Current Series Catalogue

Becoming American

In 1782, Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a French immigrant to America, asked in one of his Letters from an American Farmer a question that continues to resonate in the United States: What is an American?”

This series explores the process of becoming American through the representative experiences of immigrant writers from the diverse cultures of the United States. Through reading and discussion of these works, participants will gain an understanding of the immigrant experience. They will also clarify their own sense of American values and ideals as they develop an answer to de Crèvecoeur’s crucial question.

Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers
This novel tells the story of Sara Smolinsky’s struggle to free herself from the restrictions imposed on women in a Russian Orthodox Jewish family that emigrates to New York City at the turn of the twentieth century. She and her mother and sisters devote their lives to serving her father, a rabbi. But after watching her father marry her sisters into desperate situations, Sara rebels and leaves home, finding a job and a life of her own.

Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
Using the unusual narrative strategy of telling the story backwards—beginning with the return of one of four sisters to her native Dominican Republic many years after her family’s immigration to the United States—this touching and comic novel details the Garcia girls’ assimilation into American culture.

Gish Jen, Typical American
When Yifeng comes to American to study engineering, he intends to earn his degree and return to his native China. But soon he has changed his name to Ralph Chang, been joined by his ambitious sister Theresa, and finds himself married to a perfect American wife and pursuing the American dream—with consequences both comic and sad.

Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker
Henry Parks works undercover in New York City. He’s a natural—quiet, watchful, secretive, distant. He acquired these traits as a child, when he grew up the only Korean boy in an all-American suburb. In this cross-cultural spy story, Lee explores the effects of assimilation on immigrants seeking to become American.

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
The Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, is bent on becoming American even as everyone pines for home. The name they bestow on their first born, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world, and these conflicts will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and difficult arrivals.

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