Waukesha Reads: 1984
To promote the 2012 Waukesha Reads book selection of George Orwell’s, 1984, students from Waukesha West High School video production class created this video promotion.
To promote the 2012 Waukesha Reads book selection of George Orwell’s, 1984, students from Waukesha West High School video production class created this video promotion.
The world George Orwell created in his classic novel, 1984, offers few places to hide. Create your own fictional masterpiece, 1,000 words or less, based on the theme “Who is Watching You?” and you could be a winner!
The contest is open to middle school and high school students and adults.
Get all the contest details and an official Entry Form and get creative!
Written in 1948, 1984 was George Orwell’s chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984 has come and gone, Orwell’s narrative is timelier than ever. As literary political fiction and as dystopian science-fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a classic novel in content, plot, and style. Many of its terms and concepts, such as Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, and memory hole, have entered everyday use since its publication in 1949.
Written in 1948, 1984 was George Orwell’s chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984 has come and gone, Orwell’s narrative is timelier than ever.
The novel can be summed up in its most famous quote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
Join us in October as we explore this book and its themes with a broad variety of community-wide events.
The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of master mystery writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most accomplished stories. Sherlock Holmes and his companion Dr. Watson confront one of their most difficult cases ever: is there truly a curse on the old Baskerville estate? Is there truly a ghostly beast lurking on the dark, eerie moors?
A beloved American classic, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) is best summarized by its epigraph-“the best days are the first to flee.” In it, the adult narrator, Jim Burden, remembers his childhood through the memory of his friend, Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant.
Ernest Hemingway’s third novel, A Farewell to Arms (1929), was crafted from his earliest experience with war. As a teenager just out of high school, Hemingway volunteered to fight in the First World War but was rejected because of poor eyesight. Instead, he drove a Red Cross ambulance on the Italian front, where he was wounded in 1918 by a mortar shell. While recovering in a hospital, Hemingway fell in love with Agnes von Kurowsky, a nurse seven years his senior.
The Great Gatsby may be the most popular classic in modern American fiction. Since its publication in 1925, Fitzgerald’s masterpiece has become a touchstone for generations of readers and writers, many of whom reread it every few years as a ritual of imaginative renewal. The story of Jay Gatsby’s desperate quest to win back his first love reverberates with themes at once characteristically American and universally human, among them the importance of honesty, the temptations of wealth, and the struggle to escape the past.
When did science fiction first cross over from genre writing to the mainstream of American literature? Almost certainly it happened on October 19, 1953, when a young Californian named Ray Bradbury published a novel with the odd title of Fahrenheit 451. In a gripping story at once disturbing and poetic, Bradbury takes the materials of pulp fiction and transforms them into a visionary parable of a society gone awry.