Kiet Le

I am Vietnamese, and I like American classic literature. It sounds very ironic as I should be loving Vietnamese literature instead. Why do I love American literature? It might be because of the fact that I spent a third of my lifetime in America. One of the first plays I read that brought me a whole different perspective of studying literature as a whole was The Crucibleby Arthur Miller, which criticizes the Red Scare and the society of the 1950s. In fact, my first American literature teacher Dr. Barger was the one who really got me into the interesting side of literature and taught me how to read literature in a professional manner. To be honest I did not like literature very much before I got into her literature class and before I failed several tests on The Crucible. As I failed, I came to Dr. Barger and asked for help, and she told me to reread the passage of the play. The more I read, the more I learned something new and the more I understood the passage. Therefore, my love of literature began to grow. Even though I am not majoring in English or History, I have been reading a lot of other American classic works outside the classroom such as, just to mention a few, How the Other Half Lives? by Jacob I. Riis, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton, and others.