New Colossus Statue Of Liberty

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” America’s call to the world for the people most in need of liberty, their wretched and their homeless. This quote comes from the 1883 sonnet, New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus and is engraved on a plaque affixed to the Statue of Liberty. While American Literature predates Lazarus by a few centuries, her sonnet along with Thomas Jefferson’s 1776 contribution in the Declaration of Independence help define what makes certain literature American. Expressing the beliefs of the colonist, Thomas Jefferson, an immigrant, penned to the world the purpose of what America stood for, the preservation of individual God-given rights. American Literature is the narrative of the struggle
Having the right to live where one wants, practice their faith, or conduct the business of their choice may be taken for granted by Americans who know no other way of living. Immigrants and former slaves, however, were not far removed from their former oppressions and some were crafty enough to use whatever liberties afforded to them as an advantage. After the horrors of slavery and the Civil-War, Booker T Washington used his advanced intellect to remind white southerners that slaves and slave owners alike have suffered the same defeat. Washington suggested in his speech to the Atlanta Exposition, documented in Up from Slavery, together both races can pull themselves up and prosper. Stating that “Casting down your bucket among my people, helping and encouraging them as you are doing on these grounds, and to education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories. While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen” (Washington 450). Unfortunately, Washington’s advice was not heeded by either race; the result was a futile pursuit of happiness for the majority of both races in the South
American Literature is rife with stories about individual and mass pursuits of riches, love, solitude, or fame. It is these stories that have drawn so many to America in search of happiness, regardless of the odds against them. In Neighbor Rosicky, Willa Cather tells a beautiful story of a Bohemian immigrant, Anton Rosicky, that has lived miserably in his native country, London, and even in New York City, who finds happiness in the solitude of small town living on the Nebraska prairie. With a few exceptions, the life he preferred was not unlike that enjoyed by the Natives prior to the colonist arrival. Rosicky hopes his children never have to experience the brutality of life in a city. Oddly enough, one particular place was very comforting to him, the graveyard right outside his hay field. After Rosicky’s death, his doctor drove by the cemetery and noticed that “this was really a beautiful graveyard… Nothing could be more un-deathlike than this place; nothing could be more right for a man who had helped to do the work of great cities and had always longed for the open country and had got to it at last. Rosicky's life seemed to him complete and beautiful” (Cather 699). Happiness comes in many different forms, just like the diversity of Americans and their