Harris and Me: A Summer Remembered

Use these essay questions as writing and critical thinking exercises for all levels of writers, and to build their literary analysis skills by requiring textual references throughout the essay.

Differentiation Suggestion: For English learners or struggling writers, strategies that work well include graphic organizers, sentence frames or starters, group work, or oral responses.

Scaffolded Essay Questions

Student Prompt: Write a short (1-3 paragraph) response using one of the bulleted outlines below. Cite details from the text over the course of your response that serve as examples and support.

1. Each of the farm animals in Harris and Me plays a key role in the story and symbolizes an aspect of the novel’s themes, characters, or plot.

• How does each animal on the farm influence the protagonist’s Growing Up, as well as the way he learns about The Importance of Friendship? (topic sentence)
• Choose at least three animals. Explain each animal’s purpose in the story and determine what each animal symbolizes.
• In your conclusion, examine what the farm itself symbolizes and why the author chose to use a farm as the story’s setting.

2. The protagonist’s experience of Home, Family, and Acceptance shifts while he is living on the Larson family farm.

• What makes the Larsons such a welcoming and accepting family, and how does this impact the protagonist? (topic sentence)
• Detail at least three times in the novel where the Larsons demonstrate their acceptance of the protagonist as a member of their family, and how the protagonist reacts to these actions.
• In your conclusion, make an educated guess about what happens when the protagonist leaves the farm and whether he ever returns. Be sure to use textual evidence to support your prediction.

3. Throughout the novel, the protagonist remains nameless.

• Why do you think the author chose not to give the protagonist a name? What effect does this have on the reading experience? (topic sentence)
• In the body of your essay, examine the author’s writing style and consider the way that the reader’s perception is influenced by the absence of a name for the story’s narrator. Include at least three quotes from the novel to support your essay.
• In your conclusion, evaluate the effectiveness of Paulsen’s attempts to make the novel feel realistic and relatable.

Full Essay Assignments

Student Prompt: Write a structured and well-developed essay. Include a thesis statement, at least three main points supported by text details, and a conclusion.

1. Harris and Me takes place during the early 1950s, after the Second World War. This was a time of great prosperity and cultural change in the United States as millions moved to the cities and away from their farms. In an essay of at least three main points, discuss in what ways Harris and Me illustrates a type of rural culture that today is less and less common. Why might Gary Paulsen have chosen to set the novel in this decade, rather than in the 1990s when he wrote it? How are the attitudes of the distant era exhibited through the novel’s characters and plot?

2. Is the narrator of Harris and Me reliable? Why or why not? Can a story that depends so heavily on personal reflection and memory truly be accurate? Does the age of the protagonist at the time the events occurred affect the way the adult narrator recalls these events? Be sure to detail specific instances in the novel where it seems as though the narrator may not be telling an accurate story, and use textual evidence to support your argument.

3. In the 1950s, when the action of this novel takes place, gender roles were more prominent and rigid than they are today. Examine interactions among characters in Harris and Me and analyze what they indicate about gender assumptions. Call attention to at least three parts in the story where gender roles affect the action, and use textual evidence to support your observations about them. (You may wish to begin by considering how the story might have differed were it written about two young girls in the 1950s.)