In Golden Boy, Joe gives up his dreams of music to enter the brutal world of boxing. Today, violence in boxing sometimes extends outside the ring, as in the case of former heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson, now an ex-convict. In Blood Season: Mike Tyson and the World of Boxing (1996), Phil Berger, a former boxing correspondent for the New York Times, uses Tyson’s violent story to examine the current state of boxing. Berger’s book gives a candid look at the boxers, promoters, and businessmen who help the business thrive today.

Following the recent reforms in the welfare system, millions were forced to get unskilled jobs. In an experiment to see whether or not women could survive on these low wages, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich left her middle-class life and put herself in their place. Her 2001 book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, chronicles her attempts to get different lowpaying jobs, find places to live, and above all, survive.

In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, originally published in 1954, a group of schoolboys stranded on a deserted island during World War II are forced to survive on their own, without the aid of adults or the conveniences of civilization. In the process, many of the boys revert back to their primal instincts, with violent and murderous consequences.

In Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun, originally published in 1959, an African-American family in urban Chicago struggles to pull itself out of poverty. Conflicts arise—from the family and from society—when the family makes plans to use the leftover money from their dead father’s insurance policy to buy a house in a white suburb. Hansberry was the first African- American woman to have a play produced on Broadway.

Odets used the events of the 1934 New York City cab strike to stage his one-act play Waiting for Lefty (1935). In the play, the taxi drivers’ union gathers in a meeting hall to discuss whether or not to strike, in the process sharing their stories of desperate poverty. A fast-moving play, it is also considered by many critics to be Odets’s most angry production.

In Odets’s play The Big Knife (1949), Charlie Castle, a movie actor, desperately attempts to leave the corruption of Hollywood for his former life in the New York theater. However, Castle is a part of the Hollywood system, and he finds that it is not always easy to leave.

Mr. Bonaparte’s friend, Mr. Carp, is a pessimist who frequently quotes the ideas of German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. Many of the philosopher’s key ideas are contained in his twovolume collection, The World as Will and Idea, first published in Germany in 1819.

In John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), a depression-era family, the Joads, struggle to maintain their dignity in spite of crushing and desperate poverty. Although the Joads leave their home in the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma to go to California, where they are told that life is better, their situation only gets worse. Steinbeck’s novel of social protest captures the despair that many families in America felt during the Great Depression.

First published in 1970, Studs Terkel’s Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression chronicles the 1930s through the eyes of the people who lived it. Over the span of three decades, Terkel interviewed a wide cross-section of America to gather the firsthand accounts of the depression for his book. Interviewees include the young and old, politicians, gangsters, and sharecroppers.