciting the poem.

In this lesson, students analyze Jacob Lawrence'sThe Migration of the Negro Panel no. 57(1940-41), Helene Johnson's Harlem Renaissance poem"Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem"(1927), and Paul Laurence Dunbar's late-nineteenth-century poem"We Wear the Mask"(1896), considering how each work represents the life and changing roles of African Americans from the late nineteenth century to the Harlem Renaissance and The Great Migration.

This lesson allow students to explore the forces that prompted the literary modernism movement, specifically focusing on modernist poetry. By allowing students to explore the movement independently, they will also be able to develop research and inquiry skills.

This lesson prompts students to think about a poem's speaker within the larger context of modernist poetry. First, students will review the role of the speaker in two poems of the Romanticism period before focusing on the differences in Wallace Stevens' modernist"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

In this lesson, students will explore the role of the individual in the modern world by closely reading and analyzing T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" and Guest's famous poem "The Things That Make a Soldier Great" enable close analysis of common poetic devices (e.g., meter, rhyme, tone, symbol, image, consonance, etc.) and of each poem's marriage of form and content. Different interpretations of WWI itself emerge from these poems, which ultimately offer a far-reaching literary supplement to our collective history and understanding of The Great War.