Anglo-american literature Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Anglo-american literature Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

-american journalist, novelist
-worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Star
-served with a volunteer ambulance unit in Italy in World War I, was seriously wounded
-an european correspondent for the Toronto Star, lived in France
-a correspondent in the Spanish Civil War
-a foreign correspondent during World War II – he was involved in most european campaigns and was present at many battles
-in 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature
-in 1961 commited suicide

Works:
Three stories and ten poems (1923) – early short stories
theme of shattered indiviuals seeking refuge from the demands of the world
A Farewell to Arms (1929) – novel, established his reputation
portrays an English nurse and an American ambulance-service officer whose intense relationship was in stark contrast to the background of war
Winner Take Nothing (1933) collection of stories
Death in the afternoon (1932) – about bullfighting
The Green Hills of Africa (1935) – novel, concerned with big-game hunting, focused on the corruption of individual goodness by mass culture
To Have and Have Not (1937) – author acknowledges the possibility of men triumphing over social problems
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) –novel from the Spanish Civil War
shows, that the boudage of one people leads to the boudage of all
Across the River and into the trees (1950) – novel, reflects his sardonic view of war – World War II
not successful, unfriendly critic
The Old Man and the Sea (1952) – a short novel about an aged Cuban fisherman´s lonely expedition to catch a great fish
won a Pulitzer Prize

George Orwell (1903 – 1950)
-novelist, essayist
-pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair
-was born in India, studied in England, lived in London and Paris
-fought in the Spanish War
-considered himself a democratic socialist, hated totalitarianism, became more and more desillusioned with the aims and methods of Communism
-died of tuberculosis in London

Work:
Animal Farm (1944) – a political fable based on the story of the Russian Revolution and its betrayal of Stalin
plot – a group of barnyard animal overthrow and chase off their human master and set up an egalitarian society of their own
the animals´leaders – the pigs – subvert the revolution and form a dictatorship, whose boudage is even more heartless than that of their human master
problems with publishing
made him famous
Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) – novel, warning against Nazism and Stalinism
is set in an imaginary future in which the world is dominated by three totalitarian police states
hero – the Englishman Winston Smith – longes for truth and decency – becomes a secret rebel against the government and the leading party, which changes the truth and rewrites history to suit its own purposes – Smith is imprisoned and reeducated by brainwashing, he loses his independent mental existence until he can love only the figure he previously most hated: the apparent leader of the party = Big Brother
warns of the potential dangers of totalitarianism

Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900)
-decadent writer
-irish wit, poest, dramatist
-wrote in English and French
-born in Dublin, his parents were interested in literature, studied in Dublin and Oxford, lived in England, USA, France
-arrested and accused of being a sodomite, sentenced to two xears in prison

Work:
The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) – romantic alegory in the form of fairy tale
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) – his only novel
about a young man, who doesn´t want to get old – instead of his face a portrait of him changes – all the bad things he did occur in the portrait by changing the face
Lady Windermere´s Fan (1893) – paradoxical society comedy
A Woman of no Importance (1893) – society comedy
Salomé (1893) – drama about unnatural passion, halted by the censor, because it contained biblical charakters
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) – satiric play about Victorian crisis
The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1893) – ballad about inhuman prison conditions
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac was born in Massachusetts in 1922. He was a writer who attended Columbia University (1940-42) and roamed about and took odd jobs before he became associated with the Beat movement. His fiction, very loose in style and structure, includes The town and the city (1950), tracing the Martin family from 1910 in Lowell, Massachusetts, through the war years and the dispersal of the eight children; On the Road (1957), a quasi-autobiographical tale of Beat characters ranging around the nation in quest of experience; Dharma Burms (1958), a comparable novel but eight more emphasis on the discovery of truth or ‚dharma‘ through Zen Buddhism; The Subterreans (1958), about a love affair between a Beat writer and a Negro girl; Doctor Sax (1959), an early novel fictively recreating the author’s youth; Maggie Cassidy (1959) about the adolescent Jack Duluoz searching for love and identity; Tristessa (1960), portraying the morphine addiction of a Mexico City prostitute; Big Sir (1962), a sequel to On the Road, about the crack-up and withdrawal to the Carmel area of a leader of the Beat movement; Visions of Gerard (1963), about the great grief of a French-Canadian family of Lowell, Massachusetts, when its religious young son dies, and Desolating Angels (1965). Mexico City Blues (1959)collects poems, Lonesome Traveller (1960) gathers travel sketches, and Book of Dreams recounts the author’s dreams in stream-of-consciousness style.
Herbert George Wells
Herbert George Wells was born in 1866 as a son of a small tradesman and professional cricketter. He was apprenticed to a draper in early life, a period of which reflections may be seen in some of his best novels (The History of Mr. Polly, Kipps, The Wheels of Chance). He became a teacher at Midhurst Grammar School and subsequently graduated at the Normal School of Science, South Kensington. He followed the teaching profession until 1893, when he definitely adopted that of letters. A vivid light is thrown on the circumstance of his life and mental development by his interesting Experiment in Autobiography (1934).
Well’s novels divide themselves broadly into three groups: 1) fantastic and imaginative romances, in which, after the manner of Swift in Gulliver’s travels, the author projects himself to a distant standpoint – the moon, the future, the air – and views our life from outside, e.g. as an angel sees it (The Wonderful Visit); 2) novels of character and humour, of which The History of Mr. Polly (1910) is the type; 3) discussion novels – discussion, that is, in the main, of human ideals and progress – to which Well’s essay on The Contemporary Novel serves as a general introduction.
Well’s publications include: The Time Machine, The Wonderful Visit, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, When the Sleeper Wakes (revised as The Sleeper Awakes), Love and Mr. Lewisham, The First Men in the Moon, Anticipations, The Food of the Gods, A Modern Utopia, Kipps, The War in the Air, Tono-Bungay (one of Well’s most remarkable works, a picture of English society in dissolution in the later 19th century and of the advent of a new class of rich), Ann Veronica, The History of Mr. Polly, The New Machiavelli, The Country of the Blind, Bealby, Mr. Britling sees it through, The Outline of History, Short History of The World, The World of William Clissold, The Open Conspiracy, The Science of Life, The Shape of Things to Come.
Heller, Joseph (1923- )
Joseph Heller himself has recounted the story of his early life in his latest book Now and Then (1998). He was born in Brooklyn in 1923 and grew up on Coney Island. At the outbreak of World War II, he worked first in a navy yard and then enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces, training at bases in South Carolina before flying sixty missions as bombardier in B-25s in North Africa and Italy.
After the War he went through college and graduate study at the University of Southern California, New York University (B.A. 1948), Columbia (M.A. 1949), and Oxford (Fulbright Scholar, 1949-50). During this time he began to publish short fiction. Two years of teaching composition at Penn State followed, till in 1952 he returned to New York as a writer in advertising and promotions for Time, Look, and McCall’s. Hunched at his Time desk one morning in 1953, Heller wrote out longhand the first section of „Catch 18,“ the start of his war novel Catch-22 (1961). The extraordinary and sustained impact of that novel, both with critics and readers, was only the beginning of a literary career that now encompasses eight major books as well as stage plays, screenplays, short stories, articles, and reviews.
Heller’s long-mulled second novel, Something Happened (1974), switched attention to the anxieties and competition of civilian management. Good as Gold (1979) has a double target: not only does it follow a hustling English professor into the world of presidential public relations, but it is also searchingly concerned with the ex-professor’s identity as a Jewish-American and his relations with his extensive family. God Knows (1984) carries that theme daringly into the Old Testament itself, reimagining the deathbed autobiography of King David in Heller’s distinctive mingling of the philosophical, the satiric and the absurd.
In the early 1980s, Heller became first paralyzed and then seriously weakened by a deadly nerve disease, Guillain-Barre Syndrome; with his friend Speed Vogal, he interpreted this experience and his recovery in the collaborative work No Laughing Matter (1986). Heller’s next (anti-)novel, Picture This (1988), juxtaposes great figures from Western culture (Plato, Rembrandt) with twentieth-century America to exploit the recurrent clashes between genius and power. His most recent novel, Closing Times (1994), comes full circle by reuniting the wartime heroes of his first book–Yossarian, Milo Minderbinder, and the others–in New York fifty years later. Closing Times received wide critical acclaim: according to one reviewer, it showed „a national treasure at work,“ and it brought renewed recognition of Mr. Heller’s place as one of the greatest and most distinctive of twentieth-century Anerican novelists.