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TOPIC 55, 4.JOHN STEINBECK.Of mice and MEn Nobel Prize & Pulitzer…
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4.JOHN STEINBECK.Of mice and MEn Nobel Prize & Pulitzer Price-The grapes of Wrath. Worried with imminigration and labour, social prob. Am suffered in the 30s specially in California, where he was born and places most of his fiction.
He portrayed the local scene, speech, character & legend in a rich primitive way and he is a genuine artist of folk comedy & humour. His chaaracters are driven by forces in hem and in society : fear, hunger, sex, the evils of capitalism & the disasters of nature.
He shows sympathy for people & the human condition.His writing are search for the elements in human nature which are common to all people, which he finds in the family, the group the nation, rather than in the individual.
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HCAL BACKGROUND
Picture: girls d.Charleston,gangster caarrying machine guns or Charles Chaplin playing comical tricks. Roaring times, good and wild times.
Richness bc of the debts of European countries after the war & Am income was higher than anywhere.Am.factories produced more goods every year.Automobile & electrical industry prospered.Many Am. well-off, Investments.Am motto live now pay tomorrow.
Republican party looked after the interest of the bussinessmen, thinking everyone could become richer this day.Yet lots of poor Am. had not sufficient money for clothing or food.Low wages.In the West, farners faced problems.Lots of production could not sell.
Cultural: L Generation, art deco in art.Jazz Age, time of dancing, dance contenst and Charleston.Role of women changed, exercised her franchise, dressed differently and confidently participated in the ec. life
18th Amendment to Constitutiton of 1919,banning the selling of alcohol. Brought bootlegging to a great scale, a world of gansgters & corruption.
Economic prosperity w.changed by the Great Depression in 1929.Bankrupt, stock market, poor bussinessmen all of a sudde. Social problems, racial & political radicalism, Ku-Klux-Klan, social fights in demand of work & high rates of immigration.Am dream proved to fail.Loss of spiritual values-sense of disorientation in lit.
1st novel THIS SIDE OF PARADISE greatly autob. Career aspirations & love dissap. of Amoy Blaine. Influenced by OSCAR WILDE & JOYCE'S Portrait of an artist,He present the events & plots through letters & stage dialogue, unconventional tech.
Thr. the 20s he wrote a huge amount of fiction, which was extremely popular bc it was modern and easy to read. Style:clear, lyrical, colourful, and witty.
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz is his best known short st. Great wealth causes an evil family to become crazy.At the end there's a big earthquake and the family diamond mine begins to collapse.
In the BEAUTY AND THE DAMNED F. shows the dark side of the Jazz Age through. the squandering of money, wasting talents & moral & finantial bankruptcy
Masterpiece- The Great Gatsby.The hero Jay, has a belief in the absolute power and natural goodness of money. Through the eye of the narrator, we see both the glamour and the moral ugliness of the 20s. Gatsby a man of poor origin becomes rich and sucessful through obscure bussiness & bootlegging. True romantic, dreaming of his childhood sweetchild, hoping she come to any of his parties and fall in love with him.
Symbolims + psychological realism. Description have a symb. glow, seem to be part of an unreal world.BFamous for its unusual and interesting use of colours. Shows an advanced technique, complex stucture & controlled narrator p. of view.
Critics symbolist tragedy.Am dream = Gatsby, his failure make him a tragic figure. The hero tries and fails to change the world of hard material objects and of mterialistic people into the ideal w. of his fantasy.
INTRODUCTION.
1st applied to Hemingway by G.Stein in Pairs.
Yound p.in the post-war had lost their ideals.Disillusioned by the large n. of casualties of the war, cynical, disdainful of the Victorian notions of morality & proprierty of their elders.Some young intellectual writers moved to France such as Hemmingway or Cummins in search of the bohemian lifestyle and rejecting the values of the Am materialism.Paris by then was full of youthful idealism.
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Born of rich parents in the Mid West & eduated at Princeton Un. 5 novels & dozens of short stories.Themes:Youth, despair, age chronicled excess of Am.'s Jazz Age product of the dry law(w.of gansgters, smugglers & bootleggers, easy pursue of wealth).Remained faithful to this corrupt soc. even when it disappeared...
BABYLON REVISITED one of his best late short stories. Describes theLost G. fter his moral and economical collaps. The hero & his wife lived wildly in Paris,now the party is over. It is a sad, memorable story.
Fitzgerald suffered serious mental & psyc. health problems at he time of the collapse of Am economy. His friend, wrter & critic Edmund Wilson published his last writ. & letters under the name of Crack Up.
TORTILLA FLAT gave him his 1st critical success, adventures of younf living in Montrey during the G.D.of MICE AND MEN novella ab. the shattered dreams of a pair of migrant labourers working the Calif. soil.
THE GRAPES OF WRATH describes the exper. of a single family of indiv., but tells the sory of a great national tragedy THE JOADS, a family of farmers, must leave Oklah. bc they cant pay a loan...and started a pilgrimage in search of what can be called a promised land.However, they experienced the hatred & violence of landowners.
Some critics argue that his characters are nearly stereotypes & lack characterisation. Also, her tackled with social problems in a simplistic and sentimentality way.Lack of sophistication. How, the literary interest lies in its description of the daily heroism of ordinary people, he was able to show the sould of his land and his time in rel, to social problems.