Edit] Inspiration

Dreiser based the book on a notorious criminal case. On July 11, 1906, resort owners found an overturned boat and the body of 20-year-old Grace Brown at Big Moose Lake in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York. Chester Gillette was put on trial and convicted of killing Brown, though he claimed that her death was an accident. Gillette was executed by electric chair on March 30, 1908.^[1] The murder trial drew international attention when Brown's love letters to Gillette were read in court. Dreiser saved newspaper clippings about the case for several years before writing his novel, during which he studied the case closely. He based Clyde Griffiths on Chester Gillette, deliberately giving him the same initials.

44. John Griffith "Jack" London (born John Griffith Chaney,^[1] January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916)^[2][3][4][5] was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone.^[6] He is best remembered as the author of Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life".^{[citation needed]} He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen", and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf.

London was a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers and wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics such as his dystopian novel, The Iron Heel and his non-fiction exposé, The People of the Abyss.

London was born near Third and Brannan Streets in San Francisco. The house burned down in the fire after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; the California Historical Society placed a plaque at the site in 1953. Though the family was working class, it was not as impoverished as London's later accounts claimed^{[citation needed]}. London was essentially self-educated^{[citation needed]}.

In 1885 London found and read Ouida's long Victorian novel Signa. He credited this as the seed of his literary success.^[11] In 1886 he went to the Oakland Public Library and found a sympathetic librarian, Ina Coolbrith, who encouraged his learning. (She later became California's first poet laureate and an important figure in the San Francisco literary community).

In 1889, London began working 12 to 18 hours a day at Hickmott's Cannery. Seeking a way out, he borrowed money from his black foster mother Virginia Prentiss, bought the sloop Razzle-Dazzle from an oyster pirate named French Frank, and became an oyster pirate. In his memoir, John Barleycorn, he claims to have stolen French Frank's mistress Mamie.^[12][13][14] After a few months, his sloop became damaged beyond repair. London became hired as a member of the California Fish Patrol.

In 1893, he signed on to the sealing schooner Sophie Sutherland, bound for the coast of Japan. When he returned, the country was in the grip of the panic of '93 and Oakland was swept by labor unrest. After grueling jobs in a jute mill and a street-railway power plant, he joined Kelly's Army and began his career as a tramp. In 1894, he spent 30 days for vagrancy in the Erie County Penitentiary at Buffalo. In The Road, he wrote:

Man-handling was merely one of the very minor unprintable horrors of the Erie County Pen. I say 'unprintable'; and in justice I must also say undescribable. They were unthinkable to me until I saw them, and I was no spring chicken in the ways of the world and the awful abysses of human degradation. It would take a deep plummet to reach bottom in the Erie County Pen, and I do but skim lightly and facetiously the surface of things as I there saw them.

After many experiences as a hobo and a sailor, he returned to Oakland and attended Oakland High School. He contributed a number of articles to the high school's magazine, The Aegis. His first published work was "Typhoon off the Coast of Japan", an account of his sailing experiences.

In Sailor on Horseback: The Biography of Jack London, Irving Stone has documented the personal and professional life of one of the United States’ greatest writers. The book begins with a brief history of London’s mother and father and then moves chronologically through London’s life. Organized into ten chapters, the book reads like a novel, recounting London’s risks as a fifteen-year-old “oyster pirate” who brawled in the waterfront saloons and fended off armed attacks of his sloop, the Razzle Dazzle, as well as his trip to the...

45. The "Lost Generation" is a term used to refer to the generation, actually a cohort, that came of age during World War I. The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises. In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to Gertrude Stein, who was then his mentor and patron.

In A Moveable Feast, which was published after Hemingway and Stein were both dead and after a literary feud that lasted much of their life, Hemingway reveals that the phrase was actually originated by the garage owner who serviced Stein's car. When a young mechanic failed to repair the car in a way satisfactory to Stein, the garage owner shouted at the boy : "You are all a "génération perdue."^[1] Stein, in telling Hemingway the story, added, "That is what you are. That's what you all are...all of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation."^[2] This generation included distinguished artists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, Waldo Peirce, Alan Seeger, and Erich Maria Remarque

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.^[1] Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender is the Night and his most famous, The Great Gatsby. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, was published posthumously. Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with despair and age.

Novels such as The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night were made into films, and in 1958 his life from 1937–1940 was dramatized in Beloved Infidel.

Full name Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald) American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, scriptwriter, dramatist, and poet.

The following entry presents criticism on Fitzgerald's short fiction from 1990 through 2003. See also criticism on Fitzgerald's short story “Babylon Revisited,” The Great Gatsby, and F. Scott Fitzgerald in Contemporary Literary Criticism.

Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the most influential novelists and short-story writers of the twentieth century. He is viewed as the spokesman for the Jazz Age, America's decade of prosperity, excess, and abandon, which began soon after the end of World War I and concluded with the 1929 stock market crash. As such, in his novels and stories, Fitzgerald examined an entire generation's search for the elusive American dream of wealth and happiness. Most of his stories were derived from his own experiences and portray the consequences of his generation's adherence to false values. The glamour and insouciance of many of Fitzgerald's writings reveal only one side of a writer whose second and final decade of work characterized a life marred by alcoholism and financial difficulties, troubled by personal tragedy, and frustrated by lack of inspiration.

46. As the title suggests, A Farewell to Arms is in many ways an antiwar novel, but it would not be fair to connect this novel with a literature of pacifism or social protest. In the novel’s value system, violence is not necessarily wrong—neither Henry nor Bonello feels any remorse for shooting the engineering sergeant, and the reader believes Henry when he tells Catherine that he will kill the police if they come to arrest him. Furthermore, the novel glorifies discipline, competence, and masculinity and portrays war as a setting in which those qualities are constantly on display.

Nevertheless, A Farewell to Arms opposes the thoughtless violence, massive destruction, and sheer senselessness of war. It also criticizes the psychological damage that war inflicts on individuals and populations and its brutal upheaval of the lives of survivors. In the face of such devastation, the novel posits, victory and defeat are meaningless terms. Unlike many novels that glorify courage in battle, A Farewell to Arms attempts to give a realistic portrayal of a terrifying and, at the time of World War I, new kind of war. Never before had men fought with machines and artillery capable of bringing about such annihilation. Still, the aim of the novel is not to protest war or encourage peace; it is simply to depict the hostility and violence of a universe in which such a conflict is possible.

Throughout history, life has consisted of this: the epic battle -- the battle of good and evil, from which all other conflicts grow. This underlying factor has been placed within literature since the beginning of writing. From then to now, novels have been based on the outcome of good and evil. In the modern novel’s by Ernest Hemmingway, the battle becomes the back drop of every story. His novel A Farewell to Arms, is a great example of how this battle is played out. In the story the characters fight to cope with the reality that is the battle between good and evil, right and wrong, hope and tragedy. Good, evil, right, and wrong go hand in hand, but hope and tragedy are the consequences of these happenings. Every novel follows the same ideal of conflict, some more than others. In the novel A Farewell to Arms, the battle of good and evil permeates the characters, as well as the setting of the story. The main character, Fredrick Henry, finds himself battling the forces of good and evil beginning to end. Fredrick fights along side the Italians in the first world war.

48. John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. (February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and East of Eden (1952) and the novella Of Mice and Men (1937). He was an author of twenty-seven books, including sixteen novels, six non-fiction books and five collections of short stories; Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 779