Identification - GRE Subject Test: Literature in English

Mary Cavan Tyrone, James Tyrone, and Cathleen are primary characters in Eugene O'Neill's 1956 play, Long Day's Journey Into Night. It is a drama written in four parts between 1941 and 1942. It was the Pulitzer Prize winner in 1957.

This question describes the 1934 Porgy and Bess, first performed in New York City by a controversial cast of all-African-American singers. The play is known for its jazz style, its famous song “Summertime” (since covered by many performers), and for its questionable perpetuation of racial stereotypes. It has gone in and out of fashion for the eighty years since its debut. The play introduces important questions such as the role of the black performer in theater and the use of stereotypes by white composers.

The author is Arthur Miller, and the play, written in 1953, concerns the late-seventeenth-century Salem witch trials in the Massachusetts Bay province of America. The play is intended as an allegory of the 1950s Red Scare and McCarthyism, when the U.S. government became paranoid about the possibility of communism infiltrating the country. As a result of the play (which includes characters such as Abigail Williams, John and Elizabeth Proctor, Tituba, Mary William, Giles Corey, and Reverend Samuel Parris), Miller was questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee and charged with contempt of Congress.

The play in question is Williams’ 1944 play The Glass Menagerie. The play features narrator Tom Wingfield; matriarch Amanda Wingfield, whose husband abandoned the family and whose glory days as a Southern debutante have long faded; the cripplingly shy Laura Wingfield, Tom’s sister and Amanda’s daughter; and the deceitful prospective suitor Jim O’Connor.

Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s West Side Story is based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Originally performed on Broadway in 1957, the musical is set in a neighborhood of immigrants in New York City’s Upper West Side. Like Romeo and Juliet, it includes themes such as love, death, loyalty, and family, but it is also concerned with tensions between immigrants and native citizens in America during the 1950s.

The playwright who wrote the plays listed is Eugene O’Neill, a native of New York City and a recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature. O’Neill is widely regarded as one of the most important dramatists in twentieth-century America, and his work makes use of American vernacular, characters who are outcasts or misfits, and a stark, sometimes relentless realism.

Although all the titles listed above are American plays dealing with AIDS, only the 1993 Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes was written by Tony Kushner. It is by far the most famous work of the Kushner’s and includes character doubling, interweaving storylines, and various angels and imaginary friends.

The play described is The Odd Couple, which follows the tiffs and jokes of Oscar, a notoriously laidback slob, and Felix, an extremely organized neat-freak. The play’s main premise is that the two recently divorced main characters become roommates out of financial necessity but end up forming their own close relationship.

The play in question is A Raisin in the Sun, a work that portrays the experiences of an impoverished black family in mid-century Chicago. It is known for its cast of almost exclusively African-American characters as well as its involvement in a U.S. Supreme Court case about racist housing policies.

The theatrical genre described in the question is vaudeville, a genre that developed in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America. It has its roots in a range of different disciplines, including stage magic, burlesque, circus sideshows, and musical theater.

The author is Edward Albee, an award-winning American playwright who was born in 1928. The play follows the disintegration of the marriage of an impotent middle-aged couple and is remarkable for its interplay of reality and illusion.

The play described in the question stem is Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which follows the offstage adventures of Hamlet’s two hapless friends. The conceit is that the eponymous characters are confused by the plot of Hamlet, which they aren’t privy to, and this conceit allows Stoppard to pose strong existential questions about human purpose and determinism.

Glengarry Glen Ross was written by David Mamet and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. It centers on the machinations of four unscrupulous real estate agents in Chicago who are trying their best to sell the two pieces of real estate in the play’s title. It is known for its exquisite dialogues and attention to language.

Although Phillis Wheatley was indeed the first published African-American writer and woman, she did not write plays. As the title of her publication indicates, she wrote poetry.

Of all the options listed above, only jazz poetry developed after 1900.

This writer is Mercy Otis Warren, who eschewed cultural norms and wrote about war, politics, and ethical matters—all subjects at the time thought to be in the realm of men. Other plays by Warren include The Ladies of Castille and The Sack of Rome, which concern ideals of liberty and morality in the early United States.

Anne Sexton's poem "Sylvia's Death" deals with the death of fellow poet Sylvia Plath.

The poem is by Gwendolyn Brooks, who was the first African American poet to win the Pulitzer Prize. Brooks experimented with poetic form throughout her career, but her poetry is often concerned with the urban poor of the area of Chicago in which she lived for much of her life. This poem is a favorite of the Lit GRE's and it is extremely short, so you should make it a point to be able to recognize it on first sight.

The poet described is Edward Estlin Cummings, usually known as e. e. cummings. In addition to his poetry, Cummings was known for his paintings, plays, novels and essays.