Download Native Son Final Assessments

AP English Literature
Unit 3: Personal and Social Responsibility
Name______________________________
Native Son
Final Assessments
You will have two final responses to Native Son, and both ask you to incorporate texts
outside of the novel.
A) To practice your research and synthesis skills, you will create an Annotated
Bibliography for Native Son. An annotation is simply a summary and/or evaluation of a
source from a book, journal or periodical. You will locate literary criticism, writers who
discuss Wright’s book, then briefly examine and review these items. A more extensive
sheet of directions is coming. This will be due Monday, February 10.
B) You will write a compare and contrast essay after reading a companion book to Native
Son from the list below. Take notes while you read so that you may write a clear essay that
discusses the similarities and differences in the two novels. This will be a four or fiveparagraph essay that uses quotes, and use the sample thesis statements below to help you
shape your writer and reader’s purpose.
Essential Questions to address for this compare/contrast essay:
 What is the role of environment in shaping our identities?
 How does one’s race shape identity, and what happens when identities collide?
 What comment about social justice do these novels make?
Novel list:
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
From the publisher
This novel about a proud, independent black woman was first published in 1937 and generally
dismissed by reviewers. It was out of print for nearly 30 years when the University of Illinois Press
reissued it in 1978, at which time it was instantly embraced by the literary establishment as one of
the greatest works in the canon of African-American fiction.
(from www.barnesandnoble.com)Mesmerizing in its immediacy and haunting in its subtlety, Their
Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of Janie Crawford—fair-skinned, long-haired, dreamy
woman—who comes of age expecting better treatment than what she gets from her three husbands
and community. Then she meets Tea Cake, a younger man who captivates Janie's heart and spirit,
and offers her the chance to relish life without being one man's mule or another man's adornment.
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, by Heidi Durrow
From www.barnesandnoble.com
Rachel, the daughter of a Danish mother and a Black G.I., becomes the sole survivor of a family
tragedy after a fateful morning on their Chicago rooftop.
Forced to move to a new city, with her strict African American grandmother as her guardian, Rachel
is thrust for the first time into a mostly black community, where her light brown skin, blue eyes,
and beauty bring a constant stream of attention her way. It’s there, as she grows up and tries to
swallow her grief, that she comes to understand how the mystery and tragedy of her mother might
be connected to her own uncertain identity. *Be prepared for some adult content and language.
Link to the NY Times Book Review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/books/review/Thomas-t.html
Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward
Winner of the 2011 National Book Award.
From the NY Times Book Review, by Parul Sehgal
Job has nothing on 15-year-old Esch. She’s poor and pregnant and plain unlucky. Mama’s dead,
Daddy’s a drunk and dinner is Top Ramen every night. Sex is the only thing that has ever come
easily to her. When the boys used to take her down in the dirt or in the back seats of stripped cars in
her front yard, she could escape briefly, pretend to be Psyche, Eurydice, Daphne, her favorite
nymphs and goddesses from the Greek myths. But Manny, the boy who put the baby inside her,
won’t look at her anymore. Esch can’t lie down in the dirt and pretend to be someone else or
anywhere else. She’s stuck in shabby Bois Sauvage, a predominantly black Mississippi bayou town
in the direct path of a hurricane they’re calling Katrina.
***Really, plan on adult stuff in this one. Adult language, content and violence. I’m not just saying
that to make you want to read it. Not for the sensitive types.
The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates, by Wes Moore
*Nonfiction
Publishers Weekly - Publishers Weekly
Two hauntingly similar boys take starkly different paths in this searing tale of the ghetto. Moore, an
investment banker, Rhodes scholar, and former aide to Condoleezza Rice, was intrigued when he
learned that another Wes Moore, his age and from the same area of Greater Baltimore, was wanted
for killing a cop. Meeting his double and delving into his life reveals deeper likenesses: raised in
fatherless families and poor black neighborhoods, both felt the lure of the money and status to be
gained from dealing drugs. That the author resisted the criminal underworld while the other Wes
drifted into it is chalked up less to character than to the influence of relatives, mentors, and
expectations that pushed against his own delinquent impulses, to the point of exiling him to
military school. Moore writes with subtlety and insight about the plight of ghetto youth, viewing it
from inside and out; he probes beneath the pathologies to reveal the pressures—poverty, a lack of
prospects, the need to respond to violence with greater violence—that propelled the other Wes to
his doom. The result is a moving exploration of roads not taken.
Two Sample Thesis Statements
Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter and Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet both
explore the relationship between self-identity and one’s past; however, Tan’s novel underscores the
need to acknowledge one’s heritage before achieving a true identity, while Ford focuses on moving
forward in life to define the self.
Whereas Harper Lee asserts the slow nature of social change in To Kill a Mockingbird, Sherman Alexie
suggests the immediate and powerful damage of failed social justice programs in Indian Killer.