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A Study Guide for Eugenia Collier's "Marigolds"
A Study Guide for Eugenia Collier's "Marigolds"
A Study Guide for Eugenia Collier's "Marigolds"
Ebook40 pages27 minutes

A Study Guide for Eugenia Collier's "Marigolds"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Eugenia Collier's "Marigolds," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 15, 2016
ISBN9781535828161
A Study Guide for Eugenia Collier's "Marigolds"

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    A Study Guide for Eugenia Collier's "Marigolds" - Gale

    10

    Marigolds

    Eugenia W. Collier

    1969

    Introduction

    Marigolds remains one of the most frequently anthologized American short stories in high school English textbooks, despite the fact that it was one of the earliest of only a handful of short stories written by Eugenia W. Collier.

    Originally published in 1969 and most recently published in a 1994 collection of the author's stories titled Breeder and Other Stories, the story seems almost to be written for the specific purpose of analysis because it includes several literary techniques—symbolism, metaphor, internal and external conflict—that are immediately apparent even to the novice literary critic. Additionally, its themes of poverty, identity, and loss of innocence are those common to stories that appeal to even the youngest readers.

    And yet Marigolds is much more than an early attempt at writing in the short story genre. It is a powerful account of a seemingly insignificant event which, understood by itself, is nothing more than a temper tantrum. Upon further inspection, however, those few moments of desperate destruction have a lifelong impact on the memory keeper.

    There is nothing fancy in Collier's writing style; she does not write to entertain or inspire deep philosophical introspection. She writes to remember. Marigolds is a memory, and memory is faulty. What she provides—from the perspective of a young girl grown older—is not so much a report of the events of one late summer day but rather an emotional word painting of a scene from the woman's childhood that forever altered her perception of the world in which she lived.

    Author Biography

    Eugenia Williams Carter is an African American author and educator who was born on April 6, 1928, in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father, Harry Maceo, was a physician and her mother, Eugenia (Jackson) Williams, was an educator.

    Collier graduated magna cum laude from Howard University in 1948, the same year she married Charles S. Collier. The couple had three sons and eventually divorced. Collier earned her M.A. from Columbia University in 1950 and secured a job as a case worker with the Baltimore Department of Public Welfare. She left that job in 1955 to accept a position as assistant instructor at Morgan State College in Baltimore. One year later, she became an instructor at the college, a job she held until 1961, at which time she was promoted to assistant professor of English.

    Beginning in 1966, Collier held a number of teaching positions with the Community College of Baltimore. In 1969, Negro

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