Memoir Response

In my English class, we read some excerpts from two memoirs: “An American Childhood” by Annie Dillard, and “Salvation” by Langston Hughes.

PART 1

In “An American Childhood,” I most appreciated Dillard’s writing style. She took an event that honestly seemed uninteresting and gave it significance. I really got a sense of who she was just by reading a page and a half. Her writing was very vivid, and it was very easy for me to imagine the story happening as I read it.

Although I thought the writing of “Salvation” was a bit dry, I still enjoyed the story itself. At the end of the excerpt, I truly felt sorry for Hughes when he became saddened about lying in church and about losing his faith. I am not a religious person at all, but I could understand that this event in his life was a very big deal.

PART 2

These two excerpts were different on many levels. The most obvious difference was the writing style. I don’t want to judge these two writers without having read any of their other work, but solely based on these two passages, I would conclude that Dillard is the more talented writer. She was able to take a rather unimpressive story and liven it up, making it seem much more momentous than it probably was. Hughes’s narrative seemed to be a more crucial event in his childhood, yet I didn’t feel as connected to his story as I felt with Dillard’s.

Dillard and Hughes do have something in common, however, and that is the ability to take an occurrence and retell it in a very condensed form without removing any extremely vital details. Both of these reading were very short, and although I got an over-all different feeling from each, I still understood what I was meant to from both tales.