Anthony Mastrodonato Block

Mitch Albom, currently a sports columnist, is a best selling author who has written eight books including the popular book Tuesdays with Morrie. The novel was on the best seller list for four years in a row providing the American people with great literature. Albom also wrote The Five People You Meet in Heaven that was later made into a Hollywood production that stared well named actors such as Jon Voight. He is a highly respected journalist in the Detroit area where he currently lives. Albom has three radio shows, The Mitch Albom Show, The Mitch Albom Show on the Weekend, and the Monday Sports Albom, in which all three are nationally known. Despite his hectic lifestyle, he has founded two well-known charities in the metropolitan Detroit area and serves on many boards of existing charities. The author the phenomenal book Tuesdays with Morrie and the outstanding The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom shows the American people the idea of the American Dream through his life and through his writing.

The main character of Tuesdays with Morrie, Morrie Schwartz, has been a professor of sociology at Brandeis University. He was an excellent professor that was forced to retire because his body has lost the fight to a disease called ALS, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. With his diagnosis of ALS, Morrie realizes that his time is short and feels obligated share his drive and wisdom with other people. Morrie has a great sense of reaching every individual he befriends. To share his wisdom with other people, his main method of approach is love. Dating back to his childhood, Morrie was deprived of love and attention from others where he became reliant on love and physical affection from his family and friends. Morrie began to convey his "wisdom of life" to a young man named Mitch. Mitch was always a warm hearted human being that valued money over love, going against Morrie’s style of life. With Mitch’s work place going onto to strike, Mitch realized the time he wasted progressing his life was almost meaningless through Morrie’s encouragement. As Mitch watches Morrie day by day dying, Mitch tells himself that he aspires a man who values love over money like his old professor. Because of Morrie’s influence, Mitch changes his own life to a more loving and caring lifestyle, like one that his professor taught him.

Throughout the course of the novel Tuesdays with Morrie, Albom’s use of imagery forced the reader to become involved in his writing. The use of words and phrases made his writing more appealing to the reader. Unlike Mitch, Morrie’s approach on life was exactly the opposite. “ Turn on the faucet, Wash yourself with the emotion. It won’t hurt you. It will only help you. If you let the fear inside, if you pull it like on a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, all right, it’s just fear, I don’t have to let it control me.” When Morrie finds out about his coughing spell, Mitch becomes worried while Morrie takes the emotion and “washes his face” with it. Morrie’s experiences in his life are very important to him along with his emotions and he feels that all experiences should be dealt with “face to face” rather than ignored. Another prime example of imagery in the book is Morrie’s statement of loneliness. “ I’m not afraid of feeling lonely, but now I’m going to put that loneliness aside and know that there are other emotions in the world, and I’m going to experience them as well.” Although he takes his life by hand, he is slightly separating himself from his experiences so he does not become controlled by them. These excerpts from the book show Albom’s variety of imagery that gives the reader the ability to see it, smell it and touch it through his writing.

When writing the Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom was going through a stage of resentiment. As he was growing up, he had wanted to become a musician but instead found himself as a wealthy sports journalist. During this time period where he was re-thinking what he has done with his life, he turns to Morrie in search of the answers to the big questions that he is missing in his life. Each week Mitch and Morrie discussed the topics of death, ageing, greed, marriage, family, society, forgiveness and life the help solve the problems Mitch was undergoing. Through the perspective of Morrie, his wisdom and story’s about all the questions that Mitch asked were answered in some shape or form. For example, when Mitch is talking about forgiveness, Morrie tells a story to Mitch about his friend who was shot and Morrie never had the chance to heal him before his friend died. The moral of the story is you have to forgive certain things in you life and forget about them. As each week passed and new topics were discussed, Albom realizes that each individual was “invented” for his or her own purposes. There is no changing a set of beliefs of an individual but seeing the universal truths about life shows the morality of the individual. Morrie Schwartz did not change anything about Mitch Albom’s life in the book, other than each individual has his or hers own meaning of life that they should live. The idea of death was scary to Mitch but Morrie showed him that it was nothing less than a day of happiness.

The unique novel that Mitch Albom wrote, The Five People you Meet in Heaven, tells a story of an old eighty-three old man named Eddie. The eighty-three old man that plays the main character in the book, is Albom’s real uncle in reality. When growing up and hearing story’s about his family, the story’s about his uncle always stayed with him. As his uncle aged, he saw him as a sad man who never had true love for anybody. As Mitch began to think about his ageing uncle, he wondered about heaven. He began to explore the idea that heaven could be a place of where your past life was told to you and explained to you through five different people throughout varies different stages of your life. When these five people tell the story of your life, you begin to reflect upon the past experiences and become touched by them. As the story is related to Albom’s uncle in real life, Albom relates the concept of the story to his beliefs. By sharing his belief of life after death shows his inability to except death. The Five People You Meet in Heaven is a tale of life beyond death that was a tribute and celebration to Mitch Albom’s uncle.

When Mitch Albom was writing the Five People You Meet in Heaven, he based the book on an eighty three old man, Eddie. The book opens up with Eddie being involved in a terrible accident where he is a maintenance man at Ruby Point Amusement Grounds. Once Eddie has passed on, the book travels through his life where he meets five people that have been affected during his lifetime. When Eddie has arrived in heaven, the purpose of the five people is to explain the events that have occurred to Eddie during his lifetime. As Eddie sees the effect has had on the individuals that he has left behind, he starts to realize that he served purpose not only in his life but also in others. Despite feeling that he lived a nothing life and had a nothing job, his last memory on earth was saving a little girl from her own death. As the main character of the book, Eddie is portrayed has an old man with nothing left for him but death. He proves to the reader once he is heaven that he serves a purpose in anyone’s life. Through pieces of his life that you see and read, you see Eddie has an important human being on earth as well as in heaven. Without the character Eddie, the book would have served no purpose but instead you see a character or a human being that has lived his life to the fullest

As a reader of any book you base your reactions on the writers writing. Whenever reading something and something jumps out at you, it’s because the writer uses specific detail to make the writing interesting. Detail is the simple use of facts that make any work of literature interesting for you to read. When reading the novel, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Mitch Albom uses simple facts to help to keep the reader interested in his writing. "At the time of his death, Eddie was an old man with a barrel chest and a torso as squat as a soup can," Albom wrote. The word use of “barrel,” “torso,” and “squat” are simple use of facts or words that allows the reader to stay “in tuned” with a work of literature. Without the simple use of these words, Albom’s style of writing would be considered uneventful and indescribable. When Albom beings to describe the five different people that Eddie meets, he gave a strong but brief description through the use of great detail about each individual. Throughout the novel, the simple use of detail that Mitch Albom provided to reader, gave the reader a better outlook on what he was writing allowing you to understand the context of this literature.

“Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experiences…from generation to generation. In this way, literature becomes the living memory of a nation,” stated Alexander Isayevich Solkhenitsyn. It has also been said that literature is not created in a vacuum. The idea of literature is a bunch of words put together to prove a point, tell a story or simple to just say how a person feels. Every second of everyday literature is involved a persons like no matter what. Literature is based on the work of individuals that write words on paper. Every nation shares the idea of literature and how it gives a nation a living memory. The idea of the American Dream would not exist without the idea of literature. An American author whose work of literature portrays the idea of the American Dream is Mitch Albom. The author of Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven, gives American people a sense of the American Dream. Albom’s specific use of detail, imagery, characterization and his purpose, gives the American people a great sense of literature. He proves that anybody in the world can fit into the idea of the American Dream. After reading these two novel books, you begin to realize that the true American Dream comes from your own dreams not anyone else’s. Albom’s wonderful written books that he has shared with the American people proves that literature is not created in a vacuum but rather within an individuals own body.