A Study Guide for James Ramsey Ullman's "Banner in the Sky"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for James Ramsey Ullman's "Banner in the Sky," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535819107

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Banner in the Sky

James Ramsey Ullman

1954

Introduction

The 1954 novel Banner in the Sky is a mountaineering adventure tale by James Ramsey Ullman that was named a Newbery Honor Book. The protagonist is sixteen-year-old Rudi Matt, who is supposed to spend his time washing dishes but would rather be exploring the heights of the Citadel, the last unconquered summit of the Alps, which he dreams of one day climbing to the top. Although his mother and uncle try to restrain him, and in spite of—or perhaps because of—the fact that his father died fifteen years ago in an attempt on the Citadel's peak, Rudi feels compelled to do whatever he can toward completing his father's quest.

Ullman was a very popular author in the mid-twentieth century. His credentials as an amateur mountaineer who climbed peaks in the American and Canadian Rockies, the Teton Range, the Andes, and elsewhere lent an air of authority to both his nonfiction and fiction on mountain climbing. He was enlisted as the official historian of the first American ascent of Mount Everest. One of the summits he reached was the Matterhorn, the emblematic mountain on the border of Switzerland and Italy that was first climbed in 1865. As he relates in the author's note that opens Banner in the Sky, the first ascent of the Matterhorn was the inspiration for his fictional tale, which takes place in the same year in an essentially similar Swiss locale. Ullman's descriptions evoke with heart-stopping realism the vertiginous heights and life-or-death choices confronted by mountaineers who wish to make history.

Author Biography

Ullman was born into a well-off family in New York City on November 24, 1907. His academic credentials allowed him to enter Princeton University, where he became an amateur mountaineer at age twenty and enjoyed a chance to climb to the peak of the Matterhorn. He graduated in 1929 and embarked on a career that would revolve around the literary arts for the next four decades. Publishing his Princeton thesis on English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1930 as Mad Shelley, he proceeded to work as a newspaper reporter and features writer for several years. He then served as a theatrical producer through the mid-1930s. Among the dozen plays he worked on was the Pulitzer Prize–winning Men in White (1933). In 1938, he became an executive of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Theater Project, and that year he published The Other Side of the Mountain, a travelogue on a South American voyage he took across the Andes and along the Amazon River, following the route of sixteenth-century century Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana. Ullman married just after leaving Princeton, in 1930; he would have two sons, divorce his first wife in 1945,