Introduction to American Fiction资料.ppt

* Stephen Crane (1871-1900) His haunting Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, was published to great acclaim in 1895 Cranes Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) is one of the best, if not the earliest, naturalistic American novels. * Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) The 1925 work An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, like Londons Martin Eden, explores the dangers of the American dream. An American Tragedy is a reflection of the dissatisfaction, envy, and despair that afflicted many poor and working people in Americas competitive, success-driven society. * Jack London (1876-1916) A poor, self-taught worker from California, the naturalist Jack London was catapulted from poverty to fame by his first collection of stories, The Son of the Wolf (1900), set largely in the Klondike region of Alaska and the Canadian Yukon. Other of his best-sellers, including The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea-Wolf (1904) made him the highest paid writer in the United States of his time. * The autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909) depicts the inner stresses of the American dream as London experienced them during his meteoric rise from obscure poverty to wealth and fame. * 5. The lost generation * Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) Few writers have lived as colorfully as Ernest Hemingway, whose career could have come out of one his adventurous novels. The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short poetic novel about a poor, old fisherman who heroically catches a huge fish devoured by sharks, won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 * Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway became a spokesperson for his generation. * Hemingways fine ear for dialogue and exact description shows in his excellent short stories, such as The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. Critical opinion, in fact, generally holds his short stories equal or superior to his novels. His best novels include The Sun Also Rises, about the demoralized life of expatriates after World War I; A Farewell to Ar