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2009 ACF Fall - Packet by Princeton A and Cornell - #6 [report this tossup]
Literature — American
One of this author's protagonists helps William T. Knife market the caffeinated beverage Okey-Dokey. That satire of the fundraising culture, Gideon Plainish, features a character who manages the career of the evangelist Sharon Falconer in another of this author's novels. This author set his novel about the Jolly Seventeen's conflict with Carol Kennicott in the town of Gopher Prairie. Another town created by this author is in the fictional state of Winnemac, and is home to the car salesman Samuel Dodsworth, the preacher Elmer Gantry, and the real estate agent George Babbit. For 10 points, name this author of Main Street.
Answer: Sinclair Lewis

2009 ACF Fall - Packet by CMU and LASA A - #13 [report this tossup]
Literature — American
In one work, this author parodied the condescending Henry James as “Mr. Nixon.” The title character of that work by this author writes “medallions” in an attempt to “resuscitate the dead art of poetry.” Another poem by this man consists of the lines “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.” This author of “In a Station of the Metro” and “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” translated several works of the Chinese poet Li Po. This author included Chinese characters in a work that has “Rock-Drill” and “Pisan” sections and was largely written in an Italian jail. For 10 points, name this fascist sympathizer, an American modernist poet who wrote The Cantos.
Answer: Ezra Weston Loomis Pound

2009 ACF Fall - Packet by UCLA B - #1 [report this tossup]
Literature — American
One character in this novel annoys the protagonist with a story about how he used to walk around with crab apples in his mouth. One character creates panic by saying only “T.S. Elliot” into the phone after calling another character, and Corporal Popinjay is imprisoned for being overly specific at Clevinger's trial before the Action Board.  Only those with temperatures higher than 102 degrees are treated by Doc Daneeka in Pianosa, and “M&M Enterprises” buys all the Egyptian cotton in the world under the treasonous war profiteer Milo Minderbinder. For 10 points name this novel in which Yossarian is in the 256th airborne as a bombardier under Major Major Major Major, a work of Joseph Heller.
Answer:  Catch-22

2009 ACF Fall - Packet by Washington A and South Carolina - #11 [report this tossup]
Literature — American
The narrator of this poem mentions the “tale of the murder in cold blood of four hundred and twelve young men” after noting that “not one escaped to tell the fall of the Alamo.” In another section, a woman watches “Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore.” In the sixth of this poem's fifty two sections, the narrator suggests answers like the “handkerchief of the lord” to a child's query of “What is the grass?” The narrator justifies the line “very well then I contradict myself” by declaring “I am large, I contain multitudes.” For 10 points, name this poem which opens with the line “I celebrate myself,” the longest poem Walt Whitman included in his Leaves of Grass.
Answer: “Song of Myself”

2009 ACF Fall - Packet by Duke A and Harvard Zhao - #13 [report this tossup]
Literature — American
This work describes a “hung jury” that “threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism.” This poem's description of “twenty five thousand mad comrades” is reference to the population of Pilgrim State, a mental institution where one person mentioned in this poem received shock therapy. This poem's end references a “sea-journey on the highway across America in tears.” This work repeats the word Moloch and tells Carl Solomon “I'm with you in Rockland.” This poem opens with the line “I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness, starving hysterical.” For 10 points, name this paragon of beat poetry by Allan Ginsberg. 
Answer: “Howl”

2009 ACF Fall - Packet by St Anselm’s HS and Truman State A - #2 [report this tossup]
Literature — American
This poem's author expressed a desire to restrict it to “the limit of one sitting” in “The Philosophy of Composition.” The narrator wheels a cushioned seat in front of his visitor, who “beguiles all” his “sad soul to smiling.” Shortly after, the air grows “denser, perfumed from an unseen censer / swung by seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.” The narrator calls the title character a “thing of evil,” and demands to know whether he will be reunited with “the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore.” For 10 points, name this poem set “once upon a midnight dreary,” an Edgar Allen Poe poem about an “ebony bird,” who only says “nevermore.”
Answer: "The Raven"

2009 ACF Fall - Packet by Dunbar HS and Minnesota - #15 [report this tossup]
Literature — American
This poet wondered if the title concept could “govern in a thing so small” in a poem about a white spider on a white flower holding a white moth. This poet admitted “I have passed by the watchman on his beat and dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain” in his tirza rima poem “Acquainted With the Night.” This author of “Design” wrote that “He is all pine and I am apple orchard” in one work, and concluded another of his poems with the concession “I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.” For 10 points, name American poet who wrote “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and quoted the adage “'Good fences make good neighbors” in his poem “Mending Wall.” 
Answer: Robert Frost

2009 ACF Fall - Packet by Furman, Claremont A, Illinois A, and ULL A - #2 [report this tossup]
Literature — American
One version of this work was published as “Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil,” after its author translated a French version back to English word for word. One character in this story tells of a mare with asthma and a dog named Andrew Jackson. The narrator goes to Angel's Camp looking for information for an article about a Reverend Leonidas, but instead, Simon Wheeler tells him about how a stranger used quail shot to win forty dollars off of Jim Smiley. For 10 points, name this short story in which the title creature named Daniel Webster loses a bet for its owner because it can't leap, a work by Mark Twain.
Answer: “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” [or “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” or “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”]

2009 ACF Fall - Packet by Princeton A and Cornell - #9 [report this tossup]
Literature — American
One character in this work drops his towel to reveal boxer shorts covered in whales after brushing his teeth with soap. The protagonist of this novel plays a three day game of monopoly with Cheswick and Martini, before raising a vote to allow watching the World Series, and organizing a fishing trip with the prostitutes Sandy and Candy.  The narrator of this work is a Columbia Indian who smothers the protagonist with a pillow before escaping. For 10 points, name this Chief Bromden narrated work in which Randle McMurphy is lobotomized after challenging the tyrannical Nurse Ratched at an Oregon psychiatric hospital, a novel by Ken Kesey.
Answer: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

2009 ACF Fall - Packet by Maryland A and CWRU - #21 [report this tossup]
Literature — American
A character named Hamlet in this work hallucinates that Tennyson comes to him wearing the face of Euripides to explain the meaning of the phrase “divine despair.” Mrs. Merrett spends thirty years in jail after her nineteen year old lover shoots her husband. While most of the characters in this work are miserable, the story teller and fiddler Blind Jack now spends his afterlife listening to Homer recount the fall of Troy. This collection includes a recitation by Anne Rutledge, the “Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln.” For 10 points, identify this poetry collection in which the dead of the title town make one final statement, the masterpiece of Edgar Lee Masters.
Answer: Spoon River Anthology

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