The Contender Study Guide

Biography of Robert Lipsyte

Robert Lipsyte, born January 16, 1938, in New York City, is an acclaimed American author and journalist. He is best known for his sports writing and young adult novels. Lipsyte graduated from Columbia University in 1957 and soon after joined The New York Times, where he made a name for himself as a sports columnist. His work often transcends sports to tackle broader social issues, reflecting his keen observational skills and deep empathy.

Lipsyte's debut novel, "The Contender," published in 1967, is a seminal work in young adult literature. His other notable works include "One Fat Summer" (1977) and "The Brave" (1991). Over the years, Lipsyte has received numerous awards, including the Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association for his significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature.

Historical and Literary Context of "The Contender"

"The Contender" emerged during a turbulent period in American history, marked by the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and a burgeoning counterculture. Published in 1967, the novel reflects the socio-political climate of the 1960s, addressing themes of racial tension, social mobility, and personal integrity.

Set in Harlem, New York City, "The Contender" tells the story of Alfred Brooks, a young African American man who aspires to rise above his circumstances through boxing. The book delves into the struggles of inner-city life and the quest for self-identity against a backdrop of limited opportunities and societal expectations.

Literarily, "The Contender" is significant for its realistic portrayal of a young black protagonist at a time when such characters were underrepresented in young adult fiction. It combines the coming-of-age genre with sports fiction, offering a narrative that is both inspiring and grounded in real-world challenges. The novel's themes of perseverance, self-respect, and personal growth resonate with readers across generations, securing its place as a classic in American literature.

Want to generate unlimited academic essays?

Unlock endless possibilities for your academic writing!
Our tool helps you craft high-quality, original essays in no time. Whether you're tackling complex topics or need help structuring your thoughts, we've got you covered. Start creating with ease and elevate your academic performance today!

About Rephrasely

Getting your wording just right

Paraphrasing is a natural part of the writing process as it helps you clarify your thinking and suit your words to your audience. Using a Rephrasely helps structure and streamline this work, and our paraphrase tool offers 20 modes, many of them free, for accomplishing just this. The 20 modes we offer are diverse, including a summarize tool, a free grammar checker, a mode to simplify text, and a sentence shortener. There are sentence rephrasers and paraphrase rephrase tools, and we pride ourselves on having both, since our reword generator accounts for context at both the sentence and paragraph levels.

When you google paraphrase you will get a variety of results, from a free Rephrasely, to an article spinner, to a general phrase tool, and it can be hard to determine which of these rephrase tools will best help you complete your work. If you simply need to get a word rephrase, that is, reword only small elements within the sentence, many tools will suffice, but there is the risk that you end up with a tool that does not consider context and produces very awkward and ungrammatical sentences. Rephrasing is very much an art, and we’ve built our paraphrase bot to produce the most correct results in 20 modes in over 100 languages, making it the best paraphrasing tool at an exceptionally low cost. So whether you need to paraphrase deutsch, paraphrase greek, or paraphrase bahasa melayu, the next time you think, I need something to paraphrase this for me, you’ll know where to turn.

From keywords to paragraphs

Generating paragraphs with unique ideas can be challenging, and too often writers get stuck at this stage of the writing process. With our paragraph tool, you can enter keywords and let our AI generate paragraphs for you, so that you can have something to work with, refine the output, and become more engaged in your writing.

A paragraph generator creates links between your ideas, such that the output is sensible, unique, and stimulating, very close to what you would expect a thoughtful human paragraph writer to produce.

Paragraph makers are nice, but what about a short story generator? Because our AI is generalized, it serves a story generator, an essay generator, a poem generator, and much more. To generate compelling stories, you should provide the story generator with useful keywords from which it can develop plot elements, including characters, setting details, and any situational information. To generate reasonably good essays, you should likewise provide the essay maker with details around argumentative positions and any other pertinent ideas. If you more specifically want an introduction paragraph generator or conclusion paragraph generator, you can provide starter text and keywords that will best enable our essay creator to produce them.

You may well ask, “is this essay generator free?” Everything on this site is free within a 3-day trial, so you can test and develop confidence in our products. You may also be wondering where this is an essay automatic writer or if it will take a while to get results. All results appear within a matter of seconds, so you can move through your work as quickly as possible.

You may have professional needs for creating paragraphs as well, such as those needed for cover letter. Most of the time a cover letter template includes information that is not relevant to you; by using your own keywords, we can produce cover letter examples that are relevant to your use case and often require very little editing. By using this service, you can also learn how to write a cover letter and achieve the cover letter format you need.

Plagiarism checker free

Like everything else on our site, you can check plagiarism free within a trial, which is a great opportunity for those who want to check a paper for plagiarism without committing to paying before they see results. This free plagiarism checker is great for students and clearly indicates how to check for plagiarism by highlighting areas of similarity between the two texts. Just to be sure you are not accidentally plagiarizing, be sure to check all of your paraphrases as well.