“Hills Like White Elephants,” Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway’s spare yet powerful prose has had a profound effect on American literature. His terse, clean sentences and understated dialogue nonetheless convey significant suggestions of meaning. “Hills Like White Elephants,” published in 1927 and since widely anthologized and analyzed, is a story revealing a dialogue between a young woman and a man waiting for a train in Spain. Through their tight, brittle conversation, readers learn that the young woman is pregnant and the young man wants her to have an abortion. Much else about their personalities, their past relationship, and their decision is open to interpretation.
“On the Pulse of Morning,” Maya Angelou
In American history, only three poets have been asked to write inaugural poems—Robert Frost for John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, Maya Angelou for Bill Clinton’s first inaugural, and Miller Williams for Clinton’s second inaugural. Angelou read her poem at Clinton’s inauguration on January 20, 1993.
Campbell’s Soup Can and Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol was an initiator and leading exponent of the “pop art” movement in America, earning immediate fame when he exhibited his 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans in 1961. Warhol mass-produced silk-screened images of Coca-Cola bottles and Brillo soap pad boxes and later began printing endless variations of portraits of celebrities in garish colors. The repetition was supposed to suggest a dehumanized banality that reflected the emptiness of American material culture, the glut of information and icon in contemporary media, and the artist’s emotional distance from his art. Warhol’s soup can and his image of the face of Marilyn Monroe are among the best known and most frequently reproduced of his artworks.
“Fanfare for the Common Man,” Aaron Copland
Born in 1900 to a poor Jewish immigrant family in New York City, Aaron Copland went on to compose music that captured the spirit of the American West and the notion of the “common person” in America. “Fanfare for the Common Man” was composed in 1942.