Teacher Guide

Topdog/Underdog Lesson Plan

Relationship to Other Books

True West, a play by Sam Shepard, tracks the antagonistic relationship between two estranged brothers.

In Euripides' Greek tragedy Medea, the title character murders several of her close family members.

Between the World and Me is a memoir by Ta-Nahesi Coates, addressed to his son in the second person, about the challenges of being a black man in the United States today. Students may also be interested in reading the work of Suzan-Lori Parks' mentor and one of Ta-Nehisi Coates' models as a public African-American intellectual, James Baldwin (for example, Giovanni's Room, Notes of a Native Son, or Go Tell It on the Mountain.)

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