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12.14: Sample Student Literary Analysis Essays

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• Heather Ringo & Athena Kashyap
• City College of San Francisco via ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative

The following examples are essays where student writers focused on close-reading a literary work.

While reading these examples, ask yourself the following questions:

• What is the essay's thesis statement, and how do you know it is the thesis statement?
• What is the main idea or topic sentence of each body paragraph, and how does it relate back to the thesis statement?
• Where and how does each essay use evidence (quotes or paraphrase from the literature)?
• What are some of the literary devices or structures the essays analyze or discuss?
• How does each author structure their conclusion, and how does their conclusion differ from their introduction?

Example 1: Poetry

Victoria Morillo

Instructor Heather Ringo

3 August 2022

How Nguyen’s Structure Solidifies the Impact of Sexual Violence in “The Study”

Stripped of innocence, your body taken from you. No matter how much you try to block out the instance in which these two things occurred, memories surface and come back to haunt you. How does a person, a young boy , cope with an event that forever changes his life? Hieu Minh Nguyen deconstructs this very way in which an act of sexual violence affects a survivor. In his poem, “The Study,” the poem's speaker recounts the year in which his molestation took place, describing how his memory filters in and out. Throughout the poem, Nguyen writes in free verse, permitting a structural liberation to become the foundation for his message to shine through. While he moves the readers with this poignant narrative, Nguyen effectively conveys the resulting internal struggles of feeling alone and unseen.

The speaker recalls his experience with such painful memory through the use of specific punctuation choices. Just by looking at the poem, we see that the first period doesn’t appear until line 14. It finally comes after the speaker reveals to his readers the possible, central purpose for writing this poem: the speaker's molestation. In the first half, the poem makes use of commas, em dashes, and colons, which lends itself to the idea of the speaker stringing along all of these details to make sense of this time in his life. If reading the poem following the conventions of punctuation, a sense of urgency is present here, as well. This is exemplified by the lack of periods to finalize a thought; and instead, Nguyen uses other punctuation marks to connect them. Serving as another connector of thoughts, the two em dashes give emphasis to the role memory plays when the speaker discusses how “no one [had] a face” during that time (Nguyen 9-11). He speaks in this urgent manner until the 14th line, and when he finally gets it off his chest, the pace of the poem changes, as does the more frequent use of the period. This stream-of-consciousness-like section when juxtaposed with the latter half of the poem, causes readers to slow down and pay attention to the details. It also splits the poem in two: a section that talks of the fogginess of memory then transitions into one that remembers it all.

In tandem with the fluctuating nature of memory, the utilization of line breaks and word choice help reflect the damage the molestation has had. Within the first couple of lines of the poem, the poem demands the readers’ attention when the line breaks from “floating” to “dead” as the speaker describes his memory of Little Billy (Nguyen 1-4). This line break averts the readers’ expectation of the direction of the narrative and immediately shifts the tone of the poem. The break also speaks to the effect his trauma has ingrained in him and how “[f]or the longest time,” his only memory of that year revolves around an image of a boy’s death. In a way, the speaker sees himself in Little Billy; or perhaps, he’s representative of the tragic death of his boyhood, how the speaker felt so “dead” after enduring such a traumatic experience, even referring to himself as a “ghost” that he tries to evict from his conscience (Nguyen 24). The feeling that a part of him has died is solidified at the very end of the poem when the speaker describes himself as a nine-year-old boy who’s been “fossilized,” forever changed by this act (Nguyen 29). By choosing words associated with permanence and death, the speaker tries to recreate the atmosphere (for which he felt trapped in) in order for readers to understand the loneliness that came as a result of his trauma. With the assistance of line breaks, more attention is drawn to the speaker's words, intensifying their importance, and demanding to be felt by the readers.

Most importantly, the speaker expresses eloquently, and so heartbreakingly, about the effect sexual violence has on a person. Perhaps what seems to be the most frustrating are the people who fail to believe survivors of these types of crimes. This is evident when he describes “how angry” the tenants were when they filled the pool with cement (Nguyen 4). They seem to represent how people in the speaker's life were dismissive of his assault and who viewed his tragedy as a nuisance of some sorts. This sentiment is bookended when he says, “They say, give us details , so I give them my body. / They say, give us proof , so I give them my body,” (Nguyen 25-26). The repetition of these two lines reinforces the feeling many feel in these scenarios, as they’re often left to deal with trying to make people believe them, or to even see them.

It’s important to recognize how the structure of this poem gives the speaker space to express the pain he’s had to carry for so long. As a characteristic of free verse, the poem doesn’t follow any structured rhyme scheme or meter; which in turn, allows him to not have any constraints in telling his story the way he wants to. The speaker has the freedom to display his experience in a way that evades predictability and engenders authenticity of a story very personal to him. As readers, we abandon anticipating the next rhyme, and instead focus our attention to the other ways, like his punctuation or word choice, in which he effectively tells his story. The speaker recognizes that some part of him no longer belongs to himself, but by writing “The Study,” he shows other survivors that they’re not alone and encourages hope that eventually, they will be freed from the shackles of sexual violence.

Works Cited

Nguyen, Hieu Minh. “The Study” Poets.Org. Academy of American Poets, Coffee House Press, 2018, https://poets.org/poem/study-0 .

Example 2: Fiction

Todd Goodwin

Professor Stan Matyshak

Advanced Expository Writing

Sept. 17, 20—

Poe’s “Usher”: A Mirror of the Fall of the House of Humanity

Right from the outset of the grim story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allan Poe enmeshes us in a dark, gloomy, hopeless world, alienating his characters and the reader from any sort of physical or psychological norm where such values as hope and happiness could possibly exist. He fatalistically tells the story of how a man (the narrator) comes from the outside world of hope, religion, and everyday society and tries to bring some kind of redeeming happiness to his boyhood friend, Roderick Usher, who not only has physically and psychologically wasted away but is entrapped in a dilapidated house of ever-looming terror with an emaciated and deranged twin sister. Roderick Usher embodies the wasting away of what once was vibrant and alive, and his house of “insufferable gloom” (273), which contains his morbid sister, seems to mirror or reflect this fear of death and annihilation that he most horribly endures. A close reading of the story reveals that Poe uses mirror images, or reflections, to contribute to the fatalistic theme of “Usher”: each reflection serves to intensify an already prevalent tone of hopelessness, darkness, and fatalism.

It could be argued that the house of Roderick Usher is a “house of mirrors,” whose unpleasant and grim reflections create a dark and hopeless setting. For example, the narrator first approaches “the melancholy house of Usher on a dark and soundless day,” and finds a building which causes him a “sense of insufferable gloom,” which “pervades his spirit and causes an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an undiscerned dreariness of thought” (273). The narrator then optimistically states: “I reflected that a mere different arrangement of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression” (274). But the narrator then sees the reflection of the house in the tarn and experiences a “shudder even more thrilling than before” (274). Thus the reader begins to realize that the narrator cannot change or stop the impending doom that will befall the house of Usher, and maybe humanity. The story cleverly plays with the word reflection : the narrator sees a physical reflection that leads him to a mental reflection about Usher’s surroundings.

The narrator’s disillusionment by such grim reflection continues in the story. For example, he describes Roderick Usher’s face as distinct with signs of old strength but lost vigor: the remains of what used to be. He describes the house as a once happy and vibrant place, which, like Roderick, lost its vitality. Also, the narrator describes Usher’s hair as growing wild on his rather obtrusive head, which directly mirrors the eerie moss and straw covering the outside of the house. The narrator continually longs to see these bleak reflections as a dream, for he states: “Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building” (276). He does not want to face the reality that Usher and his home are doomed to fall, regardless of what he does.

Although there are almost countless examples of these mirror images, two others stand out as important. First, Roderick and his sister, Madeline, are twins. The narrator aptly states just as he and Roderick are entombing Madeline that there is “a striking similitude between brother and sister” (288). Indeed, they are mirror images of each other. Madeline is fading away psychologically and physically, and Roderick is not too far behind! The reflection of “doom” that these two share helps intensify and symbolize the hopelessness of the entire situation; thus, they further develop the fatalistic theme. Second, in the climactic scene where Madeline has been mistakenly entombed alive, there is a pairing of images and sounds as the narrator tries to calm Roderick by reading him a romance story. Events in the story simultaneously unfold with events of the sister escaping her tomb. In the story, the hero breaks out of the coffin. Then, in the story, the dragon’s shriek as he is slain parallels Madeline’s shriek. Finally, the story tells of the clangor of a shield, matched by the sister’s clanging along a metal passageway. As the suspense reaches its climax, Roderick shrieks his last words to his “friend,” the narrator: “Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door” (296).

Roderick, who slowly falls into insanity, ironically calls the narrator the “Madman.” We are left to reflect on what Poe means by this ironic twist. Poe’s bleak and dark imagery, and his use of mirror reflections, seem only to intensify the hopelessness of “Usher.” We can plausibly conclude that, indeed, the narrator is the “Madman,” for he comes from everyday society, which is a place where hope and faith exist. Poe would probably argue that such a place is opposite to the world of Usher because a world where death is inevitable could not possibly hold such positive values. Therefore, just as Roderick mirrors his sister, the reflection in the tarn mirrors the dilapidation of the house, and the story mirrors the final actions before the death of Usher. “The Fall of the House of Usher” reflects Poe’s view that humanity is hopelessly doomed.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Fall of the House of Usher.” 1839. Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library . 1995. Web. 1 July 2012. < http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/PoeFall.html >.

Example 3: Poetry

Amy Chisnell

Professor Laura Neary

Writing and Literature

April 17, 20—

Don’t Listen to the Egg!: A Close Reading of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”

“You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,” said Alice. “Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem called ‘Jabberwocky’?”

“Let’s hear it,” said Humpty Dumpty. “I can explain all the poems that ever were invented—and a good many that haven’t been invented just yet.” (Carroll 164)

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass , Humpty Dumpty confidently translates (to a not so confident Alice) the complicated language of the poem “Jabberwocky.” The words of the poem, though nonsense, aptly tell the story of the slaying of the Jabberwock. Upon finding “Jabberwocky” on a table in the looking-glass room, Alice is confused by the strange words. She is quite certain that “ somebody killed something ,” but she does not understand much more than that. When later she encounters Humpty Dumpty, she seizes the opportunity at having the knowledgeable egg interpret—or translate—the poem. Since Humpty Dumpty professes to be able to “make a word work” for him, he is quick to agree. Thus he acts like a New Critic who interprets the poem by performing a close reading of it. Through Humpty’s interpretation of the first stanza, however, we see the poem’s deeper comment concerning the practice of interpreting poetry and literature in general—that strict analytical translation destroys the beauty of a poem. In fact, Humpty Dumpty commits the “heresy of paraphrase,” for he fails to understand that meaning cannot be separated from the form or structure of the literary work.

Of the 71 words found in “Jabberwocky,” 43 have no known meaning. They are simply nonsense. Yet through this nonsensical language, the poem manages not only to tell a story but also gives the reader a sense of setting and characterization. One feels, rather than concretely knows, that the setting is dark, wooded, and frightening. The characters, such as the Jubjub bird, the Bandersnatch, and the doomed Jabberwock, also appear in the reader’s head, even though they will not be found in the local zoo. Even though most of the words are not real, the reader is able to understand what goes on because he or she is given free license to imagine what the words denote and connote. Simply, the poem’s nonsense words are the meaning.

Therefore, when Humpty interprets “Jabberwocky” for Alice, he is not doing her any favors, for he actually misreads the poem. Although the poem in its original is constructed from nonsense words, by the time Humpty is done interpreting it, it truly does not make any sense. The first stanza of the original poem is as follows:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogroves,

An the mome raths outgrabe. (Carroll 164)

If we replace, however, the nonsense words of “Jabberwocky” with Humpty’s translated words, the effect would be something like this:

’Twas four o’clock in the afternoon, and the lithe and slimy badger-lizard-corkscrew creatures

Did go round and round and make holes in the grass-plot round the sun-dial:

All flimsy and miserable were the shabby-looking birds

with mop feathers,

And the lost green pigs bellowed-sneezed-whistled.

By translating the poem in such a way, Humpty removes the charm or essence—and the beauty, grace, and rhythm—from the poem. The poetry is sacrificed for meaning. Humpty Dumpty commits the heresy of paraphrase. As Cleanth Brooks argues, “The structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations” (203). When the poem is left as nonsense, the reader can easily imagine what a “slithy tove” might be, but when Humpty tells us what it is, he takes that imaginative license away from the reader. The beauty (if that is the proper word) of “Jabberwocky” is in not knowing what the words mean, and yet understanding. By translating the poem, Humpty takes that privilege from the reader. In addition, Humpty fails to recognize that meaning cannot be separated from the structure itself: the nonsense poem reflects this literally—it means “nothing” and achieves this meaning by using “nonsense” words.

Furthermore, the nonsense words Carroll chooses to use in “Jabberwocky” have a magical effect upon the reader; the shadowy sound of the words create the atmosphere, which may be described as a trance-like mood. When Alice first reads the poem, she says it seems to fill her head “with ideas.” The strange-sounding words in the original poem do give one ideas. Why is this? Even though the reader has never heard these words before, he or she is instantly aware of the murky, mysterious mood they set. In other words, diction operates not on the denotative level (the dictionary meaning) but on the connotative level (the emotion(s) they evoke). Thus “Jabberwocky” creates a shadowy mood, and the nonsense words are instrumental in creating this mood. Carroll could not have simply used any nonsense words.

For example, let us change the “dark,” “ominous” words of the first stanza to “lighter,” more “comic” words:

’Twas mearly, and the churly pells

Did bimble and ringle in the tink;

All timpy were the brimbledimps,

And the bip plips outlink.

Shifting the sounds of the words from dark to light merely takes a shift in thought. To create a specific mood using nonsense words, one must create new words from old words that convey the desired mood. In “Jabberwocky,” Carroll mixes “slimy,” a grim idea, “lithe,” a pliable image, to get a new adjective: “slithy” (a portmanteau word). In this translation, brighter words were used to get a lighter effect. “Mearly” is a combination of “morning” and “early,” and “ringle” is a blend of “ring” and "dingle.” The point is that “Jabberwocky’s” nonsense words are created specifically to convey this shadowy or mysterious mood and are integral to the “meaning.”

Consequently, Humpty’s rendering of the poem leaves the reader with a completely different feeling than does the original poem, which provided us with a sense of ethereal mystery, of a dark and foreign land with exotic creatures and fantastic settings. The mysteriousness is destroyed by Humpty’s literal paraphrase of the creatures and the setting; by doing so, he has taken the beauty away from the poem in his attempt to understand it. He has committed the heresy of paraphrase: “If we allow ourselves to be misled by it [this heresy], we distort the relation of the poem to its ‘truth’… we split the poem between its ‘form’ and its ‘content’” (Brooks 201). Humpty Dumpty’s ultimate demise might be seen to symbolize the heretical split between form and content: as a literary creation, Humpty Dumpty is an egg, a well-wrought urn of nonsense. His fall from the wall cracks him and separates the contents from the container, and not even all the King’s men can put the scrambled egg back together again!

Through the odd characters of a little girl and a foolish egg, “Jabberwocky” suggests a bit of sage advice about reading poetry, advice that the New Critics built their theories on. The importance lies not solely within strict analytical translation or interpretation, but in the overall effect of the imagery and word choice that evokes a meaning inseparable from those literary devices. As Archibald MacLeish so aptly writes: “A poem should not mean / But be.” Sometimes it takes a little nonsense to show us the sense in something.

Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry . 1942. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1956. Print.

Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking-Glass. Alice in Wonderland . 2nd ed. Ed. Donald J. Gray. New York: Norton, 1992. Print.

MacLeish, Archibald. “Ars Poetica.” The Oxford Book of American Poetry . Ed. David Lehman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 385–86. Print.

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• How to write a literary analysis essay | A step-by-step guide

How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay | A Step-by-Step Guide

Published on January 30, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on August 14, 2023.

Literary analysis means closely studying a text, interpreting its meanings, and exploring why the author made certain choices. It can be applied to novels, short stories, plays, poems, or any other form of literary writing.

A literary analysis essay is not a rhetorical analysis , nor is it just a summary of the plot or a book review. Instead, it is a type of argumentative essay where you need to analyze elements such as the language, perspective, and structure of the text, and explain how the author uses literary devices to create effects and convey ideas.

Before beginning a literary analysis essay, it’s essential to carefully read the text and c ome up with a thesis statement to keep your essay focused. As you write, follow the standard structure of an academic essay :

• An introduction that tells the reader what your essay will focus on.
• A main body, divided into paragraphs , that builds an argument using evidence from the text.
• A conclusion that clearly states the main point that you have shown with your analysis.

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Table of contents

Step 1: reading the text and identifying literary devices, step 2: coming up with a thesis, step 3: writing a title and introduction, step 4: writing the body of the essay, step 5: writing a conclusion, other interesting articles.

The first step is to carefully read the text(s) and take initial notes. As you read, pay attention to the things that are most intriguing, surprising, or even confusing in the writing—these are things you can dig into in your analysis.

Your goal in literary analysis is not simply to explain the events described in the text, but to analyze the writing itself and discuss how the text works on a deeper level. Primarily, you’re looking out for literary devices —textual elements that writers use to convey meaning and create effects. If you’re comparing and contrasting multiple texts, you can also look for connections between different texts.

To get started with your analysis, there are several key areas that you can focus on. As you analyze each aspect of the text, try to think about how they all relate to each other. You can use highlights or notes to keep track of important passages and quotes.

Language choices

Consider what style of language the author uses. Are the sentences short and simple or more complex and poetic?

What word choices stand out as interesting or unusual? Are words used figuratively to mean something other than their literal definition? Figurative language includes things like metaphor (e.g. “her eyes were oceans”) and simile (e.g. “her eyes were like oceans”).

Also keep an eye out for imagery in the text—recurring images that create a certain atmosphere or symbolize something important. Remember that language is used in literary texts to say more than it means on the surface.

Narrative voice

Ask yourself:

• Who is telling the story?
• How are they telling it?

Is it a first-person narrator (“I”) who is personally involved in the story, or a third-person narrator who tells us about the characters from a distance?

Consider the narrator’s perspective . Is the narrator omniscient (where they know everything about all the characters and events), or do they only have partial knowledge? Are they an unreliable narrator who we are not supposed to take at face value? Authors often hint that their narrator might be giving us a distorted or dishonest version of events.

The tone of the text is also worth considering. Is the story intended to be comic, tragic, or something else? Are usually serious topics treated as funny, or vice versa ? Is the story realistic or fantastical (or somewhere in between)?

Consider how the text is structured, and how the structure relates to the story being told.

• Novels are often divided into chapters and parts.
• Poems are divided into lines, stanzas, and sometime cantos.
• Plays are divided into scenes and acts.

Think about why the author chose to divide the different parts of the text in the way they did.

There are also less formal structural elements to take into account. Does the story unfold in chronological order, or does it jump back and forth in time? Does it begin in medias res —in the middle of the action? Does the plot advance towards a clearly defined climax?

With poetry, consider how the rhyme and meter shape your understanding of the text and your impression of the tone. Try reading the poem aloud to get a sense of this.

In a play, you might consider how relationships between characters are built up through different scenes, and how the setting relates to the action. Watch out for  dramatic irony , where the audience knows some detail that the characters don’t, creating a double meaning in their words, thoughts, or actions.

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Your thesis in a literary analysis essay is the point you want to make about the text. It’s the core argument that gives your essay direction and prevents it from just being a collection of random observations about a text.

If you’re given a prompt for your essay, your thesis must answer or relate to the prompt. For example:

Essay question example

Is Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” a religious parable?

Your thesis statement should be an answer to this question—not a simple yes or no, but a statement of why this is or isn’t the case:

Thesis statement example

Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” is not a religious parable, but a story about bureaucratic alienation.

Sometimes you’ll be given freedom to choose your own topic; in this case, you’ll have to come up with an original thesis. Consider what stood out to you in the text; ask yourself questions about the elements that interested you, and consider how you might answer them.

Your thesis should be something arguable—that is, something that you think is true about the text, but which is not a simple matter of fact. It must be complex enough to develop through evidence and arguments across the course of your essay.

Say you’re analyzing the novel Frankenstein . You could start by asking yourself:

Your initial answer might be a surface-level description:

The character Frankenstein is portrayed negatively in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .

However, this statement is too simple to be an interesting thesis. After reading the text and analyzing its narrative voice and structure, you can develop the answer into a more nuanced and arguable thesis statement:

Mary Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as.

Remember that you can revise your thesis statement throughout the writing process , so it doesn’t need to be perfectly formulated at this stage. The aim is to keep you focused as you analyze the text.

Finding textual evidence

To support your thesis statement, your essay will build an argument using textual evidence —specific parts of the text that demonstrate your point. This evidence is quoted and analyzed throughout your essay to explain your argument to the reader.

It can be useful to comb through the text in search of relevant quotations before you start writing. You might not end up using everything you find, and you may have to return to the text for more evidence as you write, but collecting textual evidence from the beginning will help you to structure your arguments and assess whether they’re convincing.

To start your literary analysis paper, you’ll need two things: a good title, and an introduction.

Your title should clearly indicate what your analysis will focus on. It usually contains the name of the author and text(s) you’re analyzing. Keep it as concise and engaging as possible.

A common approach to the title is to use a relevant quote from the text, followed by a colon and then the rest of your title.

If you struggle to come up with a good title at first, don’t worry—this will be easier once you’ve begun writing the essay and have a better sense of your arguments.

“Fearful symmetry” : The violence of creation in William Blake’s “The Tyger”

The introduction

The essay introduction provides a quick overview of where your argument is going. It should include your thesis statement and a summary of the essay’s structure.

A typical structure for an introduction is to begin with a general statement about the text and author, using this to lead into your thesis statement. You might refer to a commonly held idea about the text and show how your thesis will contradict it, or zoom in on a particular device you intend to focus on.

Then you can end with a brief indication of what’s coming up in the main body of the essay. This is called signposting. It will be more elaborate in longer essays, but in a short five-paragraph essay structure, it shouldn’t be more than one sentence.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement unrestrained by ethical considerations. In this reading, protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a stable representation of the callous ambition of modern science throughout the novel. This essay, however, argues that far from providing a stable image of the character, Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as. This essay begins by exploring the positive portrayal of Frankenstein in the first volume, then moves on to the creature’s perception of him, and finally discusses the third volume’s narrative shift toward viewing Frankenstein as the creature views him.

Some students prefer to write the introduction later in the process, and it’s not a bad idea. After all, you’ll have a clearer idea of the overall shape of your arguments once you’ve begun writing them!

If you do write the introduction first, you should still return to it later to make sure it lines up with what you ended up writing, and edit as necessary.

The body of your essay is everything between the introduction and conclusion. It contains your arguments and the textual evidence that supports them.

Paragraph structure

A typical structure for a high school literary analysis essay consists of five paragraphs : the three paragraphs of the body, plus the introduction and conclusion.

Each paragraph in the main body should focus on one topic. In the five-paragraph model, try to divide your argument into three main areas of analysis, all linked to your thesis. Don’t try to include everything you can think of to say about the text—only analysis that drives your argument.

In longer essays, the same principle applies on a broader scale. For example, you might have two or three sections in your main body, each with multiple paragraphs. Within these sections, you still want to begin new paragraphs at logical moments—a turn in the argument or the introduction of a new idea.

Robert’s first encounter with Gil-Martin suggests something of his sinister power. Robert feels “a sort of invisible power that drew me towards him.” He identifies the moment of their meeting as “the beginning of a series of adventures which has puzzled myself, and will puzzle the world when I am no more in it” (p. 89). Gil-Martin’s “invisible power” seems to be at work even at this distance from the moment described; before continuing the story, Robert feels compelled to anticipate at length what readers will make of his narrative after his approaching death. With this interjection, Hogg emphasizes the fatal influence Gil-Martin exercises from his first appearance.

Topic sentences

To keep your points focused, it’s important to use a topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph.

A good topic sentence allows a reader to see at a glance what the paragraph is about. It can introduce a new line of argument and connect or contrast it with the previous paragraph. Transition words like “however” or “moreover” are useful for creating smooth transitions:

… The story’s focus, therefore, is not upon the divine revelation that may be waiting beyond the door, but upon the mundane process of aging undergone by the man as he waits.

Nevertheless, the “radiance” that appears to stream from the door is typically treated as religious symbolism.

This topic sentence signals that the paragraph will address the question of religious symbolism, while the linking word “nevertheless” points out a contrast with the previous paragraph’s conclusion.

Using textual evidence

A key part of literary analysis is backing up your arguments with relevant evidence from the text. This involves introducing quotes from the text and explaining their significance to your point.

It’s important to contextualize quotes and explain why you’re using them; they should be properly introduced and analyzed, not treated as self-explanatory:

It isn’t always necessary to use a quote. Quoting is useful when you’re discussing the author’s language, but sometimes you’ll have to refer to plot points or structural elements that can’t be captured in a short quote.

In these cases, it’s more appropriate to paraphrase or summarize parts of the text—that is, to describe the relevant part in your own words:

The conclusion of your analysis shouldn’t introduce any new quotations or arguments. Instead, it’s about wrapping up the essay. Here, you summarize your key points and try to emphasize their significance to the reader.

A good way to approach this is to briefly summarize your key arguments, and then stress the conclusion they’ve led you to, highlighting the new perspective your thesis provides on the text as a whole:

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy

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By tracing the depiction of Frankenstein through the novel’s three volumes, I have demonstrated how the narrative structure shifts our perception of the character. While the Frankenstein of the first volume is depicted as having innocent intentions, the second and third volumes—first in the creature’s accusatory voice, and then in his own voice—increasingly undermine him, causing him to appear alternately ridiculous and vindictive. Far from the one-dimensional villain he is often taken to be, the character of Frankenstein is compelling because of the dynamic narrative frame in which he is placed. In this frame, Frankenstein’s narrative self-presentation responds to the images of him we see from others’ perspectives. This conclusion sheds new light on the novel, foregrounding Shelley’s unique layering of narrative perspectives and its importance for the depiction of character.

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Literary analysis: sample essay.

We turn once more to Joanna Wolfe’s and Laura Wilder’s  Digging into Literature: Strategies for Reading, Writing, and Analysis  (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016) in order to show you their example of a strong student essay that has a strong central claim elucidated by multiple surface/depth arguments supported by patterns of evidence.

Paragraph 1

Sylvia Plath’s short poem “Morning Song” explores the conflicted emotions of a new mother. On the one hand, the mother recognizes that she is expected to treasure and celebrate her infant, but on the other hand, she feels strangely removed from the child. The poem uses a combination of scientific and natural imagery to illustrate the mother’s feelings of alienation. By the end of the poem, however, we see a shift in this imagery as the mother begins to see the infant in more human terms.

Paragraph 2

There are several references to scientific imagery in “Morning Song” that suggest that mother is viewing the baby in clinical, scientific terms rather than as a new life. The poem refers to magnification (4) and reflection (8), both of which are scientific methods. The word “distills” (8) refers to a scientific, chemical process for removing impurities from a substance. The baby’s cry is described as taking “its place among the elements” (3), which seems to refer to the periodic table of elements, the primordial matter of the universe. The watch in the first line is similarly a scientific tool and the gold the watch is made of is, of course, an element, like the baby’s cry. Even the balloons in the last line have a scientific connotation since balloons are often used for measurements and experiments in science. These images all serve to show how the speaker feels distanced from the baby, who is like a scientific experiment she is conducting rather than a human being.

Paragraph 3

Natural imagery also seems to further dehumanize the baby, reducing it to nothing more than its mouth. The baby’s breathing is compared to a moth in line 10, suggesting that the speaker feels the infant is fragile and is as likely to die as a moth dancing around candlelight. A few lines later, the baby’s mouth is compared to another animal—a cat—who greedily opens its mouth for milk. Not only does the speaker seem to feel that the baby is like an animal, but she herself is turned into an animal, as she arises “cow-heavy” (13) to feed the infant. These images show how the speaker sees both the baby and herself as dumb animals who exist only to feed and be fed. Even the morning itself seems to be reduced to another mouth to feed as she describes how the dawn “swallows its dull stars” (16). These lines suggest that just as the sun swallows up the stars, so the baby will swallow up this mother.

Paragraph 4

However, in the last few lines the poem takes a hopeful turn as the speaker begins to view the baby as a human being. The baby’s mouth, which has previously been greedy and animal-like, now becomes a source of music, producing a “handful of notes” (17) and “clear vowels” (18). Music is a distinctly human sound. No animals and certainly not the cats, cows, or moths mentioned earlier in the poem, make music. This change in how the speaker perceives the baby’s sounds—from animalistic cry to human song—suggest that she is beginning to relate the baby as an individual. Even the word “handful” in the phrase “handful of notes” (17) seems hopeful in this context since this is the first time the mother has referred to the baby as having a distinctly human body part. When the baby’s notes finally “rise like balloons” (18), the speaker seems to have arrived at a place where she can celebrate the infant. For the first time, the infant is giving something to the speaker rather than threatening to take something away. The mother seems to have finally accepted the child as an independent human being whose company she can celebrate.

Works Cited

Melville Bibliography

Writing About Literature Copyright © by Sarah Guayante is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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April 18, 2024

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Stifled Rage

April 18, 2024 issue

Louisa May Alcott; illustration by Maya Chessman

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A Strange Life: Selected Essays of Louisa May Alcott

“I write for myself and strangers,” Gertrude Stein once announced. So, too, Louisa May Alcott, who wrote for herself as well as the strangers who have been reading Little Women since 1868, when it first appeared. For more than a century and a half, Little Women has inspired playwrights, composers, filmmakers, scholars, novelists, and of course countless young girls. Jane Smiley salutes those young girls—she was one of them—in her warmly appreciative preface to A Strange Life , Liz Rosenberg’s slim new collection of Alcott’s essays.

When she first encountered Little Women , Smiley realized that a book about girls was actually famous and that every library had it. Later it even seemed that the book had to be about Alcott’s own life. And since many others have felt the same way—with good reason—it’s not surprising that new biographies come down the pike every few years, intent on changing the negative view of Alcott best expressed by Henry James, who belittled her as “the Thackeray, the Trollope, of the nursery and the school-room.”

Martha Saxton’s feminist Louisa May: A Modern Biography (1977) and, more recently, biographies by Harriet Reisen, Susan Cheever, and Eve LaPlante, and by scholars such as John Matteson, have demonstrated that Alcott was much more than the author of what she self-deprecatingly called “moral pap for the young.” Rather, as a woman of imagination with considerable stylistic range, Alcott composed gothic tales, short stories, satires, fantasies, adult novels, poetry, memoirs, and essays in which she wrote of female independence and its costs in a restrictive domestic circle. She was also a prolific letter writer who converted into a tart prose style much of her anguish—and anger—at the circumstances in which she found herself, as a woman, as a dutiful daughter, as a second-class citizen, and, ironically, as a best-selling author who worked hard to maintain her popularity.

Rosenberg, the author of Scribbles, Sorrows, and Russet Leather Boots: The Life of Louisa May Alcott (2021), aimed at young readers, is thus not the first person to suggest that Alcott, and in particular her nonfiction, are worthy of serious attention. There’s also Elaine Showalter’s excellent selection of Alcott’s prose in Alternative Alcott (1988); there’s the Portable Louisa May Alcott (2000), edited by Elizabeth Lennox Keyser, and The Sketches of Louisa May Alcott (2001), collected by the Alcott specialist Gregory Eiselein, not to mention the superb selection of her nonfiction in one of the Alcott volumes published by the Library of America.

In A Strange Life , Rosenberg wisely includes Alcott’s best-known prose works—the excellent, slightly fictionalized memoir “Transcendental Wild Oats” and the exceptional (abridged) Hospital Sketches —and sets them alongside excerpts from her semiautobiographical nonfiction to show that her prose, as she explains in her introduction, “canters along; she covers great distances in the fewest words; there is no dilly-dallying.” Maybe so; what’s also true is that Alcott can write with unmistakable acerbity.

Rosenberg provides some biographical information on Alcott as well but unfortunately doesn’t explain why she chose certain pieces and not others, or why she arranged them in the order she did. Presumably the essay “Happy Women” (1868), her penultimate selection, is meant to present Alcott at her feminist best. True, it was written as a buck-me-up advice column for the unmarried woman, counseling her not to fear becoming an “old maid” since “the loss of liberty, happiness, and self respect is poorly repaid by the barren honor of being called ‘Mrs.’” In stock terms, Alcott advises, “Be true to yourselves; cherish whatever talent you possess, and in using it faithfully for the good of others, you will most assuredly find happiness for yourself.” But pieces that Rosenberg didn’t include, such as “Unofficial Incidents Overlooked by the Reporters” (1875), Alcott’s account of the centennial celebration in Concord, Massachusetts, have far more bite:

We had no place in the procession, but such women as wished to hear the oration were directed to meet in the Town Hall at half-past nine, and wait there until certain persons, detailed for the service, should come to lead them to the tent, where a limited number of seats had been reserved for the weaker vessels.

Rosenberg also reprints short excerpts from Alcott’s travel book, Shawl-Straps : An Account of a Trip to Europe (1872), but these selections—from the essays “Women of Brittany,” “The Flood in Rome,” and “Visit from a King”—are flat and predictable. And while she includes Alcott’s autobiographical sketch “My Boys,” a forgettable group of portraits intended mainly for young people and originally published in Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag (1872), Rosenberg fails to note that this was the first in a series of six Scrap-Bag books ( Shawl-Straps being the first), and that in them Alcott cleverly assumed the voice of Jo March Bhaer, from the best-selling Little Women —presumably to make money.

Despite the thinness of these sketches, they could be enriched if the reader knew the books from which they’re taken or more of the circumstances under which they were written. For Alcott worked obsessively to become a successful writer and, not coincidentally, her impoverished family’s breadwinner. Her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, was eccentric and impecunious—and lovable, as long as you weren’t related to him. A self-taught Connecticut peddler turned educator, Bronson for a time ran the progressive Temple School in Boston. But after he published Conversations with Children on the Gospels (1836–1837), in which he included allusions to sex and birth, scandalized Bostonians withdrew their children from the school, forcing it to close. His next venture was short-lived; he admitted a Black child to a new school and even his die-hard supporters bolted.

Then in 1843, when Louisa was ten, Bronson marched his family off to the town of Harvard, Massachusetts, about fourteen miles from Concord, where the Alcotts had been living. At a farm inappropriately dubbed Fruitlands, Bronson believed that they and a small band of cohorts could create a new Garden of Eden by living off the fruit of the land. “Insane, well-meaning egotists,” the antislavery writer Lydia Maria Child called them.

At Fruitlands, Abigail May Alcott, Louisa’s mother, was tasked with the cleaning, the washing of clothes, and the cooking, though there was little of that since utopia mandated a diet of mostly raw vegetables. (Rosenberg calls Bronson “a prescient and intelligent vegetarian pre-hippie.”) She was miserable, and the children almost starved. The model for the beloved Marmee, the mother of the brood in Little Women , Abigail was the youngest child in a family of prominent Boston Brahmin liberals; her brother was the passionate Unitarian abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Samuel Joseph May. She studied French, Latin, and chemistry privately in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and later helped form the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. In 1830 she married the self-involved Bronson, who confessed in his journal, “I love her because she loves me.” In Little Women , Marmee understandably declares, “I am angry nearly every day of my life.”

In “Transcendental Wild Oats” (1873), Alcott changes the names of the Fruitlanders and, Rosenberg argues, “alternates broad comedy with tragedy.” As she puts it, “Alcott never lingers on the psychological devastation” that she likely experienced but rather

focuses on the characters around her and records the homely details of daily life (“unleavened bread, porridge, and water for breakfast; bread, vegetables, and water for dinner; bread, fruit, and water for supper”), leaving little room for disbelief.

Yet Alcott’s details are telling. Her irony is unmistakable, and her voice devastating in its affectlessness. As she observes, these “modern pilgrims,” most notably her father, possessed “the firm belief that plenteous orchards were soon to be evoked from their inner consciousness.” Once in their prospective Eden, she acidly continues, “no teapot profaned that sacred stove, no gory steak cried aloud for vengeance from her chaste gridiron; and only a brave woman’s taste, time, and temper were sacrificed on that domestic altar.” Fortunately the sojourn in paradise lasted only seven months.

The Alcotts eventually resettled in Concord, where Louisa grew up near Emerson, Thoreau, and later Hawthorne. But since “money is never plentiful in a philosopher’s house,” as she later recollected, the family temporarily moved to a basement apartment in Boston. After her mother formed what was basically a female employment agency, Louisa volunteered to take a position as a lady’s live-in companion in Dedham, Massachusetts. It turned out to be a degrading experience that she partly fictionalized in the essay “How I Went Out to Service” (1874), with which Rosenberg opens her volume, claiming it’s yet another example of Alcott’s ability to “strike the intersecting point between tragedy and comedy.” It’s a fine essay but not particularly comic: it’s a chilly story of exploitation and sexual harassment despite the moralizing conclusion about how the experience taught her many lessons.

Doubtless it did, but it also seems that Alcott wrote more for strangers than herself, often muzzling the intensity of her response to those who underestimated, harassed, or took advantage of her. She had begun to sell stories to help support her family, and though she’d already published two in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly , she also tried her hand at teaching again, despite her hatred of it. The publisher of The Atlantic , James Fields, loaned her forty dollars to help outfit her classroom, but when she came to him with another story—according to Rosenberg, “How I Went Out to Service”—he told her bluntly, “Stick to your teaching.” Rosenberg omits what happened later: after the success of Little Women , Alcott paid back the loan, telling Fields she’d found that writing paid far better than teaching, so she’d stick to her pen. “He laughed,” she said, “& owned that he made a mistake.”

She never forgot the insult. Like Marmee, who said she was angry nearly every day of her life, Alcott added, “I have learned not to show it.” Instead she found ways to stifle her rage, distancing herself from her feelings and retreating into the safety of platitudes, which often deaden her prose. For instance, at the conclusion of “How I Went Out to Service,” she tacks on a lesson about “making a companion, not a servant, of those whose aid I need, and helping to gild their honest wages with the sympathy and justice which can sweeten the humblest and lighten the hardest task.” It’s not clear if she’s counseling the reader or herself.

That’s far less true, though, in Hospital Sketches (1863), Alcott’s first successful book, in which she combined her recollections with material from the letters she wrote home while serving as an army nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Washington, D.C. Having “corked up” her tears, she nonetheless writes with feeling about “the barren honors” that these soldiers, cut to pieces at Fredericksburg, had won. She washed their bodies with brown soap, dressed their wounds, sang them lullabies, mopped their brows, and scribbled letters to the mothers and sweethearts of the nameless men, some without arms or legs, who lay in excruciating pain in the hotel’s ballroom. Such “seeming carelessness of the value of life, the sanctity of death” astonished Alcott, who wanted to believe that none of them had been sacrificed in vain.

She lasted only six weeks before she fell ill with typhoid pneumonia and had to be taken home to Concord by her father. The physicians who treated her shaved her hair and dosed her with calomel, a mercury compound that ultimately ruined her health. Alcott, encouraged by a friend to publish her experience, wrote of the desperate conditions that had made her, like many others, so sick: the fetid water and poor ventilation and scant or inedible food. And she wrote not just of the clammy foreheads and agonized deaths, and the insouciance of doctors who made a young woman tell a desperate man that he was dying, but also of the inescapable racism even of her fellow nurses:

I expected to have to defend myself from accusations of prejudice against color; but was surprised to find things just the other way, and daily shocked some neighbor by treating the blacks as I did the whites. The men would swear at the “darkies,” would put two g s into negro, and scoff at the idea of any good coming from such trash. The nurses were willing to be served by the colored people, but seldom thanked them, never praised, and scarcely recognized them in the street.

When she voluntarily touched a small Black child, she was labeled a fanatic. Alcott then offers a typical homily:

Though a hospital is a rough school, its lessons are both stern and salutary; and the humblest of pupils there, in proportion to his faithfulness, learns a deeper faith in God and in himself.

These homilies, like her detachment, may have been a marketing strategy, since she worried always about hanging on to her audience. Yet she did still write for herself after all. “Darkness made visible,” as she called it, was what she also sought, anticipating, in her way, what the witty Emily Dickinson surmised: “Success in Circuit lies.”

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Sunjeev Sahota: ‘I’ve always been in labour movements – but I’m critical of identity politics’

The Booker shortlisted novelist on writing his first significant non-working-class character, the literary critics who inspired him and why he’s not on Facebook

S unjeev Sahota, 43, was born and raised in Derbyshire. Named one of Granta’s best young British novelists in 2013, he made the Booker shortlist two years later with his second novel, The Year of the Runaways , an “epic of immigration... that brings to mind the great realist chroniclers” (the New Yorker ). In 2021 he was longlisted for the same prize with his third novel, China Room , drawn on family history and set partly in 1920s Punjab. His new book, The Spoiled Heart , turns on a vicious leadership contest between two British Indian trade unionists divided by age, sex and class. Sahota, who teaches literature at Durham University, was speaking from his home in Sheffield. Where did this book begin? This is my first time writing a novel set entirely in the UK – for once the story doesn’t go back to India at all. It’s also my first novel properly set in my home town of Chesterfield, which my parents left between my writing China Room and The Spoiled Heart . I’ve now got no reason to go back, which freed me to write about it. I’d been thinking about my childhood in this deindustrialised former mining town and the childhood my kids are having in the middle-class suburb I’m in now. It made me want to explore how the left does or doesn’t talk about class. I’m on the left – I’ve been in a union for years and I’ve always been in labour movements – but I’m critical of identity politics and believe much more in solidarity and economic justice. Did that make it tricky to write both sides of the quarrel at the book’s core? While I do think people like Nayan who believe in class-first politics – arguments very much in line with mine – are being set aside in favour of identitarians like Megha, I had to leave my prejudices at the door: you have to try open-heartedly to give life to your characters in the most enthralling way possible. Megha is the first significant non-working-class character I’ve written and probably the hardest character I’ve ever had to write. But the novel came quickly. China Room took three or four years because I was riven with doubt about the narrator’s right to tell his ancestor’s story; with this, I wrote with an urge to put down on the page things I feel strongly about.

Were you influenced by other novels about class? Nonfiction helped more. The American literary theorist Walter Benn Michaels crystallised so much for me. I read The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality when it first came out [in 2006]. In my early 20s I’d been thinking about race and class. Everyone was telling me that race was the thing that was going to have the largest impact on my life. Inside, I didn’t feel that to be true. I think a lot about his essay Going Boom , which says publishing has been concerned with historical novels about colonialism and slavery because [the culture] wants to feel good for no longer discriminating against people in those ways – while at the same time the gap between rich and poor is now as wide as can be. Internet pile-ons are pivotal to the plot . Do you use social media? No, I’ve never had a Facebook account or anything. I find it depressing for people on the left to indulge the mechanisms of neoliberal tech-bro billionaires who make huge profits from algorithms that enable a bearpit mentality. One of the reasons this denunciation culture has arisen is that the left currently lacks the belief that a different way of organising the world can actually happen. It reminds me of my kids: when they don’t have a project – building a den, say - they start finding ways to fight among themselves. Working out how to create a more egalitarian world is hard. It’s easier to point to some white yoga woman saying namaste and demand that her arse gets handed to her. Which novels have been important to you as a reader? In hindsight, reading Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers in my early 20s, having grown up around friends whose dads were former miners, made clear to me the pain of the job they did and weren’t able to do any more. In my teens I was completely taken over by Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance , about destitute characters in India during the 1970s. I tried it again recently and couldn’t get through the first few pages: my idea of what I want a novel to do has changed. Did you write in your teens? No. I never kept a diary, I wasn’t scribbling stories, I just read. I didn’t have a formal education in the humanities [Sahota studied maths]: reading was my education. A big thing was discovering literary criticism: Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Virginia Woolf’s essays, James Wood . I really enjoyed reading critics trying to make sense of how novels worked or didn’t. That’s what made me want to have a go at writing one myself [his 2011 debut Ours Are the Streets ] when I was 24 or 25. What do you recall reading as a child? Mine wasn’t a bookish household. My parents had a shop and I mostly just read magazines and newspapers waiting to do the paper round. I didn’t read any fiction that I can remember, but I was always reading – even shampoo bottles. I remember intently looking at the backs of cereal boxes, wanting to read every single word, fascinated by their sounds. Where do you write? My kids are all at school, so Monday to Friday between half nine and half two at my dining table, where I’m sat now. Name an author whose work you teach. [Thomas] Pynchon. If we’re to use terms like “political writer”, he’s the kind I like. His narrative structures allow us to achieve an understanding of the systems that harm the lives of the poor, an understanding that might illuminate the problem and not simply request pity for what the problem causes.

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Mothering and Writing Are Both Undervalued Labor, so How Do Women Do Both?

Books & Culture

Madeleine l'engle showed me that being a mother artist is possible, but not easy.

For weeks I throw up every day. I can’t smell the diaper bin or the dishwasher without heaving. I can’t exercise without churning my nausea. I go to sleep at 7:30 pm. In the mornings, I log in to meetings where my male colleagues don’t know that just off-screen, I’m beginning to show.

They don’t know, either, what it feels like to be in a body like this: to ache and retch and long to collapse, and still to show up for work; to manage a household, with its tedious chores and consuming mental labor; to welcome a toddler from his grandparents’ at sunset, fatigued by the force of his energy and curiosity but straining to stay gracious and cool. They’ll never praise me for this work. They’ll never pay me for it.

The work of the mother and the work of the artist are undervalued and undercompensated. Creative work, after all, is “nonessential,” as the pandemic has made explicit. And while most everyone would affirm that the work of the mother is essential, her work is still largely taken for granted. Most communities lack substantial structures to compensate, validate, or buttress her in her labor. It is challenging to persevere in either vocation and especially challenging to persevere in both. Just as arts budgets are cut when resources are strained, creative practice may be the first thing to go in a new mother’s life. Amid the thankless labor of caregiving, why would a woman take on still more work that might go unseen? How could she justify hiring childcare to do work that might not pay? Why would she abide in her craft, and how?

Madeleine L’Engle’s writing career was already underway when, during the years she was raising her children, she received only rejection letters from publishers for an entire decade. The author best known for her fantastical novel A Wrinkle in Time had been writing since she was a child in the 1920s. After college, as an actress living in Greenwich Village, she wrote between scenes in the theater wings, piecing together her first novel. Titled The Small Rain, her debut was published in 1945, when she was twenty-seven. The New York Times called it “evidence of a fresh new talent,” and it sold well, paving the way for her to publish a second novel 14 months later. That same year, she married an actor she met on the set of a Chekhov play. In 1947, their daughter Josephine was born.

Amid the thankless labor of caregiving, why would a woman take on still more work that might go unseen?

L’Engle kept writing through the first years of motherhood, publishing a third novel the year of her second pregnancy. But after that book, her literary agent was unable to sell any of her manuscripts. As her family grew, editors’ interest in her work withered. She gave birth to a son, Bion, in 1952 and adopted a daughter, Maria, in 1956. By then her family had moved from Greenwich Village to the dairy farm village of Goshen, Connecticut, where she and her husband bought an old farmhouse and the town’s general store. He took the lead managing the market while L’Engle split time between caregiving, writing, and tending the store. She persisted in sending out work. But by 1958, nearing forty, she was so worn by editors’ indifference that she vowed to give up writing altogether.

A rejection slip on the day of her fortieth birthday appeared to seal her fate. “This seemed an obvious sign from heaven,” she remembers in her memoir A Circle of Quiet . “I should stop trying to write.” She blamed her literary ambition for her deficient domestic skills, comparing herself to the other Connecticut mothers with their polished floors and country pies. “And with all the hours I spent writing,” she went on, “I was still not pulling my own weight financially.” Why keep writing when no one is reading? Why paint when no one sees? Why work when it doesn’t pay?

The summer I first conceived, I began writing letters to literary agents, seeking representation for a collection of essays written after the deaths of my father and brother. The book was a meditation on grief and beauty, and writing it had trained my eyes to see light even in the midnights of human experience. It would meet readers, I hoped, as a companion in the dark. But first, I’d need an agent to get my work on editors’ desks. Before the baby was born, I sent inquiries to over fifty agencies, and I received as many rejections.

Two years pass. The boy is growing. I continue to send letters.

Finally, in the winter of my second pregnancy, a literary agent invites me to sign with her agency. I am so glad that I pour an illicit glass of champagne. Together, we develop a proposal for the book, and she presents it to editors at eighteen publishing houses. It’s January, and the bright field behind our home after a snowfall sprawls like a future. But one by one, the editors send their regrets.

As Madeleine L’Engle’s family grew, editors’ interest in her work withered.

Now the white field is just an empty page. I thought that an agent would open the door where I’ve been knocking; in this case it means only more disappointment, channeled now through a benevolent proxy.

Soon I’ll have a newborn again. Life with two children will not amble to the slow cadence of that first summer with my son; it will be arrhythmic and bewildering. I am not yet at a stage in my career when anyone depends on me to keep making art. As the poet Kate Baer says in Sara Fredman’s interview series Write Like a Mother, “No one cares if you’re a writer, except you.” Now would be a reasonable time to quit.

“I was born with the itch for writing in me, and oh, I couldn’t stop it if I tried,” L’Engle wrote in her journal as a teenager. Rather than quit on her fortieth birthday, she kept going. Her agent found a home for her 1960 novel Meet the Austins , and with that success, L’Engle returned to her typewriter. There, she began to work out an idea about a courageous girl named Meg Murry and her quest through space and time to save her physicist father from the forces of evil. As she resumed her practice, she established patterns that would last a lifetime. Her granddaughter remembers that she turned in at nine each night so that she’d be fresh for the next day’s work. Whether in her country house or at the library of Manhattan’s Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, where beginning in 1966 she was writer-in-residence, she wrote every day. She did so not because she was inspired every day but so that the tools of her craft would be sharp when a rare moment of vision struck. As she writes in the memoir The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, “Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.”

I don’t write every day as L’Engle models, but I do keep writing. In the final months of my pregnancy, to my great satisfaction, I place articles in a few magazines. I pitch new articles to magazine editors with a six-month lead time so that after a twelve-week maternity leave, I’ll have something to work on. And my agent urges me—after the baby comes, when I’m ready—to prepare a proposal for a new project.

My second child is born in early June, a boy as golden and fair as the month of his birth. He nurses vigorously and sleeps deeply. He’s a quiet baby, and his brother approaches him reverently. At first.

Why keep writing when no one is reading? Why work when it doesn’t pay?

Within a week, our calm splinters into ceaseless cries of need, all of them directed toward my body. The baby cries to eat. The toddler protests sleep unless I lie down beside him. He will not bathe unless I bathe him. All he says to his daddy now is, “not you.” A new question of perseverance comes to the fore: How will I abide in the chaos of early parenthood, chaos that with two children is not doubled but squared?

Picture this scene: The newborn wakes in the violet light as the sun is beginning to rise. I scoop his body, limber as a kitten, from the bassinet at my bedside and carry him to the kitchen, where I put water on the stove for coffee. Then I open the back door to let the air in, and we walk to a plush chair in the living room. I cradle this new boy with one arm, tuck three different pillows on my right and left and lap, and single-handedly roll up a swaddling cloth to place beneath the baby’s cheek, elevating his head so it meets my breast. How strange it is to care for a person so frail, so fresh, that he hasn’t the strength even to put his face where he needs it to be. He begins to eat.

Down the hall, a doorknob. His brother is awake. Now two years old, he has graduated from crib to bed, and I’m still startled he can open his own door. I brace myself, preparing to speak sweetly. Footsteps down the hall. A drowsy figure in the doorframe. Then he climbs onto the chair’s arms, suddenly lively. Now he is sitting on my shoulders. Now he is hugging my face. “Lovey, Lovey, Mama needs some space.” Now my hair is in my eyes, and my neck is bending sideways, and the baby is so new he doesn’t notice and so he’s still nursing, draining me, draining me. And the water is boiling.

Austin is sleeping. I’m angry that I’m alone with these two needy creatures. My first impulse is to shout help to the other side of the house like a real drama queen. Instead, I huff audibly to let it be known that I have been inconvenienced. Then I clutch the baby carefully, squirm out of the toddler’s hold, stand up, and feel the pillows tumble to the floor. I turn off the boiling water. I do not make my coffee. My oldest is sitting in the chair where we were, and I pull up a TV tray and a laptop. He gets a show. He gets pancakes defrosted in the microwave. He gets grapes, served whole because I have weighed the risk of his choking against the risk of slicing fruit while holding a newborn and have selected not the safest option but the option that requires less effort.

Within a week, our calm splinters into ceaseless cries of need, all of them directed toward my body.

In the bedroom, I pat Austin’s shoulder and say, in a tone that is both a whisper and a bark, “I could use a little help.” Then I return to a chair beside the toddler, recreate the pillow rig, and resume nursing the baby.

Here is trouble so subtle it seems barely worth telling about. But it frays and inflames me. How to abide in this chaos?

I don’t wonder whether I will persevere in motherhood; I know I will not leave my children. But I do wonder how I will persevere. What will be the quality of my presence? Will I begrudge this thankless labor?

Will I be tired all the time? Will I be short-tempered, escaping into housework while the boys toddle at my feet because laundry demands less of me than the children’s desires? Or will I wake up to the humor of this time—its slapstick antics? Will I notice its magic? Will I have joy with which to be generous?

The spark that lit A Wrinkle in Time came to L’Engle by starlight. Her children were seven, ten, and twelve when she and her husband made plans to move from their rural home back to Manhattan. The summer before the move, they took their kids on a ten-week camping trip. They wanted to see the stars. L’Engle, once an English major without any interest in the sciences, had recently read about quantum physics and the theory of relativity. More than the theologians esteemed at her country church or in the Anglicanism of her childhood, Albert Einstein and Max Planck seemed to her an opening between the mundane and the metaphysical.

On their road trip, beneath her feet in the passenger seat, she stowed a crate of books about the making of the universe. At night while the children slept, she sat outside her tent reading and gazing heavenward, feeling at once small and magnificent. In her reading of cosmology, human beings were part of a fantastical system, one in which time could wrinkle and love was magic enough to defeat evil. From these meditations, L’Engle began to draft a novel to tell this story.

Feeling new resolve after her agent succeeded in selling Meet the Austins , L’Engle persisted as 26 editors passed on this new manuscript. Finally, after two years of effort, L’Engle handed the pages directly to John Farrar at Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, who accepted it enthusiastically. A Wrinkle in Time was finally published in 1962. It was instantly beloved by children and adults alike, and won the Newbery Medal the following year. By the time it was turned into a major motion picture in 2018, it had sold more than ten million copies.

Maybe this is all I need—not the satisfaction of my literary ambition but simply to be still awhile with this child. This could be enough.

Over the course of L’Engle’s career, she published more than sixty novels, memoirs, poetry collections, and plays. Though in her thirties her efforts to reach readers were thwarted, she continued to write. “It didn’t matter how small or inadequate my talent,” she reflects in A Circle of Quiet . “If I never had another book published, and it was very clear to me that this was a real possibility, I still had to go on writing.” She wrote in such volumes that I suspect it wasn’t merely a drive for acclaim that motivated her; something deeper called her again and again to her writing desk.

“Why does anybody tell a story?” she asks in The Rock That Is Higher , a nonfiction meditation on myth. “It does indeed have something to do with faith, faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

That’s why L’Engle kept writing. Because she believed that our little human lives matter cosmically. Like Amy March, who insisted that her sister Jo write her story even if it was “just about our little life”; and like Della Miles, who saw Jack Boughton as “a holy human soul”; L’Engle was lit with awe for the human person, small as we are in the cosmic drama.

She never could distinguish her novels as either for grown-ups or for children. When I read L’Engle as an adult, I believe again in magic. She writes in Walking on Water , “The artist, if he is not to forget how to listen, must retain the vision which includes angels and dragons and unicorns and all the lovely creatures which our world would put in a box marked Children Only.”

While I don’t see dragons, I do, after hours in L’Engle’s authorial mind, start to see stardust. There’s the glimmering surface of my children’s skin, the light in their eyes, the sacred nature of their wonder, and the uncanny fact that they exist at all and are entrusted to my care. This is a powerful elixir against the tedium of motherhood, a shot in the arm for the adventure before me.

The new baby is sleeping. When his brother wakes from his own nap in the late afternoon, we recline in a chair, and I read to him. The Happy Lion. Owl Moon. Books where children encounter jovial beasts and mystical birds, where the scrim of the ordinary opens into the otherworldly. I wedge him between my hips and the chair’s arm, and he rests his neck on my elbow. He wears a muslin gown and drinks a bottle of warm milk, his neck and cheeks hot from sleep. “Read more books, Mama,” he says. Maybe this is all I need—not the satisfaction of my literary ambition but simply to be still awhile with this child. This could be enough. On the other hand, how powerful will it be to show my son that I, too, write books, and to impart a legacy of courage to pursue a career—artistic or otherwise—that pays not in money but in meaning?

When I finish reading, my oldest stays with me, not wired as he usually is but docile. I dip my cheek onto his fine hair and stare at his hands, bigger now but still plush like a baby’s. His little brother wakes, and we go together to my bedroom. The toddler climbs into the bassinet and curls his body around the newborn’s. I guide his movements to protect the baby while encouraging tenderness between them, carefully watching every limb.

Our vision of the world is shaped by what we see. What an artist sees, therefore, shapes the world that she shows to others in her work. Again and again, I look at these frail, magnificent bodies. I look at them to be sure they’re safe. I look at them because they demand it of me: “Mama, look at me.” “Mama, come find me.” And I look at them because they are so beautiful that I can’t stop looking.

When I’m with them, I catch myself staring. When I leave them, I study their photographs. In all this looking, my view of the world is reframed by maternal humanism, composed of awe, curiosity, and adoration for the vulnerable ones of this world—which is to say, all of us.

Why persevere in making art? Because our communities need art made by those who can’t take their eyes off of the vulnerable ones of this world. We need a visual culture, a literary culture, a culture of performance that wakes us up to the dignity of every person. A mother artist brings certain virtues to the creative life—gifts that she gives to her audience.

We need artists who have tamed their egos enough to care for others, then revived their ambitions to be generous with their talents.

An artist who’s been transfigured in pregnancy gives us the body in all its strange beauty. An artist who has lost a child refuses to explain away tragedy, and companions all who grieve. An artist who’s been through the calamity of childbirth shows us women’s vulnerability and strength. We need artists who have tamed their egos enough to take time to care for others, then revived their ambitions to be generous with their talents. We need artists who reimagine women’s desire in all its complexity. We need artists who rightly balance self-emptying with self-possession, and artists who stand up for others’ dignity, and artists who give themselves in interdependence to their communities. If art has the power to change minds, if art has the power to shift public opinion, if art has the power to shape new worlds, then imagine with me a world lit by this constellation of maternal virtues. It’s luminous.

This is not to say that every mother is as virtuous as the vision I’ve laid out, or that any mother is virtuous all the time. Motherhood has introduced me to the worst version of myself—a woman often embittered, impatient, and bored by the bodily imposition and tedium of this endeavor. But as I interact with artwork made by mothers, virtue comes more easily, as I become alert to the magic and humor shared between me and these tiny bodies. Carmen Winant, in an essay in Frieze , puts it this way: “As I tend to my own children and reach for the fortitude to be a parent, I am struck by the ways in which—now more than ever—I need art, across books and visual exhibitions, to feel assured of my own daily capacity for resilience, patience and affection.” The more mothers persevere in making art, the more we draw out the best in one another, thus inviting our audiences to imagine and work for a world humanized by the love of a mother for herself, her family, and her communities.

I wrote the majority of my book while caring for both an infant and a toddler, and I still wonder whether this was the right time for an ambitious creative project. I’ve been so tired. Consumed at every moment by the book, or these bodies, or both. What enrichment for my children might I have dreamt up if my mind weren’t crowded with insight and worry for this book? If I weren’t writing, might I have slept better? Been more patient? Felt more joy? Every day I wonder.

I have not yet resolved many of the tensions. Except for this one: whether an artist comes back to her art practice three weeks or thirty years after her child is born, her audience is better for her departure, and for her return. 

Excerpted from  The Mother Artist . Copyright © 2024,  Catherine Ricketts . Reproduced by permission of Broadleaf Books. All rights reserved.

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Here are the 2024 finalists for the $50,000 Gotham Book Prize.

Today, the  Gotham Book Prize , an annual award that began during the first year of the pandemic to honor and support the best writing about New York City, whether fiction or nonfiction, announced its eleven 2024 finalists.

“It’s impossible to capture the richness of New York City in just one book, but the eleven finalists for the 2024 Gotham Book Prize all come pretty close,” said Gotham Book Prize co-founders Bradley Tusk and Howard Wolfson in a statement. “We can’t wait to award the $50,000 prize to one of these books in the coming months, and for the first time we’ll be doing it alongside Queens Public Library—a great institution serving the most diverse place in the world. And while we are well past the lowest points of the pandemic, the Gotham Book Prize is a way to celebrate the creative minds who have bounced back and continued to tell the tale of one of the greatest stories in the world—the City of New York.”

Here are the finalists:

Patrick Brinkley, All the Beauty in the World Aisha Abdel Gawad, Between Two Moons Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto Melissa Rivero, Flores and Miss Paula Patricia Park, Imposter Syndrome and Other Confessions of Alejandra Kim Graham Rayman, Reuven Blau, Rikers: An Oral History Maria Smilios, The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis Prudence Peiffer, The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever Alexander Stille, The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune Tyriek White, We Are a Haunting Joshunda Sanders, Women of the Post

The winner, who will be selected by a jury “ made up of leading New Yorkers and authors ,” will be named at Queens Public Library’s annual gala on June 5, 2024.

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CBSE Class 10 English Syllabus 2024-25: Download English Language and Literature Syllabus in PDF

Cbse class 10 english syllabus 2024-25: find here the detailed cbse class 10 syllabus of english language and literature subject. the syllabus has been released at the board’s official website at cbse.gov.in for the new academic session 2024-25. download the complete syllabus in pdf here..

CBSE Class 10 English Syllabus 2024-2025: The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has released the latest syllabus for Class 10 English for the academic session 2024-2025 on its official website. This article will provide you with a comprehensive overview of the latest English (Language and Literature) syllabus, including the prescribed texts and topics to be covered in the new academic session 2024-25. By understanding the syllabus content, students can develop a strategic study plan and prepare effectively to excel in their annual board exams.

CBSE Class 10 English Syllabus  2024-2025 Highlights

Cbse class 10 english syllabus 2024-2025, section a - reading skills.

I.Reading Comprehension through Unseen Passage   20 Marks

1. Discursive passage of 400-450 words. (10 marks)  

2. Case-based factual passage (with visual input- statistical data, chart etc.) of 200-250 words. (10 marks)

(Total length of two passages to be 600-700 words)

Section B - Writing Skills and Grammar

II Grammar 10 Marks

Determiners 

Tenses 

Subject – verb concord 

• Commands and requests

3. The courses at the secondary level seek to cement high professional grasp of grammatical items and levels of accuracy. Accurate use of spelling, punctuation and grammar in context will be assessed through Gap Filling/ Editing/Transformation exercises. Ten out of 12 questions will have to be attempted.

III Writing Skills 10 marks

4. Writing a Formal Letter based on a given situation, in 100-120 words. One out of two questions is to be answered. 5 marks

Section C - Language through Literature 40 Marks

IV. Reference to the Context (5+5 = 10 Marks)

6.One extract out of two from Drama / Prose.

7. One extract out of two from poetry.

Multiple Choice Questions / Objective Type Questions Very Short Answer Questions (one word/ One sentence), Short Answer Questions (to be answered in 30-40 words) will be asked to assess inference, analysis,interpretation, evaluation and vocabulary.

V. Short & Very Long Answer Questions 30 Marks

8. Four out of Five Short Answer Type Questions to be answered in 40-50 words from the book FIRST FLIGHT to assess interpretation, analysis, inference and evaluation. 4x3=12 marks

9. Two out of Three Short Answer Type Questions to be answered in 40-50 words each from FOOTPRINTS WITHOUT FEET to assess interpretation, analysis, inference and evaluation. 2x3=6 marks

10.One out of two Long Answer Type Questions from FIRST FLIGHT to be answered in about 100-120 words each to assess creativity, imagination and extrapolation beyond the text and across the text. This canbe a passage-based question taken from a situation/plot from the text.  6 marks

Prescribed Books for CBSE Class 10 English (Language & Literature)

1. english reader: first flight, 2. supplementary reader: footprints without feet, 3.workbook for class 10: words and expressions – ii , internal assessment for 2024-2025.

Listening and Speaking Competencies 30 Periods

Assessment of Listening and Speaking Skills will be for 05 marks. It is recommended that listening and speaking skills should be regularly practiced.

Typology of Questions for CBSE Class 10 English Exam 2024-2025

Theory Paper - Maximum Marks 80

NCERT Books for Class 10 English 

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NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust

David Folkenflik

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust.

NPR's top news executive defended its journalism and its commitment to reflecting a diverse array of views on Tuesday after a senior NPR editor wrote a broad critique of how the network has covered some of the most important stories of the age.

"An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America," writes Uri Berliner.

A strategic emphasis on diversity and inclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, promoted by NPR's former CEO, John Lansing, has fed "the absence of viewpoint diversity," Berliner writes.

NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

NPR names tech executive Katherine Maher to lead in turbulent era

She added, "None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole."

A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network's chief content officer, would have no further comment.

Praised by NPR's critics

Berliner is a senior editor on NPR's Business Desk. (Disclosure: I, too, am part of the Business Desk, and Berliner has edited many of my past stories. He did not see any version of this article or participate in its preparation before it was posted publicly.)

Berliner's essay , titled "I've Been at NPR for 25 years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust," was published by The Free Press, a website that has welcomed journalists who have concluded that mainstream news outlets have become reflexively liberal.

Berliner writes that as a Subaru-driving, Sarah Lawrence College graduate who "was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother ," he fits the mold of a loyal NPR fan.

Yet Berliner says NPR's news coverage has fallen short on some of the most controversial stories of recent years, from the question of whether former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, to the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19, to the significance and provenance of emails leaked from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden weeks before the 2020 election. In addition, he blasted NPR's coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

On each of these stories, Berliner asserts, NPR has suffered from groupthink due to too little diversity of viewpoints in the newsroom.

The essay ricocheted Tuesday around conservative media , with some labeling Berliner a whistleblower . Others picked it up on social media, including Elon Musk, who has lambasted NPR for leaving his social media site, X. (Musk emailed another NPR reporter a link to Berliner's article with a gibe that the reporter was a "quisling" — a World War II reference to someone who collaborates with the enemy.)

When asked for further comment late Tuesday, Berliner declined, saying the essay spoke for itself.

The arguments he raises — and counters — have percolated across U.S. newsrooms in recent years. The #MeToo sexual harassment scandals of 2016 and 2017 forced newsrooms to listen to and heed more junior colleagues. The social justice movement prompted by the killing of George Floyd in 2020 inspired a reckoning in many places. Newsroom leaders often appeared to stand on shaky ground.

Leaders at many newsrooms, including top editors at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times , lost their jobs. Legendary Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron wrote in his memoir that he feared his bonds with the staff were "frayed beyond repair," especially over the degree of self-expression his journalists expected to exert on social media, before he decided to step down in early 2021.

Since then, Baron and others — including leaders of some of these newsrooms — have suggested that the pendulum has swung too far.

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New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned last year against journalists embracing a stance of what he calls "one-side-ism": "where journalists are demonstrating that they're on the side of the righteous."

"I really think that that can create blind spots and echo chambers," he said.

Internal arguments at The Times over the strength of its reporting on accusations that Hamas engaged in sexual assaults as part of a strategy for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel erupted publicly . The paper conducted an investigation to determine the source of a leak over a planned episode of the paper's podcast The Daily on the subject, which months later has not been released. The newsroom guild accused the paper of "targeted interrogation" of journalists of Middle Eastern descent.

Heated pushback in NPR's newsroom

Given Berliner's account of private conversations, several NPR journalists question whether they can now trust him with unguarded assessments about stories in real time. Others express frustration that he had not sought out comment in advance of publication. Berliner acknowledged to me that for this story, he did not seek NPR's approval to publish the piece, nor did he give the network advance notice.

Some of Berliner's NPR colleagues are responding heatedly. Fernando Alfonso, a senior supervising editor for digital news, wrote that he wholeheartedly rejected Berliner's critique of the coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, for which NPR's journalists, like their peers, periodically put themselves at risk.

Alfonso also took issue with Berliner's concern over the focus on diversity at NPR.

"As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry's long-standing lack of diversity," Alfonso says. "These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done."

After this story was first published, Berliner contested Alfonso's characterization, saying his criticism of NPR is about the lack of diversity of viewpoints, not its diversity itself.

"I never criticized NPR's priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not 'denigrated' NPR's newsroom diversity goals," Berliner said. "That's wrong."

Questions of diversity

Under former CEO John Lansing, NPR made increasing diversity, both of its staff and its audience, its "North Star" mission. Berliner says in the essay that NPR failed to consider broader diversity of viewpoint, noting, "In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans."

Berliner cited audience estimates that suggested a concurrent falloff in listening by Republicans. (The number of people listening to NPR broadcasts and terrestrial radio broadly has declined since the start of the pandemic.)

Former NPR vice president for news and ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin tweeted , "I know Uri. He's not wrong."

Others questioned Berliner's logic. "This probably gets causality somewhat backward," tweeted Semafor Washington editor Jordan Weissmann . "I'd guess that a lot of NPR listeners who voted for [Mitt] Romney have changed how they identify politically."

Similarly, Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton suggested the rise of Trump alienated many NPR-appreciating Republicans from the GOP.

In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR's leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino.

"The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?" Lansing, who stepped down last month, says in response to Berliner's piece. "I'd welcome the argument against that."

"On radio, we were really lagging in our representation of an audience that makes us look like what America looks like today," Lansing says. The U.S. looks and sounds a lot different than it did in 1971, when NPR's first show was broadcast, Lansing says.

A network spokesperson says new NPR CEO Katherine Maher supports Chapin and her response to Berliner's critique.

The spokesperson says that Maher "believes that it's a healthy thing for a public service newsroom to engage in rigorous consideration of the needs of our audiences, including where we serve our mission well and where we can serve it better."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.