10 Ways to...

With The New York Times

Classics, contemporary fiction, young adult and graphic novels, sequels and
adaptations: here are 10 ideas that will help any literature teacher use the vast
resources of NYTimes.com to connect literature to life.
Write to us with ideas: For what works of literature would you like to have a
collection of Times resources?

1. There are certain classics that have appeared on a majority of high school English
lists every year since the 1960's, and many, if not most, are likely somewhere in your
school's curricula as well.
We have made special pages of Times and Learning Network resources for many of
these, including:

"To Kill a Mockingbird"

"The Great Gatsby"
"The Lord of the Flies"
"The Odyssey"
"Frankenstein"
Shakespeare

2. But say you're teaching something we haven't yet made a special collection for,
like "Huckleberry Finn".
To find Times articles from 1851-present related to almost any book, visit our Site
Search. Click on Advanced Search (on the right hand side of the Search page) to
narrow your search. To go back further, search the archives from 1851-1980. (Some
articles are not free; home delivery subscribers get access to 100 of these a month.
Educators can subscribe at a special discounted rate.) As needed, sort your results by
"newest first," "oldest first" or "closest match."

If you do that for "Huck," you'll see that one of its very first mentions in the New York
Times comes in 1885 in the form of an editorial republished from the Springfield
Republican. Headlined "Trashy and Vicious," it comments on the Concord Library's
ban of the book.
Here's what else you might find:

1902 letter from Mark Twain on the Omaha Public Library's ban
Norman Mailer on the novel's 100th birthday in 1984
1992 article about the source of Huck's voice
1995 article headlined "Teaching Huck Finn Without Fear"
1957 editorial on the NYC Board of Education dropping the book
1996 article comparing the novel to "Uncle Tom's Cabin"
1995 essay on "Huck's" influence on literary portrayals of childhood

3. To enrich students' understanding of the time and place in which a novel is set,
you might use Times Topics pages to find related articles, photographs, video,
interactive graphics or podcasts.
For example, if you're teaching "Grapes of Wrath", the Great Depressiontopic page
has a short overview of the social, political, and economic conditions of the period, as
well as photo slideshows of both black and white and color photographs from the era.
The page also highlights several videos in The New Hard Times series in which
people who were alive during the Great Depression compare it to conditions today.
Similarly, "Anne Frank," "Night" or "The Book Thief" might be taught using
resources from the Times Topics page on the Holocaust, or with our special Learning
Network Holocaust page.
And just for fun, the interactive Literary Map of Manhattan might teach your students
about writers like J.D. Salinger to Ralph Ellison, or might inspire them to create their
own map that features the literary landscape of another region, state or country.

4. Show students the relevance of what they read in English class to "the real world"
by having them connect key quotes from the work to news articles, photos and
editorials in The Times that echo this idea.
How do these three famous quotes, for example, resonate today? What contemporary
connections can students find in The Times?
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." ("A Tale of Two Cities")

 "No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the
multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true." ("The Scarlet Letter")
"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the
world. ("Anne Frank")

5. Maybe your students are reading contemporary fiction like "The Kite Runner", "The Brief,
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" or "Life of Pi".
If so, the Books section offers podcasts and a blog with news and interviews about these and
other popular books and writers. In December each year The Times also chooses 100 Notable
Books of that year to recommend.

6. Or, perhaps, you teach young adult literature or pair YA novels with classics. In this
lesson we find commonalities between the "Twilight" series and other literature, but the lesson
could be adapted to work with any young adult novel, from the "Harry Potter" series to "The
Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian".
Or maybe you want to give your students models of how to think critically about the books they
read. Here is a 2006 essay by Naomi Wolfabout the "Gossip Girl," "A-List" and "Clique" novels
and a 2009 essay by Ned Vizzini about stereotypes in young adult fiction.

7. A common literature class assignment is to rewrite a portion of a literary text,

either updating it, writing a new story inspired by the old, telling the story from a new point of
view or recasting it in a new genre or under new conditions.
Many published works do this as well, as the recent legal battle over the "Catcher in the Rye"
sequel illustrated. This article lists many famous sequels, including "The Wide Sargasso Sea"
and "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies".
What about film adaptations? Although many believe a few films--notably "To Kill a
Mockingbird"--to be just as good, or even better, than the source material, many are
disappointing. Here, for example, is Joyce Carol Oates on the Disney version of "The Scarlet
Letter". In this lesson plan, using the movie version of "The Kite Runner" as a jumping-off point,
we show students how to compare book and movie versions of the same work.

8. An easy way to find information about a well-known author is to visit the Times Topics
pages. A quick look-up is at on the top of the right hand side of the Books section, with a dropdown menu featuring authors from Jane Austen, Nikolai Gogol, Ernest Hemingway, George
Orwell, Edgar Allan Poe, and Albert Camus to Raymond Carver,Stephen King and Edwidge
Danticat.
Use these pages to find out how Amy Tan came to write "The Joy Luck Club" or why Sandra
Cisneros got mostly C's and D's in 5th grade.

9. Graphic novels, such as "Persepolis" and "Maus", are taught across the curriculum in many
schools today. Here are two useful essays, one about the genre in general, and another about their
use in schools. We also have a lesson plan in which students create their own storyboards for
graphic novels about adolescence.

10. Finally, if you need more, you can explore the Learning Network's special Literature page,
which has selected lessons about particular authors and genres, as well as general lessons
encouraging fun with literature, such as this lesson about exploring literature "American Idol"
style, this one about creating a timeline of your history as a reader or this one in which students
invent a Web search history for a literary character.
The banner image above was taken from an illustration by Greg Clarke for a Week in Review
article about literary sequels headlined "The Sincerest Form of Lawsuit Bait ".