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.