American and English literature in the XX century

Information about American and English literature in the beginning of XX century. The most influential authors: their biography, literary achievements. Popular books which were developed in that century. The peculiarities of Kyrgyz and American novels.

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Bishkek Humanities University named after K.Karasaev

Faculty of European Civilization

English language Department

Course Paper

American and English literature in the XX century

Scientific Supervisor

Turusbekova Aida Sadyrbekovna

Done by:

Avazbekova Jazgul Madalbekovna

Bishkek 2013

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. General information about American and English Literature

1.1 American literature at the beginning of 20th century

1.2 English literature in 20th century

1.3 American and English literature in postwar period

Chapter 2. Most influential authors in 20th century

2.1 Most influential authors in American literature in 20th century

2.2 Most influential authors in English literature in 20th century

2.3 The peculiarities of Kyrgyz and American novels

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

The interest, raised recently towards English language, the development of international relations on different levels has reasoned the desire to learn as much as possible about the country where this language originated as well as about its culture.

The literature is that magic key that opens the door of cognition of many sphere of human knowledge. It helps us to learn some interesting facts about history, to know more about people's life in other countries. Sometimes, while reading a book, we can analyse actions of its' characters and it helps us to draw some certain conclusion. That's why I find studying foreign literature is not only interesting, but also very useful.

The theme of my course paper is American and English literature in 20th century.

First of all what is literature? The word itself connected to words like “letter”. It means any form of communication which is written down.

But we use the word to describe a certain kind of writing, a certain category of written communication.

Another way of defining literature is to limit it to "great books", books that, whatever their subject is, are outstanding for literary form or expression.

One of the things we think literature is different from other kinds of writing is that it has many meanings close to it, so that we may interpret a piece of literature. There are often some layers of meaning; or, we have to read between the lines to get to the true meaning of a poem or a play. Twentieth century English literature is remarkable for a great diversity of artistic values and artistic methods.

The aims of my course paper are:

· To research American and English literature in the 20th century;

· To find information about most influential authors;

· To compare characters in American and English novels.

The structure of my course paper is the following:

· Contents

· Introduction

· Chapter 1

· Chapter 2

· Conclusion

· Bibliography

The theoretical value of my course paper is the research that can be helpful for the students who are interested in literature.

In the Chapter 1 there is given general information about American and English literature in the beginning of 20th century and in postwar period. Also written about what books were popular and what genres were developed in that century.

In the Chapter 2 written about most influential authors in 20th century, about their own and literary life. In fact they produced really great works in century which they lived. There are so many authors in the 20th century, but I wanted to write about life some of them. There was used many literatures and some Internet sources to get more information.

The actuality of my course paper is that learning American and English literature helps us to learn English language widely. Because reading literary books we can get more information about history of that country, people's lifestyle and their culture. It helps students who learn English language to know more about it.

The novelty of my course paper is to compare characters in American literary works with Kyrgyz literary works. There are many differences between American and Kyrgyz people's lifestyle in the 20th century. That's why authors in that century wrote books with many differences.

I believe that this course paper will help all person who interested in English language and literature.

Chapter 1.General Information about American and English literature

american english literature novel

1.1 American literature at the beginning of 20th century

Prose. Although in the beginning and in the course of the 20th century books lost some of their influence due to new forms of mass media like the radio, the television and recently the internet, American literature became more and more influential on an internationale level.

By the turn of the century writers of prose as well as poets and playwrights were keen on experimenting with new techniques and topics. The rather idealistic point of view authors had taken in the 19th century was no longer up - to - date and especially after the 1st World War another style of writing got popular. Perhaps it would be the best description to say that realism got even more realistic. Ernest Hemingway e.g. had a very realistic, straightforward style without the romantic ornaments that had been used before. He got first famous with his two anti - war novels «The Sun Also Rises» and «A Farewell to Arms» published in 1926 and 1929.

American authors in general began to reject the emotional aspects of literature more and more. Instead they became fascinated with describing and analyzing the psychologic depths of their characters.

The 1920s, also known as «The Roaring Twenties» brought change again. Society and thus also the society of writers, started to reject the Puritan and Victorian values and ideals that had been established. Writers felt that now they had much more freedom in choosing their topics - and also in choosing their way of life. In 1930 Sinclair Lewis was the first American to get the Nobel Prize for Literature for his novel «Dodsworth».

But the most important persons of the American literature scene at that time were surely a group of people called the Lost generation. Gertrude Stein, American writer living in Paris gathered some writers around her, for whom she became both mentor and idol. Members of this group were e.g. Thornton Wilder, a famous novelist and playwright and Scott Fitzgerald as well. They were mainly influenced by the consequences of the 1st World War, which were personal disillusionment and the loss of old values. The most important author of the Lostgeneration who was even called the most important American author of the 20th century was certainly Ernest Hemingway. Another very important person especially for the Lostgeneration but also for every other writer was the Irishman James Joyce. With his stream of consciousness- technique, the use of many symbols and his prose style that was rather lyric, he set new standards not only for Europeans, but also for Americans.

At the beginning of the new decade, the 1930s the Black Friday at the New York Stock Exchange and the following world- wide recession shocked all Americans. Many writers suddenly left their old topics to write in a very realistic way about social problems. One of the authors to do so was John Steinbeck, who expressed all his despair in «Of Mice and Men» in 1937. In 1939 he published his novel «The Grapes of Wrath». In this book he describes the life of poor farmhands in California and their will to live, but he also criticizes American capitalism. In 1940 John Ford made a very successful film out of this story. Steinbeck achieved the Nobel Prize in 1962.

Another very popular subject at that time was the so called Southern Gothic, which means the American South and its problems. William Faulkner e.g. created in his novel «The Hamlet» in 1940 as well as with other books a very humorous picture of the South for which he was awarded with the Nobel Prize in 1949.

Drama.Concerning drama the beginning of the 20th century brought the most radical changes one can think of. In the 19th century American drama consisted merely of immitations of European plays and stage adaptations of novels such as «Uncle Tom?s Cabin».There was no real copyright law to protect dramatists and Americans were more focused on seeing famous actors than on attending American plays. But suddenly things started to change and the American drama scene flourished. Along with various other reasons this was due to Eugene O?Neill, probably the most important American playwright.

His plays are, generally speaking about the working class and poor people, obsessions and sex, for O?Neil was influenced by his contemporary Sigmund Freud very much and about the relationships between people. Two of his most famous plays are «Strange Interlude», published in 1928 and «Mourning Becomes Electra» published in 1931.

At the same time, Maxwell Anderson published his plays, which were mostly historical ones. He wrote e.g. «Elizabeth the Queen» (1930), «Mary of Scotland»(1933), and «Anne of the Thousand Days» (1948) about King Henry VIII?s second wife Anne Boleyn.

Poetry.It was the same with poetry as with drama - American poetry and poetry in general was not very influential in the first years of the 20th century. This changed when Harriet Monroe, a poet herself, decided to publish the magazine «Poetry: A Magazine of Verse» in 1912. One of the most famous American poets of the 20th century, Ezra Pound, contributed a lot to this literary magazine, although he was living in London by the time it appeared first. Pound was the leader of a new movement in poetry, called Imagism, which featured a clear, plain presentation of poems. His life work was certainly «The Cantos» a series of poems appearing between 1925 and 1960, but which he tried to improve and complete until his death in 1972. The Cantos contains many allusions to literature and art as well as to many different eras and cultures and thus it is very difficult to understand. The second big American poet of the 20th century is Thomas Sterns Eliot, Pound?s contemporary. Getting a very good education and being a very intelligent man, Eliot?s poetry is on a very high intellectual level. What he writes seems sometimes illogical and too abstract to understand, but exactly because of this innovative style his lyric was a turning point or revolution for American poetry. In his poems e.g. in «The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock» Eliot wrote about disillusionment and the loss of old traditions and values. Later on the so called lost generation will be of interest to us and thus one of the poets belonging to this movement is to be presented here: Edward estlin Cummings. He was one of the first poets to realize that poetry had become a visual more than an oral art. Thus he didn?t just write, he designed his poems, by unusual punctuation, spacing, indentation and by dropping the use of capital letters. Furthermore he used colloquial language and a lot of words from popular culture. One of his ideas was e.g. to write a poem with gaps that had to be filled in by the reader.

1.2 English literature in the beginning of 20th century

The XX century had been marked by Great Britain's unparalleled colonial and industrial expansion. Colonial expansion transformed the economic structure of British capitalism. Instead of the old and vanishing industrial monopoly, there was a more complex large-scale colonial and financial monopoly, an extension of British state power over vast distant regions of the earth.

Fundamental political, social and economic changes on the British scene deeply affected the creative writing of the new century. Men-of-letters of different generations and aesthetic views were critical of the new era; they were spiritual explorers voicing their discontent with life. For a number of these writers an understanding of the artist's duty towards society, an earnest desire to give expression to the feelings and thoughts of the British people was at the basis of their approach to literature; their work therefore became a new investment in the heritage of English realism and stimulated its further development. We find this brilliantly exemplified in the art of H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy and others.

H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw held the public attention for more than half a century. While Shaw essentially expounded the intellectual, social and moral problems of his time, Wells laid heavier stress on the consciousness of his changing compatriots and analysed the feelings and ambitions of the present in the light of the nation's future. Wells believed that the very existence of civilization was in jeopardy unless men of the highest intelligence seized the initiative, or communicated their wisdom to the masses until they reached the point where they would be capable of governing themselves. Being a scientist he turned his knowledge into science fiction in which he emphasized the social implications of the problems of space, time and technical revolution. When presenting his imaginary picture of the future he is really concerned with the present. Wells depicts the old order seeking in vain to perpetuate itself in a changing world and the new one rising assertively, chaotically in cities which grow and throw out their suburban tentacles far into the country-side.

The beginning of the century was an epoch of incessant debates, of criticizing, evaluating and rejecting old conceptions of life. Bernard Shaw was increasingly involved in these activities, castigating social defects in his plays, essays, lectures and letters to the papers. His surgical frankness in uttering plain truths to the nation was all , the more impressive as they reached the public through the medium of the theatre. In Mrs. Warren's Profession he demonstrated that it was society which was to blame for the evils of prostitution rather than the procuress; in Widower's Houses again it was society rather than the individual landlord, who created abuses of the right to property that proved disastrous to the lower classes. Shaw's contemporaries never failed to take in his message because apart from being an expert in stagecraft, he was a master of forceful simple English and an irresistible wit. His plays may be said to have won the day for realism in the theatre.

At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century English literature was also greatly influenced by writers and poets who made persistent attempts to break away from established literary conventions. The new century heralding changes in every sphere of life and human knowledge and foreshadowing the inevitability of more profound upheavals -- all this, the writers felt, called for a different, a new approach to literary representation. These trends gained an especially strong impetus after the holocaust of World War I. And many of those who wanted to express their disillusionment and hopelessness, their loathing of the revolting realities of bourgeois society, felt it their duty to reject traditional literary forms. Unable to form a clear conception of how to change things, they limited their protest to extravagance of form, relegating the rational meaning to the background.

The writers experimenting with poetic form have received the much debated and still not clearly defined title of "modernists", as distinct from traditionalists. This term cannot be accepted without certain reservations. To begin with, we must distinguish between the earlier modernists (those belonging to the first decades of the present century), who were certainly critics both of social and literary conventions, and the later ones in whose art experimentation with form became a convenient device to impart an aura of novelty to unclear or even reactionary ideas. It should also be emphasized that modernism cannot be used as a universally disparaging designation of all that was negative in literature. Some of the innovations introduced by modernists exercised a certain influence upon the realistic trends of twentieth-century art and were accepted by progressively minded artists.

The first modernists to put forward a program of some consistency were the "imagists" -- a group formed shortly before World War I and listing among its members E. Pound, T. E. Hulme, R. Aldington, and others. The theoretical concepts of the group were put forth in the writings of Т. Е. Hulme. The imagists scornfully rejected melodious, rhythmically flowing verse abounding in poetic imagery or a logical, straightforward prose style, in short, all that is commonly denoted by poetic and prose diction.

The two most prominent figures in modernist literature were Thomas S. Eliot in poetry and James Joyce in prose. Eliot's major poetic creation The Waste Land was a model for poets, for it became a symbol of the world's sickness, of a civilization gone to seed. The waste land is a world of spiritually displaced people of every nationality and creed, of people emotionally and intellectually starved and hopelessly alienated from decency and dignity in a barren land of rock and stone with dry bones strewn everywhere. Eliot's influence was strongly exerted on several generations of poets, among whom were such diverse talents as Robert Graves, W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas.

In prose fiction James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake are especially representative of a writer's reaction to man's alienation from life and society. Joyce depicts the psychic movement of his characters by creating a chaotic play of sensations and emotions in arbitrary succession without seeming relevance to a unifying idea. To present the workings of the human mind he evolved a special technique defined by literary criticism as the "stream-of-consciousness" technique disregarding linguistic norms in an attempt to approximate mental processes below the level of consciousness. Deliberate obscurity has rendered Joyce's books practically unintelligible to all but the most zealous and scholarly students. And while Joyce's influence on later writers has been considerable, they have refrained from competing with his inaccessibility

Criticism of modern civilization also finds a very strong and peculiar expression in the work of D. H. Lawrence. Often accused of obscenity and immoral treatment of sex, Lawrence devoted his great literary talent to the pursuit of a life more full, free and intense than the contemporary world could grant to men and women. The underlying purpose of his art was to restore the natural balance in living destroyed by the evils of industrialism. His novels and short stories, his verse, essays and travel books reveal that to him sex was the creative affirmation of life as opposed to a deadening, sordid and mechanical age.

1.3 American and English literature in Postwar period

After the 2nd World War poetry can be divided up into several main directions. The first one is Traditionalism. Traditional poets are mostly coming from the South or the East Coast of the U.S. and use, as the name tells, traditional topics as well as a traditional style of writing. What?s interesting is that many poets like e.g. Robert Penn Warren were supporters of Traditionalism first, but turned to completely different directions of poetry later. The second group are the so called Idiosyncratic Poets. The fundaments of idiosyncratic poetry are traditional, but the poets just use them to explore and experiment with new forms of poetry. Experimental poetry, being created in the 1950s is a very complex area, which has to be divided up. Donald Allen defined five different directions in his book «The New American Poetry». Poets belonging to the New York School mostly had a very good education and their topics were moral questions, political issues, or the urban lifestyle. The fith group Allen defined are the surrealists and extentialists, the American followers of an initially European movement. Surrealism?s main feature is the use of a complex, dazzling imagery. No matter which kind of poetry one favours, poetry in general is very popular in the U.S. tody. There are many literary magazines, colleges offer poetry workshops everybody can attend and many poets earn their money by teaching students how and what to write.

In general prose after the 2nd World War can be divided into two categories. On the one side there was the realisitc and naturalistic way of describing things, on the other side there was literature full of black humor and strange phantasies. Kurt Vonnegut was one of the many authors to publish anti - war novels because of his own experiences. His most famous book is «Slaughterhouse - Five"»(1969), which is about a group of prisoners in Germany during 2nd World War who are suddenly sent to a fictitious planet, a subject that is very similar to Science- Fiction Literature.

Another very important novel of the 1950s is J. D. Salinger?s «The Catcher in the Rye» published in 1951. This novel is about a boy / young man called Holden Caulfield who is expelled from school. But instead of going home to his parents he goes to New York and spends some days there, thinking about his past life as well as about his future. Although Holden Caulfield is not in love and doesn?t comitt suicide in the end «The Catcher in the Rye» ist often associated with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe?s «The sorrows of young Werther», because both Werther and Holden are lonley, desperate and looking for their real purpose in life. When talking about recent literature in the U.S. black literature should of course also not be forgotten. Basically Afro - American authors still write about the same subjects as their predecessors of the Harlem Renaissance: the problems of black people in American society. A famous Afro - American writer is Toni Morrison, who wrote e.g. ,,Beloved" published in 1987. «Beloved» is about a female slave, who tries to escape with her children, but who fails and decides to kill her kids, so that they don?t have to suffer under their cruel owner. She only suceeds in killing her oldest dughter, who haunts her as a ghost 20 years later. In 1993 Morrison was awarded with the Nobel Prize.

A novelist who is quite famous today and might also be known to future generations is John Irving, who tries to combine in his novels a satiric and humorous point of view with important lessons about life. His novels are very grotesque and sometimes full of violence, but nervertheless or maybe exactly because of that he is one of the most successful American authors of the present. One of his books ,,The Cider House Rules" was made a film in 1999 and Irving got an Oscar, for he wrote the script for this film.

Last but not least the Pulitzer Prize, the most important American Award for achievements in literature, journalism and music should be mentioned. Joseph Pulitzer was an American publisher who owned several newspapers and who is said to be the creatoir of the modern American daily press. In his will he defined that every year a committee, the Pulitzer Prize Board should choose who is to get the award. There are 5 pizes for literature, eight for journalism and one for music. The winners are announced by the Columbia University in New York and the prizes are given to them there.

After the war there was a significant movement away from the avant-garde, from the technical experimentation favored by earlier generations of writers. The writers' interest in man's external relationships led to a less associative style, to a style closer to the straightforward narrative of the greater part of nineteenth-century fiction. They often deliberately tried to reestablish conventional prose techniques, old novelistic traditions. Several major writers like С. Р. Snow and Graham Greene came to the fore in the inter-war period, but their specific manner outlined itself most markedly in their post-war work.

C. P. Snow viewed all social problems in large political terms. He invariably expressed his social convictions and attitudes in reference to political power. Throughout his sequence Strangers and Brothers (which forms an impressive study of both great public issues and man's peisonal problems), Snow continually illustrated some form of conflict between individual conscience and the pressure of the political situation. His books provide a valuable commentary on the life of contemporary British society.

Humanistic traditions of English literature have also been taken up by Angus Wilson who appeared on the literary scene immediately after the war. With mingled irony and compassion he gives, both in his short stories and novels, a skilful dissection of post-war England exposing the foibles and hypocrisies of the middle-class milieu, its self-righteous and hollow conventions, the mean devices with which people seek to mask their deep-rooted brutal egotism. In his major novel Anglo-Saxon Attitudes he uses the large framework of the traditional nineteenth-century novel, the saga that portrays a society by cutting across numerous class and occupational lines, by raising profound questions of moral honesty. After World War II there appeared young writers, who are ready to keep up the standard of wholesome optimism, and mature writers, who have passed through a certain creative crisis.

In the fifties there appears a very interesting trend in literature, the followers of which were called "The Angry Young Man". The post-war changes had given a chance to a large number of young from the more democratic layers of society to receive higher education at universities. But on graduating, these students found they had no prospects in life; unemployment had increased after the war. There appeared works dealing with such characters, angry young men who were angry with everything and everybody, as no one was interested to learn what their ideas on life and society were. Outstanding writers of this trend were John Wain, Kingsley Amis and the dramatist John Osborne.

The sixties saw a new type of literature. The criticism was revealed in the "working-class novel" as it was called. These novels deal with characters coming from the working class. The best known writer of this trend is Alan Sillitoe. Much of post-war English literature is in the form of novels, and up to the present the novel remains the most popular literature genre in Britain. Contemporary English novelists are represented by several different trends. Since sixties the literary life in Great Britain has developed greatly. The new time brings new heroes, new experience in theatrical life and poetry, new forms and standards in prosaic works. The specific feature of nowadays literature is the variety of genres and styles, which inrich the world's literature. Alongside with the realistic method the symbolic one takes place and develops further. On the one hand, the themes in the modern literary works concern more global problems: the Peace and the War, the environmental protection, the relations between the mankind and Universe. But on the other hand, the duties and the obligations of the individual man, the psychology of the human nature, the life's situations and the ways of solving the problems, the power and money have always been in the centre of public attention, that found its reflection in the newest English literature, too. The Angry Young Men

Who are these widely discussed group known as the Angry Young Men? Although their name is not quite correct - they are not angry in the strict sense of the word, they are not all young and not all men - the members of this group have much in common. Most of these were of lower middle- class backgrounds. The four best known are novelists Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine and playwright John Osborne. Although not all personally known to one another, they had in common an outspoken irreverence for the British class system and the pretensions of the aristocracy. Their heroes are usually young men from the so- called lower or lower middle class structure of English society. They strongly disapprove of the elitist universities, the Church ofv England, and the darkness of the working class life. Though in most cases they criticise not the essential class distinctions but the outwards signs of bthe Establishment such as the privileges that the top of society has retained from the times of feudalism.

Outside England the influence of the Angry Young Men has been felt mainly in plays by John Osborne. As Osborne has said of himself, "I want to make people feel, to give them a lesson of feeling, They can think afterwards". As regards literary techniques, the Angry Young Men are conservatives. They look upon Kafka, Joyce and other modernist writers of the twenties as museum pieces. Their style is close to the straightforward narrative of most of 19th - century fiction. The Angry Young Men are not especially interested in the philosophical problems of men's existence. "The great questions I ask to myself", Kingsley Amis says, "are those like 'How am I going to pay the electric bill?' "

Chapter 2.Most influential authors in 20th century

Modern English Writers

During the 1970's and early 1980's, such writers as Greene, Lessing and Le Carre continued to produce important novels. New writers also appeared. D. M. Thomas blended fiction with actual events and famous people in The White Hotel (1981).

Perhaps the three leading English writers are Graham Greene, Iris Murdoch and Agatha Christie, that is read and loved not only in her native country.

There are also many writers in American literature who produce popular novels. Sush writers as William Faulkner,Ernest Hemingway,Harper Lee and Margaret Mitchel are famous not only in their country,but all over the world.

2.1 Most influential authors in American literature in 20th century

American author Ernest Hemingway is considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Best known for his novels and short stories, he was also an accomplished journalist and war correspondent. Hemingway's trademark prose style -- simple and spare -- influenced a generation of writers. A larger-than-life figure, Hemingway thrived on high adventure -- from safaris and bullfights to wartime journalism and adulterous affairs. Hemingway is among the most prominent of the "Lost Generation" of expatriate writers who lived in Paris in the 1920s. He was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in literature and several of his books were made into movies. After a long struggle with depression, Hemingway took his own life in 1961.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on the 21st July 1899 in Illinois and the biggest part of his life was influenced by tragic events. He took part in the 1st World War, where he was severely wounded and about at that time his father commited suicide. In the first period of his life Hemingway wrote mainly anti- war novels, but other topics followed soon. In the following years Hemingway concentrated on Short Stories - something he got especially famous for. His Short Stories were so tight, compact, condensed and plain in style that up to now many people think nobody could ever come close to Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway grew up with four sisters; his much longed-for brother did not arrive until Ernest was 15 years old. Young Ernest enjoyed family vacations at a cottage in northern Michigan where he developed a love of the outdoors and learned hunting and fishing from his father. His mother, who insisted that all of her children learn to play an instrument, instilled in him an appreciation of the arts. In high school, Hemingway co-edited the school newspaper and competed on the football and swim teams. Fond of impromptu boxing matches with his friends, Hemingway also played cello in the school orchestra. He graduated from Oak Park High School in 1917.

Hemingway began submitting short stories to magazines, but they were repeatedly rejected. Through mutual friends, Hemingway met novelist Sherwood Anderson, who was impressed by Hemingway's short stories and encouraged him to pursue a career in writing.

In 1923, several of Hemingway's poems and stories were accepted for publication in two American literary magazines, Poetry and The Little Review. In the summer of that year, Hemingway's first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published by an American-owned Paris publishing house.

On a trip to Spain in the summer of 1923, Hemingway witnessed his first bullfight. He wrote of bullfighting in the Star, seeming to condemn the sport and romanticize it at the same time. On another excursion to Spain, Hemingway covered the traditional "running of the bulls" at Pamplona, during which young men -- courting death or, at the very least, injury -- ran through town pursued by a throng of angry bulls.

In December 1928, Hemingway received shocking news -- his father, despondent over mounting health and financial problems, had shot himself to death. Hemingway, who'd had a strained relationship with his parents, reconciled with his mother after his father's suicide and helped to support her financially.

In May 1928, Scribner's Magazine published its first installment of A Farewell to Arms. It was well-received; however, the second and third installments, deemed profane and sexually explicit, were banned from newsstands in Boston. Such criticism only served to boost sales when the entire book was published in September 1929.

World War II

Hemingway and Gellhorn rented a farm house in Cuba just outside of Havana, where both could work on their writing. Traveling between Cuba and Key West, Hemingway wrote one of his most popular novels - For Whom the Bell Tolls. A fictionalized account of the Spanish Civil War, the book was published in October 1940 and became a bestseller. Despite being named the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1941, the book did not win because the president of Columbia University (which bestowed the award) vetoed the decision.

As Martha's reputation as a journalist grew, she earned assignments around the globe, leaving Hemingway resentful of her long absences. But soon, they would both be globetrotting. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, both Hemingway and Gellhorn signed on as war correspondents. Hemingway was allowed on board a troop transport ship, from which he was able to watch the D-day invasion of Normandy in June 1944.

The Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes

While in London during the war, Hemingway began an affair with the woman who would become his fourth wife -- journalist Mary Welsh. Gellhorn learned of the affair and divorced Hemingway in 1945. He and Welsh married in 1946. They alternated between homes in Cuba and Idaho.

In January 1951, Hemingway began writing a book that would become one of his most celebrated works - The Old Man and the Sea. A bestseller, the novella also won Hemingway his long-awaited Pulitzer Prize in 1953.

The Hemingways traveled extensively, but were often the victims of bad luck. They were involved in two plane crashes in Africa during one trip in 1953. Hemingway was severely injured, sustaining internal and head injuries as well as burns. Some newspapers erroneously reported that he had died in the second crash.

In 1954, Hemingway was awarded the career-topping Nobel Prize for literature.

Margaret Mitchell became one of the most famous American writers with the publication of her novel, "Gone With the Wind" in 1936. She drew from her own background as a woman growing up in the South, but she also based her story on the controversial history of the South.

Mitchell started out as a journalist, with her earliest articles appearing in the "Journal" in 1922. She began writing "Gone with the Wind" in 1926, though she may never have published the book had she not been angrily goaded into allowing the vice president of Macmillian, Harold Latham, to read the novel. The rest, as they say, is history...

Despite the small number of her works, the legend of Margaret Mitchell has continued. "Gone With the Wind" has never been out of print. Its popularity continues, with each new generation reading, learning from,and enjoying the tale of Scarlett O'Hara

Margaret Mitchell's greatest contribution to literature was her "Gone With the Wind," which she began writing in 1926 and published in 1936. At the time of its publication, the book sold more copies than any other American novel in literary history. The story centers around the life and times of Scarlett O'Hara, a Southern woman. Mitchell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The novel has been published in 40 countries, with many critical studies and articles. During World War II, Margaret Mitchell was a volunteer for the American Red Cross and she raised money for the war effort by selling war bonds. She was active in Home Defense, sewed hospital gowns and put patches on trousers. Her personal attention, however, was devoted to writing letters to men in uniform--soldiers, sailors and marines, sending them humor, encouragement, and her sympathy. The USS Atlanta (CL-51) was an anti-aircraft ship of the United States Navy sponsored by Margaret Mitchell and used in the naval Battle of Midway and the Eastern Solomons. The ship was struck and sunk in night surface action on November 13, 1942 during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal.

Mitchell sponsored a second cruiser named after the city of Atlanta, USS Atlanta (CL-104). On February 6, 1944, she christened Atlanta in Camden, New Jersey. Atlanta was operating off the coast of Honshы when the Japanese surrendered on August 15, 1945. It was sunk during an explosive test off San Clemente Island on October 1, 1970.

More Lines From "Gone With the Wind" - Quote:

"Death and taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them."

"I'll think of it all to-morrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. To-morrow, I'll think of some way to get him back. After all, to-morrow is another day."

Margaret Mitchell Quotes:

"The usual masculine disillusionment is discovering that a woman has a brain."

"Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect."

"Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was."

2.2 Most influential authors in English literature in 20th century
Graham Greene

Graham Greene is one of the most outstanding novelists of modern English literature. He is talented and sincere, but at the same time his world outlook is characterised by sharp contradictions.

Greene's novels deal with real life burning problems. His observations are concentrated on the actual details of poverty and misery. The author penetrates into weak spots in the capitalist world, does not try to find out the reasons for the evil he sees. Social conditions are shown only as a background to his novels. Neither does he try to comprehend the causes of spiritual crises experienced by his contemporaries. Decadent motives are to be found in his novels, though he does not lead the reader away from reality into the world of dreams and fantasy, and in most of novels he reveals the truth of life.

Life of Graham Greene

Graham Greene was born in 1904. He was educated at an English School, the head-master of which was his father. His childhood was not at all happy; he describes this period of his life as "…something associated with violence, cruelty, evil across the way".

In 1922 Greene became a student of Balliol College, Oxford. At the age of twenty-two he became sub-editor on the staff of a newspaper The Nottingham Guardian. It was during this period that his first novel, The Man Within, was written. From 1930 onwards his work as a novelist has been steady and continuos. In 1940 he became literary editor of the spectator and the year following entered the Foreign Office. During World War II Greene spent some years in Africa. It had been his cherished desire from childhood to see that continent.

In 1944 he wrote for an anti-fascist journal which was illegally published in France.

Literary Work

Some bourgeois critics class Greene among the 'modernists'. They substantiate their classification by the fact that Greene's works, like those of modernists, are marked by disillusion, scepticism and despair, and that the themes employed by Greene and the modernists are much the same. These critics fail to understand the real nature of Greene's pessimism, which rests upon a deeply-rooted sympathy for mankind, a sympathy not to be found in the modernists.

Though Greene, like the modernists, deals with the problem of crime, his approach to it is quite different. Unlike the modernists, who are mostly interested in the description of the crime itself, Greene investigates the motives behind the crime. He gives a deep psychological analysis of his criminals by investigating the causes that led to murder.

According to his own words, Greene wants to make the reader sympathise with people who don't seem to deserve sympathy. The author tries to prove that a criminal may possess more human qualities, that is to say, may sometimes be better at the core, than many a respectable gentleman. He doesn't, however, always succeed in giving a truthful interpretation of the motives of the crime he deals with, though in his later works his approach to the subject becomes more realistic. He shows the corrupting influence of capitalist civilisation on human nature, and tries to prove that many of the bad qualities in a person are the natural result of cruel, inhuman conditions of life.

Though crime and murder, the problem of 'the dark man', motivate many of Greene' s works, the main theme of his novels is pity for man struggling in vain against all the evils of life; his longing for sympathy, love and friendship; his striving for happiness, which is inevitably doomed to failure.

In the thirties Greene's protest against human suffering brought him to Catholicism, but he did not become a true Catholic. His novels The Heart of the Matter, A Burn-Out Case, The Comedians and many others reject the dogmas of Catholicism, and his talented realistic descriptions are more convincing than his ideology and Philosophy.

In The Heart of the Matter, a true Catholic, Scobie, commits suicide when he becomes aware of the fact that the church cannot free people from suffering. For this idea the novel was condemned by the Vatican.

Greene is known as the author of two genres - psychological detective novels or 'entertainments', and ' serious novels', as he called them. The main theme of both genres is much the same (the problem of 'the dark man', deep concern for the fate of the common people. But in the 'serious novels' the inner world of the characters is more complex and the psychological analysis becomes deeper.

Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoc has written novels, drama, phylosophical criticism, critical theory, poetry, a short story, a pamphlet, and a libretto or an opera based on her play The Servants and the Snow, but she is best knkown and the most successful

as a philosopher and a novelist. Although she claimes not to be a phylosophical novelist and does not want to philosophy to intrude to openly into her novels, she is a Platonist whose aesthetics and view of man and iextricable, and moral phylosophy, arsthetics, and characterization are clearlyiterrelated in her novels.

Murdoch began to write prose in 1953. She soon became very popular with the English resders. All her novels Under the Net, The Flight from the Enchanter, The Sandcastle, The Unicorn, The Red and the Green, The Time of Angels, An Accidental Man, The Black Prince, and many others are characterized by the deep interest im phylosophycal problems and in the inner world of man. Iris Murdoch shows the loneliness and sufferings of the human being in the hostile world.

Literary work.

Iris Murdoch, was born in Dublin in 1919. She attended school in Bristol and studied philosophy at Cambridge, the two oldest universities in England. The for many years Murdoch was teaching philosophy at Oxford.

Early influences on her work include French writers and philosophers including Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Well, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Raymond Queneau, as well as Samuel Beckett. Her first novel Under the Net, a picaresque tale set in London and Paris, has extensive existential derivations, including the title, and she has said that this work was influenced by Beckett's Murthy and Queneau's Pierrot. However the novels soon move away from existentialism, for she does not believe that existentialism it regards man's inner life.

Although honest, intelligent, and well written, the novels of Iris Murdoch nevertheless lack clear definition. Hers seems to be a talent for humour, but she appears unable to sustain it for more than a scene or a temporary interchange. Her first novel, Under the Net (1954), fits into the humorous pattern set by Kingsley Amis in Lucky Jim (1954) and John Wain in Hurry on Down (1953). Her Jack Donaghue of this novel is akin to Amis's Jim Dixon and Wain's Charles Lumley, in that he maintains his own kind of somewhat dubious integrity and tries to make his way without forsaking his dignity, and increasingly difficult accomplishment in a world which offers devilish rewards for loss of integrity and dignity.

Jake is angry middle-aged man who mocks society and its respectability. He moves playfully around law and order; he does small things on the sly- swims in the Thames at night, steals the performing dog, sneaks in and out of locked apartments, steals food. He is a puerile existence in which he remains "pure" even while carrying on his adolescent activities.

The dangers of this type of hero, indeed of this kind of novel, are apparent, for when the humour begins to run low, the entire piece becomes childish. In Lucky Jim, we saw that as the humorous invention lost vigor, the novel became enfeebled because it had nothing else to draw upon. In her first novel as well as in The Flight from the Enchanter (1956) and The Bell (1958), Miss Murdoch unfortunately was enable to sustain the humour, and the novels frequently decline into triviality.

Another danger that Miss Murdoch has not avoided is that of creating characters who are suitable only for the comic situations but for little else. When they must rise to a more serious response, their triteness precludes real change. This fault is especially true of the characters in The Flight from the Enchanter, a curious mixture of the frivolous and serious. The characters are keyed low for the comic passages but too low to permit any rise when the situation evidently demands it. The comic novel usually is receptive to a certain scattering of the seed, while a serious novel calls for intensity of characterisation and almost an entirely different tone. In her four novels Miss Murdoch falls between both camps; the result is that her novels fail to coalesce as either one or the other.

Agatha Christie

The woman who has become one of the most popular and prolific of all English detective novelists, Agatha Christie (1891-1976), largely, it would seem, by virtue of the skilfully engineered complexity of her plots.

Once, after reading in a magazine that she was 'the world's most mysterious woman' , Agatha Christie complained to her agent: " What do they suggest I am! A Bank Robber or a Bank Robber's wife? I am an ordinary successful hard-working author - like any other author." Her success was not exactly ordinary. She produced nearly 90 novels and collections of stories in a lifetime that spanned 85 years. One of her plays, The Mousetrap, opened in London in 1952 and is still running.

The Life and Creative Activity

She refined and left a lasting imprint on the detective formula. An "Agatha Christie" became a shorthand description for an unadomed display of crime unmasked by perceptive and relentless logic. She dared readers to outwit her, and few resisted the challenge. Shortly after her death in 1976, one estimate put the world-wide sale of her books at 40 million copies. Given such glittering evidence and the clues provided by her fiction, a mystique was bound to develop around the one whodunit: Agatha the enchantress, the proper Englishman with a power to murder and create. When she insisted that the truth was far less exotic, armchair sleuths who had been trained by her books recognised a false lead when they saw one.

She was right, of course, as this biography, Agatha Christie, the first written with the blessings of Christie's heirs and estate, conclusively proves. Author Janet Morgan does a through job of getting the facts in the Christie case straight and on the record. But the story, even when demystified, seems almost as unbelievable as the guessing games it prompted.

Her childhood could have been written by Jane Austen. Agatha miller, beloved by her parents and an older sister and brother, grew up in an English seaside village surrounded by Edwardian privileges and leisure. Her American father lived off a trust fund that dwindled steadily, and his death when Agatha was eleven left family finances more unsteady. Still, breeding and manners meant as much as money, and the young woman, largely educated at home, moved in a circle of eligible bachelors. She turned down three proposals and took a flier instead. After a stormy courtship, she married Archie Christie, a dashing aviator with few expectations of living through World War I.

While he fought, his new bride stayed at home working in a hospital. Her sister suggested that Agatha who was both exhausted and bored during her free time, try to write the sort of detective novel they both enjoyed reading. She did, but by the time The Mysterious Affair at Styles appeared in print, the war was over and Agatha had a daughter and a husband, grounded at last, who seemed chiefly interested in making money and playing golf.

The year 1926 changed her prospects and her life. For one thing, she published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which caused a stir because it broke the rules of detective fiction: the narrator did it. Something more shocking followed. In December Agatha left her husband and child and disappeared for ten days, setting off a nation-wide search and a carnival of speculation. Morgan's recreation of this drama is meticulous, but it lacks, perhaps unavoidably, the tight resolution that Christie gave her invented plots.

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