Allan Bloom

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is a book by English writer Terry Pratchett. This book presents to the reader a marvelous story about a talking—or very intelligent and clever, as he puts it—cat, a clan of educated rats, and a stupid-looking kid, who go from town to town to scam the villagers by producing a fake plague of rats, and then the kid would play the piper that leads the rats away with his music. That plan leaves Maurice as the master mind behind the act. The story begins…

Biography Profile Introduction: Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet, critic, and editor that had many famous poems like The Raven, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Tell Tale Tell Heart. He is best known for his poems and his short stories, mostly the tales of mysteries and the macabre. Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809 and died on October 7, 1849. He was the first well known American writer to try to earn a living with writing alone which is normally very…

Have you ever thought about the deeper meaning of a story? Have you ever looked beyond the horizon right in front of you? If not, the short stories “Contents of a Dead Man’s” Pockets by Jack Finney, “The Leap” by Louise Erdrich, and “The Trip” by Laila Lalami, all have their additions that contribute to the deeper level intended. This can be created through the topics of setting, conflict, characters, and theme. These topics help make up the plot of each story as well as the conflict and…

Tragedy will reveal the beauty behind the pain. This truth is made clear in Thomas Scarseth's excerpt "A Teachable Good Book: Of Mice and Men". In the excerpt, Scarseth states that Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck is a tragedy. The tragedy is the pain of living life and being defeated can be transformed into the beauty of art. With the book, Of Mice and Men, Scarseth established his opinion in three ways. The first claim was how the tragedy in Of Mice and Men is in a Shakespearean sense. His…

Emily Dickinson is one of the most famous poets of early America. She wrote many poems during the Civil War and the period where many people were heading to the West. Death was prominent in society and much of her writing is about death. Her writing about death is different from that of authors because she writes casually about her own death as she would any other event in her life. She is not writing about her physical death, but rather a lack of life. Dickinson’s “It was not Death, for I stood…

Borges’ “The Mirror of Ink” embodies the essence of a quintessential moral anecdote. Brief, deliberate and insightful, “The Mirror of Ink” certainly asserts to its readership a particular set of lessons and imperatives but, as the title implies, there is a complex and nuanced ambiguity to the content of Borges’ short story. The title of this piece is something of an oxymoron. A mirror is by nature a pure reflective surface. Ink, conversely, is muddled and opaque. A mirror of ink seems…

John Steinbeck a famous writer in the early to mid 1900’s is famous for books such as The Grapes of wrath, Of Mice and Men, and Cannery Row. All of these books are about different things, but they all have one thing in common. Symbolism is the main concept in each book. In Mice of men he uses symbolism such as candy's dog, the mice, and the dream farm. Candy’s dog represents the fate that all people and living things come to. One day we are all going to grow old and sooner or later outlive…

Constructing my portfolio and building my journal on Edna St. Vincent Millay has been a fascinating journey. I have been able to learn about one of the most influential writers of the 1920's, and put myself in her shoes through the one passion we share the most, writing. I believe overall my history portfolio was fairly well constructed. The part I am most proud of was the Political, Social, and Economic Change graphic organizer. I spent a great deal of time on it and talked to my grandfather…

In many classic stories, the idea of romance is a common theme. This theme, in many stories, affects the story, the characters, and the behaviors of said characters. Two such stories that revolve around this theme are William Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ and Emily Bronte’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, and both are considered classic stories. However, the relationships in both stories end very differently due to how love is approached by the characters. Love also has different meanings in the…

“At last - at last! - I stand upon the spot where seven years since, I should have stood…” (Hawthorne 119). The reputations of the characters in a novel are determined by not only their actions, but also by their surroundings and their physical appearances. These circumstances can often influence the way the reader views a character. Within a novel, these specific circumstances serve as symbols to show a conflict within the character’s heart and mind. In a novel like The Scarlet Letter, written…