Research Paper on:
Literary Portrayals of the Conflict Between Illusion and Reality

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ask for an account of the accident from the witnesses, some blame one driver and some blame the other , but no two accounts are completely identical. The reality of  the accident was slightly different for each witness and largely dependent on the position from which that particular witness observed the incident. Similarly, how a specific time period or  culture is perceived can largely depend on the perspective of the observer. In other words, the reality of culture is mutable according to who is doing the observing. Illusion and  reality often intermingle to fit the purposes of the agenda of the observer. This principle is easily observable in a variety of books. For example, Doris Kearns Goodwins  autobiographical memoir Wait Till Next Year is about a growing up in the 1940s and 50s in Brooklyn. Many writers have depicted this era as one of illusion, in which  Americans clung to the notion that county was filled with picture-perfect families, composed of a hard-working dad, a stay-at-home contented mom and two or more drug-free high-achieving kids. Goodwins memoir  shows that this scenario, for her, was true. Not every 50s mom was as discontented as Betty Freidan, the housewife who started the feminist movement with the publication of  her book The Feminine Mystique. Not all fifties kids turned into sixties hippies. Goodwin talks about baseball and the pleasures of growing up on a street where the neighbors were  constituted a large extended "family," and no one bothered to lock their doors or worry about household items, such as bikes, left out in the yard. Goodwin touches on  some of the negatives of that era - segregation, the Korean War, Joseph McCarthy, and the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg - but these news events did not really