During the literary renaissance of the 1920s, a large number of new writers— William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—sought to record the inner life of Americans and to scrutinize the American dream,
the dream that anyone can earn his own fortune and live happily ever after through hard work, which had become tarnished.
A. the dream that anyone can earn his own fortune and live happily ever after through hard work, which had become tarnished
B. the tarnished dream that anyone can make his own fortune and live happily ever after through hard work
C. the tarnished dream that anyone can, through hard work, make his own fortune and live happily ever after
D. the dream that anyone can earn his own fortune and live happily ever after, though tarnished, through hard work
E. that making one’s own fortune and living happily ever after, through hard work, had become tarnished
C. The original version is confusing because the clause which had become
tarnished is awkwardly separated from dream and the prepositional phrase
through hard work is awkwardly separated from the verb it modifies, earn. In
choices B, D, and E, the prepositional phrase is misplaced.
The correct answer should be C , as the word tarnished is correctly modifying the dream and through hard work make sense unlike in b where it makes sense that live happily through hard work.