新视野第二版 第四册 Unit 1讲稿.docx

Unit 1 Section AThe Tail of FameI .Background InformationTennessee Williams (1911-1983) was an American writer whose plays are mainly about people with emotional problems and are set in the Southern States. As a playwright Williams began his career while studying at the University of Missouri and Washington University, St. Louis. The first critical triumph came in 1945 with The Glass Menagerie. The Glass Menagerie ran on Broadway for over a year and received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Williams’ next major play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), won the Pulitzer Prize, and established him as a major American dramatist. Williams also received the Pulitzer Prize for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), about the moral decay of a southern family, and for The Night of the Iguana (1961). Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was one of the most famous American novelists, short story writers and essayists, whose deceptively simple prose style has influenced a wide range of writers. Hemingway was awarded the 1954 Novel Prize for Literature. Hemingway’s first books, Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) and In Our Time (1924), were published in Paris. The Torrents of Spring appeared in 1926 and Hemingway’s first serious novel, The Sun Also Rises, in the same year. The novel deals with a group of expatriates in France and Spain, members of the disillusioned post-World War I Lost Generation. Hemingway wrote and rewrote the novel in various parts of Spain and France between 1924 and 1926. It became his first great success as a novelist. Although the novel’s language is simple, Hemingway used understatement and omission, which make the text multilayered and rich in allusions. After the publication of Men Without Women (1927), Hemingway returned to the United States, settling in Key West, Florida. In Florida he wrote A Farewell to Arms, which was published in 1929. In 1937 Hemingway observed the Spanish Civil war firsthand. As many writers did, he supported the case of the Loyalists.