《现代大学英语精读3 lesson2》.ppt

Text A Discovery of a Father Sherwood Anderson(1876-1941) Sherwood Anderson was approaching middle age when,giving in to long-deferred ambitions, he left a successful business career to become a writer. Living in Chicago, New Orleans, and Paris, meeting literary people, he worked furiously to make up for his late start, producing novels, short stories, essays, and an autobiography. His short fiction provided a model for younger writers, whose careers he encouraged by literary advice and by practical help in getting published as well (he had stimulated Hemingway in his quest for stylistic simplicity, Faulkner in his search for the proper subject matter). Winesburg, Ohio, which appeared in 1919 near the beginning of his literary career, remains a major work of experimental fiction and was in its time a bold treatment of small-town life in the American Midwest. Anderson was born in a southern Ohio family headed by a father whose training and skill as a harness maker were becoming useless in the new world of the automobile. A heavy drinker and gifted storyteller, Anderson’s father kept his family on the move in search of work; the stamina and tenderness of his mother supplied whatever coherence and security there was in this nomadic life. Not until Anderson was sixteen, did they settle down in the town of Clyde, Ohio, which became the model for Winesburg. Anderson’s schooling was irregular and he never finished high school. He held a variety of jobs and finally had his own successful business. But in secret he wrote fiction and found increasingly that the need to write conflicted with his career. In 1912 he abandoned his business and his marriage. In Chicago, he met the writers and artists whose activities were creating the Chicago Renaissance, including the novelist Theodore Dreiser, and the poets Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg. His first books reveal three of his preoccupations: the individual quest of self and social betterment, the small-town environment and