I’d say:
I had a hard time deciding whether to write an essay about the works of “Eudora Welty, Joan Didion, Gwendolyn Brooks” because the rest of the punctuations doesn’t make sense.
But actually it should be:
I had a hard time deciding whether to write an essay about the works of Eudora Welty, Joan Didion, and Gwendolyn Brooks.
(Without the quotation marks and inclusion the word “and” before “Gwendolyn”)
The climax is when Cap wants to go to the Halloween dance at the school so that he can say goodbye to everyone at the school.
