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The pre-Revolutionary roots of the dream and the focus on opportunities to an individual and aspirations of an ideal Puritan community by English settlers. Literature of the Virginia Company and its hope for prosperity versus the New England colonies and their focus on conscience; John Winthrop's sermon "A Model of Christian Charity." Nineteenth-century perspectives on the dream in the writings of Herman Melville and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who emphasized the need for self-reliance and the likelihood that hard work and desire will not fulfill the dream. Fiction that depicts themes of immigration and migration as part of the American Dream--Abraham Cahan's "Yekl," Willa Cather's My Ántonia, and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.
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