Different influential writers Flashcards
1
Q
George Orwell
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- eorge Orwell was educated as a scholarship student at prestigious boarding schools in England. Because of his background—he famously described his family as “lower-upper-middle class”—he never quite fit in, and felt oppressed and outraged by the dictatorial control that the schools he attended exercised over their students’ lives. After graduating from Eton, Orwell decided to forego college in order to work as a British Imperial Policeman in Burma. He hated his duties in Burma, where he was required to enforce the strict laws of a political regime he despised. His failing health, which troubled him throughout his life, caused him to return to England on convalescent leave. Once back in England, he quit the Imperial Police and dedicated himself to becoming a writer
- v left wing and hated right wing
- He later lived among destitute coal miners in northern England, an experience that caused him to give up on capitalism in favor of democratic socialism. In 1936, he traveled to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War, where he witnessed firsthand the nightmarish atrocities committed by fascist political regimes. The rise to power of dictators such as Adolf Hitler in Germany and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union inspired Orwell’s mounting hatred of totalitarianism and political authority. Orwell devoted his energy to writing novels that were politically charged, first with Animal Farm in 1945, then with 1984 in 1949.
2
Q
J.D Salinger
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- he son of a wealthy cheese importer, Salinger grew up in a fashionable neighborhood in Manhattan and spent his youth being shuttled between various prep schools
- Because Salinger used slang and profanity in his text and because he discussed adolescent sexuality in a complex and open way, many readers were offended, and The Catcher in the Rye provoked great controversy upon its release. Some critics argued that the book was not serious literature, citing its casual and informal tone as evidence. The book was—and continues to be—banned in some communities, and it consequently has been thrown into the center of debates about First Amendment rights, censorship, and obscenity in literature.
- Gradually became recluse himself
3
Q
Ralph Ellison
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- The grandson of slaves, Ralph Ellison was born in 1914 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and was raised largely in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His father was a construction worker, and his mother was a domestic servant who also volunteered for the local Socialist Party. As a young man, Ellison developed an abiding interest in jazz music; he befriended a group of musicians who played in a regional band called Walter Page’s Blue Devils, many of whom later played with Count Basie’s legendary big band in the late 1930s. Ellison himself studied the cornet and trumpet, and planned a career as a jazz musician. In 1933, he left Oklahoma to begin a study of music at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. The Institute, which is now called Tuskegee University, was founded in 1881 by Booker T. Washington, one of the foremost black educators in American history, and became one of the nation’s most important black colleges. It later served as the model for the black college attended by the narrator in Invisible Man.
- Despite—or possibly because of—the overwhelming success of Invisible Man, Ellison never published another novel in his lifetime.
4
Q
Vladimir Nabobokov
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- By 1955, Nabokov had already published a number of novels but had yet to create his masterpiece Lolita, which Nabokov began writing in 1949. It was originally rejected by no fewer than four American publishers, who found the story of a middle-aged professor’s lust for his preteen stepdaughter too inflammatory for publication. Undaunted, Nabokov persisted, and Lolita was eventually published in France in 1955 by the marginally reputable Olympia Press. Though it was condemned in some corners as scandalous trash, Lolita became an underground literary sensation in France.
- Postmodern writers are primarily interested in writing that evokes the fragmentary nature of experience and the complexity of language. Humbert Humbert, the protagonist of Lolita, narrates the novel from a highly subjective point of view, and he uses rich, sophisticated language to do so. Lolita contains a vast variety of linguistic devices, including puns, multilingual expressions, artistic allusions, word patterns, and references to other works. These devices followed from the then-popular idea that a novel was not a fixed work of literature, but rather a more fluid, organic creation that was interconnected with other media. Humbert’s elegant and sinuous prose, however, conceals a subversive intent. The beauty and intensity of the language allow readers to remain sympathetic to the pedophile protagonist and compel them to read further, despite the numerous distressing events within the novel.
5
Q
Harper Lee
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-Although Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960 she actually set her novel in the mid-1930s. This was a time when many white people, particularly in the southern states of America were racist towards black people. Slavery had been abolished in 1890 but that did little to change the way many white people felt about black people.
6
Q
Richard Yates
A
- Richard Yates was the child of an unhappy marriage.
- Yates was an alcoholic and a badly behaved drunk. After his divorce, he lived in awful squalor, spending his time drinking, sobering up, and writing. His lung troubles caused him to start every morning by vomiting, but he remained a four-pack-a-day smoker until a year before his death at sixty-six, despite once setting his apartment on fire. Yates wrote six other novels and two collections of short stories. Although his writing was always praised by other writers, he never became a true success during his lifetime and supported himself at various times by teaching writing (although he did not believe it could be taught), writing publicity materials for Remington Rand (a company similar to Knox Business Machines), and writing speeches for Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
