Alumni Put Their Literary Knowledge to the Test

In the Fall 2025 issue of Gonzaga Magazine, English Teacher Mr. Patrick Welch wrote an article titled “Why Study English,” which made the case for literature’s power to expand minds, sharpen expression and foster compassion. The piece was one in a recurring series in the magazine in which members of the Gonzaga faculty write about the value of studying their subject in today’s modern world.

 

Welch sprinkled literary allusions throughout the essay that he thought current and past Gonzaga students may recognize. At the end of the essay, readers were invited to take part in a “pop quiz” by trying to find all the references and email their answers to Gonzaga. Nearly a dozen alumni from across the decades sent in their best guesses - all had fond recollections of their days at Gonzaga and the challenging curriculum that prepared them for college and beyond. Steven Blizzard ’71 was ultimately the winner, gladly accepting the prize of a $100 credit at the Gonzaga Bookstore. 

“I always tell everyone my time at Gonzaga prepared me for so many things. Four years of Latin, three years of classic Greek and three years of Spanish always comes in handy. I was the only guy in my year selecting that particular language trifecta. And since I was a glutton for punishment, four more years with the Jesuits at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, double major in history and English— rounded out my lessons.”

To read the original article from the magazine, click here. To read the annotated version with literary references highlighted, please see below. Maybe you’ll be inspired to re-read a classic, or pick up a book you haven’t yet enjoyed.

Why Study English at Gonzaga?
By Patrick Welch

If you really want to hear about it (1), twenty-five years ago at Brophy Prep in Phoenix, AZ, my sophomore English teacher, Mr. Walsh, had us make collages about happiness. I cut out magazine pictures of flashy cars, svelte suits, and island vacations; then, we read Fahrenheit 451, which had predicted fifty years beforehand the commercialized, TV-addicted society around me. It was a pleasure to read (2). It changed my life, offering a compelling alternative to endless screens, mass consumerism, and vacuous contentment: books.

Sophomore year at Notre Dame, after reflecting on what I most enjoyed studying weeknights at 2 a.m., I ditched Engineering for English and Philosophy. This was financially foolish, but existentially freeing. In Philosophy, I read thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, van Inwagen, and MacIntyre who tried to explain our world via theory, and in English, I read authors like Melville, Ellison, Woolfe, Hemingway, Shakespeare, and Austen who tried to recount our world in all its complexity and beauty, posing questions. After Saturday football games, I would read novels and write essays. On a Florida beach during spring break, I devoured three hundred pages of Moby Dick in a single day. Senior year, as I finished typing a term paper about Slaughterhouse Five in my dorm room at 3 a.m., I felt the cool air of the spring night seep in through my open window and suddenly heard a robin tweet: “Poo-tee-weet?” (3). It was the best of times (4).

Your life on earth is a brief candle (5), but when you study English at Gonzaga, you get to live many alternate lives: as a king of ancient Thebes (Oedipus the King), a young lover in Verona (Romeo and Juliet), a New Yorker in the roaring 20s (The Great Gatsby), an ambitious Scottish nobleman (Macbeth), a shipwrecked Greek warrior (Odyssey), a teenager in the postwar 40s (Catcher in the Rye), a Civil War medic (Walt Whitman), an escaped slave from Chesapeake Bay (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass), a Creature formed from dead limbs (Frankenstein), a prince who sees ghosts (Hamlet)—by hallucinating while staring at millions of runic symbols printed onto wafer-thin slices of dead trees. In other words, at Gonzaga, you read great books, both classics read by generations of Gonzaga men and the latest literature from today. You see the world through the eyes of young women, the old, the dead, other races, and people from the ancient past and the other side of the world. At graduation, you contain multitudes (6).

Additionally, as a Gonzaga English student, you learn to write clearly–even beautifully–and by writing clearly, to think clearly. Guided by teachers following titans such as Cannon, Free, Sampugnaro, Ross, and L’Etoile, you reaffirm timeless wisdom while challenging outdated norms, all while omitting excess words (Tiebreaker Reference! The Elements of Style, Strunk Jr.) You develop a talent for self-expression that many can only yearn for and a pride in your writing such that you would rather lose a hand than present something ChatGPT™ spit out as your own work.

Studying English is studying what it means to be human, which is more important than ever right now. In the face of generative A.I., intractable societal problems, human suffering, and the constant specter of extinction, whether by cosmological anomaly, unstoppable atmospheric processes, or thermonuclear warheads–so it goes (7)–we may wonder deep down whether being human is all that good. In Gonzaga English classes, however, you learn what makes you and other humans important, no matter what algorithms eclipse your creative abilities, no matter what wine-dark seas (8) of tragedy might one day overwhelm you, and no matter what you choose to do with your life. Once armed with this knowledge, let others beware, for you will be fearless, and therefore powerful (9)–yet also virtuous: seeing the world with new, wiser eyes, you live your life differently, and you can write its happy ending.

To read, or not to read (10)? At my Jesuit high school, Mr. Walsh sparked in me what would become an insatiable appetite for stories. I read anything and everything, and I still do. I hope my students will, too.

1. Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

2. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

3. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut 

4. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

5. Macbeth, William Shakespeare

6. Song of Myself, Walt Whitman

7. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

8. The Odyssey, Homer

9. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

10. Hamlet, William Shakespeare