美国文学-整理

John Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California in 1902 and attended Stanford University intermittently between 1920 and 1926. Steinbeck did not graduate from Stanford, but instead chose to support himself through manual labor while writing. His experiences among the working classes in California lent authenticity to his depiction of the lives of the workers who are the central characters of his most important novels. Steinbeck spent much of his life in Monterey County, which later was the setting of some of his fiction.

Steinbeck had his first success with Tortilla Flat in 1935, an affectionately told story of Mexican-Americans told with gentle humor. Nevertheless, his subsequent novel, In Dubious Battle (1936) was marked by an unrelenting grimness. This novel is a classic account of a strike by agricultural laborers and a pair of Marxist labor organizers who engineer it, and is the first Steinbeck novel to encompass the striking social commentary of his most notable work. Steinbeck received even greater acclaim for the novella Of Mice and Men (1937), a tragic story about the strange, complex bond between two migrant laborers

His crowning achievement, The Grapes of Wrath, won Steinbeck a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award. It was also adapted into a classic film directed by John Ford that was name one of the American Film Institute's one hundred greatest films. The novel describes the migration of a dispossessed family from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California and critiques their subsequent exploitation by a ruthless system of agricultural economics.

During the second world war, Steinbeck wrote some effective pieces of government propaganda, among them The Moon Is Down (1942), a novel of Norwegians under the Nazis. He also served as a war correspondent. With the end of World War II and the move from the Great Depression to economic prosperity Steinbeck's work did soften somewhat. While containing the elements of social criticism that marked his earlier work, the three novels Steinbeck published immediately following the war - Cannery Row (1945), and The Pearl (1947) were more sentimental and relaxed in approach.

Steinbeck's later writings were comparatively slight works of entertainment and journalism, but none of the works equaled the critical reputation of his earlier novels.

Steinbeck's reputation depends mostly on the naturalistic novels with proletarian themes he wrote during the Depression. It is in these works that Steinbeck is most effective in his building of rich symbolic structures and his attempts at conveying the archetypal qualities of his characters. Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962, and died in New York City in 1968.

Tom Joad: The central character of the novel, he is a recently released inmate imprisoned for murder who returns home to find that his family has lost their farm and is moving west to California. Tom is a plainspoken, forthright and direct man, yet he still retains some of his violent tendencies.

Ma Joad: The mother of Noah, Tom, Rose of Sharon, Ruthie and Winfield, Ma Joad is a woman accustomed to hardship and deprivation. She is a forceful woman who is determined to keep her family together at nearly all costs, yet remains kind toward all, even sparing what little the family has for those even less fortunate.

Pa Joad: Although Pa Joad is the head of the Joad household, he is not a forceful presence. Without the ability to provide for his family, he recedes into the background, playing little prominent role in deciding the fate of his family.

Uncle John: A morose man prone to depression and alcoholism, Uncle John believes himself to be the

cause of the family's misfortune. He blames himself for the death of his wife several years ago, and has carried the guilt of that event with him.

Rose of Sharon: Tom Joad's younger sister, recently married to Connie Rivers and pregnant with his child, Rose of Sharon is the one adult who retains a sense of optimism in the future. She dreams of a middle-class life with her husband and child, but becomes paranoid and disillusioned once her husband abandons her when they reach California.

Connie Rivers: The shiftless husband of Rose of Sharon, Connie dreams of taking correspondence courses that will provide him with job opportunities and the possibility of a better life. When he reaches California and does not find work, he immediately becomes disillusioned and abandons his pregnant wife.

Noah Joad: Tom's older brother, he suffers from mental disabilities that likely occurred during childbirth. He leaves the family to remain an outsider from society, supporting himself by catching fish at the nearby river.

Al Joad: Tom's younger brother, at sixteen years old he is concerned with cars and girls, and remains combative and truculent toward the rest of the family. Out of the Joad family, he has the most knowledge of cars, and fears that the rest of the family will blame him if anything goes wrong. He dreams of becoming a mechanic, and becomes engaged to Aggie Wainwright by the end of the novel.

Reverend Jim Casy: A fallen preacher who too often succumbed to temptation, Casy left the ministry when he realized that he did not believe in absolute ideas of sin. He espouses the idea that all that is holy comes from collective society, a belief that he places in practical context when, after time in jail, he becomes involved with labor activists. Casy is a martyr for his beliefs, murdered in a confrontation with police.

(1888-1953)

— Nobel Prize Winner in Drama Born in New York City, Oct. 16, 1888

Father: James, matinee idol specialized in portraying the count of The Count of Monte Cristo. James toured the entire country for sixteen years in this production.

The family had a summer cottage in New London, but the Irish family was looked down upon by the Puritan neighbors.

About mother:

―First seven years of my life spent mostly in hotels and railroad trains, my mother accompanying my father on his tours of the United States, although she never was an actress, disliked the theatre, and held aloof from its people.‖

Anne Sexton (1928-1974) Stayed in mental hospital and was advised to write as part of her treatment

Taught in Harvard when committing suicide Major Works

Live or Die (1966)

To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) All My Pretty Ones (1962) Transformations (1975)

The Death of Notebooks (1974)

The Awful Rowing toward God (1975)

Her personal truth may be becoming an expression of the public truth, which ensures a place in history.

The Beat Generation (1955-1960)

A non-conformist, rebellious attitude toward conventional values concerning sex, religious, the arts, and the American way of life. It was an attitude that resulted from the feeling of depression and exhaustion and the need to escape into an unconventional, sometimes communal, mode of living.

Gary Snyder (1930- ) Growing up in Oregon Emersonian love for nature Studied Zen Buddhism Studied Chinese

How Poetry Comes to Me

It comes blundering over the Boulders at night, it stays Frightened outside the Range of my campfire I go to meet it at the Edge of the light

W. S. Merwin (1927- ) born in New York City .

Major Works

Migration (Copper Canyon), which won the 2005 National Book Award

The River Sound (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year Flower and Hand: Poems 1977-1983 (1997) The Vixen (1996)

Travels (1993 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize The Second Four Books of Poems (1993) The Rain in the Trees (1988) Selected Poems (1988)

The Carrier of Ladders (1970), the Pulitzer Prize The Lice (1967)

A Mask for Janus (1952)

Robert Bly (1926- ) born in western Minnesota Major Works

The Light Around the Body Loving a Woman in Two Worlds The Wingéd Life: Selected Poems and Prose of Thoreau The Man in the Black Coat Turns A Little Book on the Human Shadow.

James Wright (1927-1980) born in Martins Ferry, Ohio Major Works

Above the River: The Complete Poems (1992) Collected Poems (1971)

Moments of the Italian Summer (1976) Saint Judas (1959)

Shall We Gather at the River (1969) The Branch Will Not Break (1963) The Green Wall (1957)

The Lion's Tail and Eyes: Poems Written Out of Laziness and Silence (1962) This Journey (1982)

To a Blossoming Pear Tree (1977) Two Citizens (1973)

Influences of Beat Generation \"Hippies\"

During the 1950s, aspects of the Beat movement metamorphosed into The Sixties Counterculture, accompanied by a shift in terminology from \"beatnik\" to \"hippie\". Many of the original Beats remained active participants, notably Allen Ginsberg, who became a fixture of the anti-war movement. Notably, however, Jack Kerouac broke with Ginsberg and criticized the 60s protest movements as an excuse to be \"spiteful\"

There were stylistic differences between beatniks and hippies – somber colors, dark shades, and goatees gave way to colorful psychedelic clothing and long hair. The beats were known for \"playing it cool\" (keeping a low profile) but the hippies became known for \"being cool\" (displaying their individuality).

Beyond style, there were changes in substance: the Beats tended to be essentially apolitical, but the hippies became actively engaged with the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.

Rock and pop music

The Beats had a pervasive influence on rock and roll and popular music, including the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison: the Beatles spelled their name with an \"a\" partly as a Beat Generation reference, and Lennon was a fan of Jack Kerouac. Ginsberg later met and became friends with members of the Beatles. Paul McCartney played guitar on Ginsberg's album Ballad of the Skeletons. Ginsberg was close friends with Bob Dylan and toured with him on the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. Dylan cites Ginsberg and Kerouac as major influences.

The Beat Generation is a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired. Central elements of \"Beat\" culture included experimentation with drugs and alternative forms of sexuality, an interest in Eastern religion, a rejection of materialism, and the idealizing of exuberant, unexpurgated means of expression and being. Even still the Generation is in motion.