Major Characters
- Jurgis Rudkus is a strong-willed Lithuanian who wants a better life for his family. He hears about the freedoms of the United States and decides to emigrate. He works hard, knowing that the welfare of his family and friends depends on him.
- Ona Lukoszaite Rudkus is Jurgis' teenage wife. Jurgis tries to get her father to sell her to him in her youth so he can marry her because they are in love. Her father does not want to but eventually dies. She then eventually becomes his fiance. She heard of the greatness of the United States from Jurgis, who had never before let her down, when they were in Lithuania shortly before their marriage. She married Jurgis after they immigrated in Chicago. She and Jurgis had a child named Antanas who dies drowning. She is sexually harassed and raped by her boss Phil Connor. Later in the story, while giving birth to her second child, she dies from blood loss.
- Marija Berczynskas, a masculine woman, who is Ona’s cousin, has a dream to marry a musician and tour with him around the United States. After Ona’s death, and Jurgis's abandonment, she gives up and becomes a prostitute to help feed the few children left.
- Teta Elzbieta Lukoszaite, Ona’s stepmother, is not very fond of Jurgis. She takes care of the children. Towards the end of the book she is forced to become a beggar.
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Famous quotes containing the words major and/or characters:
“As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with “characters,” or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons “in history.” History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.”
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“Do you set down your name in the scroll of youth, that are written down old with all the characters of age?”
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