Portrayal of Challenging Childhood in Jeanette Wall’s The Glass Castle

Abstract

                Literature is a body of written works. The name has traditionally been applied to those imaginative works of poetry and prose distinguished by the intentions of their authors and the perceived aesthetic excellence of their execution. American literature refers to the body of written or literary works shaped in the history of the United States and its former colonies. Jeannette Walls was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1960. As a child, her family moved all over the American Southwest. They had very little money and routinely experienced hunger and homelessness. Jeannette’s mother, Rose Mary Walls, was a passionate painter and ambivalent about cooking meals and cleaning the house. Her father, Rex Walls, suffered from severe alcoholism. For the most part, her parents took a laissez faire approach to parenting, which meant that Jeannette and her siblings Lori, Brian, and Maureen were often left to protect and feed themselves. When Jeannette was a teenager, the family moved to Rex’s Appalachian hometown of Welch, West Virginia. There Jeannette started working at the school newspaper, the Maroon Wave, in the seventh grade because it was the only club that didn’t require money to join. This paper aims to present an extended definition on the meaning of the term American Literature, and it will discuss the background and how it has come about, the writing style of American authors and what makes the American text different and unique from other national literatures.