English CSET: Authors and their Works
ID lit period, abt, and major works.
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- Virginia Woolf
- Pd: modernist (British). Abt: stream of consciousness and interior monologue. Member of Bloomsbury Group. Works: A Room of One's Own, Mrs. Dalloway
- Mark Twain
- Pd: 1835-1910. Abt: humorist, narrator, and social observer, unsurpassed in American literature. Works: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a masterpiece of humor, characterization, and realism, has been called the first (and sometimes the best) modern American novel. narrative device of a raft carrying Huck and a runaway slave down the Mississippi enabled Twain to achieve a realistic portrait of American life in the 19th cent. Through his use of authentic vernacular speech he revolutionized the language of American fiction and exerted a great influence on many subsequent American writers.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Pd: Romanticism (dark romanticism). Anti-transcendentalist. Abt: New England. Reflected the Calvinist obsession with original sin and the struggle between good and evil; grew up as a Puritan in Salem, MA. Works: The Scarlett Letter (Hester Prinn), "The Minister's Black Veil" (veil symbolized sin in everyone)
- Henry James
- Pd: Realism. 1843-1916. Abt: B. in America, became a British subject. A master of the psychological novel, James was an innovator in technique and one of the most distinctive prose stylists in English. rimarily known for a series of major novels in which he portrayed the encounter of America with Europe. His plots centered on personal relationships, the proper exercise of power in such relationships, and other moral questions. His method of writing from the point of view of a character within a tale allowed him to explore the phenomena of consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting. Wrote numerous novels around the theme of the conflict between American innocence and European sophistication/corruption, with an emphasis on the psychological motivations of the characters. Works: The Wings of the Dove, Portrait of a Lady, "The Beast in the Jungle" (ss), "The Turn of the Screw" (play). e rejected allegory and mystery and vague impressionism as unscientific. He condemned the tradition that "a serious story of manners shall close with the factitious happiness of a fairy tale." He was a scientist; his second paper in the Atlantic is a defence of George Eliot, scientist. To both of them the first requisite of fiction was the truth, the truth told directly, simply, concretely.
- Walt Whitman
- Pd: transition between Transcendentalism and Realism, incorporating both views in his works. Abt: Among most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. Controversial in its time, particularly poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sexuality. Transcendentalist writer from Brooklyn who wrote a famous collection of poems); "Poet Laureate of Democracy"; was an example of a writer who was caught in the enthusiasm of an expanding America that turned its back on the Old World. Works: Leaves of Grass (Song of Myself; I Sing the Body Electric; When Lilacs Last on the Dooryard Bloom'd (elegy to assassinated Lincoln);
- William Faulkner
- Pd: (1897-1962) Abt: frequent use of "stream of consciousness," wrote often highly emotional, subtle, cerebral, complex, and sometimes Gothic or grotesque stories of a wide variety of characters—ranging from former slaves or descendents of slaves, to poor white, agrarian, or working-class Southerners, to Southern aristocrat. Most work set in Yoknapatawpha, MI (imaginary county). Works: The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932)
- Bret Harte
- Pd: 1806-1932. Abt: Am short stories and humorous verse, incorporating Western color. Works: "The Luck of Roaring Camp," the first of his picturesque stories of Western local color, and with such later stories as "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" and "Brown of Calaveras."
- Joseph Conrad
- Pd: Hints of romanticism but forerunner to modernism. Abt: Polish-born, anti-heroic characters. Works: Heart of Darkness, a symbolic novella, actually a story within a story, or frame narrative. It follows Marlow as he recounts, from dusk through to late night, his adventure into the Congo to a group of men aboard a ship anchored in the Thames Estuary. Black = good, White = bad, theme of darkness w/in all mankind.
- Lois Lowry
- Pd: b 1937, children's author. Works: The Giver, Number the Stars. Number the Stars" tells the story of a young Danish girl and her Jewish bestfriend growing up in Nazi controlled Denmark. "The Giver" is about a boy, Jonas, coming to grips with the fact that the "Utopia" he lives in is far from perfect, The Giver, Number the Stars
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- Pd: 1343-1400, British. Abt: "Father of English Literature," credited by some scholars as the first author to demonstrate the artistic legitimacy of the vernacular English language, rather than French or Latin. Works: The Canterbury Tales (The tales, some of which are originals and others not, are contained inside a frame tale and told by a collection of pilgrims on a pilgrimage from Southwark to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. Written in Middle English, naturalism in the narrative.
- John Steinbeck
- Pd: Naturalism (more scientific, gritty than Realism). Abt: noted for his novels about agricultural workers (1902-1968). Works: Of Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath, Tortilla Flats
- JD Salinger
- Pd: b. 1919, pub CITR in 1951. Abt: used interior monologue, letters, and extended telephone calls to display his gift for dialogue. Themes of innocence and adolescence. Works: Catcher in the Rye (main character, Holden Caulfield, was unable to find any area of society—school, family, friends, city - in which he could feel secure or committed.
- Pearl S Buck
- Pd: 1892-1973. Abt: born America, moved to China age 3. Awarded Nobel Prize in Lit, "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces." With no irony, she has been described in China as a Chinese writer. Humanitarian. Works: The Good Earth, novel of family life in village China.
- Henry David Thoreau
- Transcendentalism Abt: 817-62, American author and naturalist, b. Concord, Mass. Supreme individualist who championed the human spirit against materialism and social conformity. His most famous book, Walden (1854), is an eloquent account of his experiment in near-solitary living in close harmony with nature; it is also an expression of his transcendentalist philosophy (see transcendentalism). Works: Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (he created both from his journals)
- TS Eliot
- Pd: Modernism. Abt: born American, became British citizen. Work: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (The poem's structure was heavily influenced by Eliot's extensive reading of Dante Alighieri (in the Italian). References to Shakespeare's Hamlet and other literary works are present in the poem: this technique of allusion and quotation was developed in subsequent poetry.)
- James Joyce
- Pd: (1882-1941) Abt: Stream of Consciousness. Irish writer. Works: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (semi-autobiographical), Ulysses, the most famous and disturbing of the stream-of-consciousness novels, an account of an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary man, and ironic parallel between his hero's aimless wanderings through the streets and pubs of Dublin and the adventures of Homer's hero Ulysses on the way home from Troy. Abandoning conventional grammar and blending foreign words, puns, bits of knowledge, and scraps of memory together in bewildering confusion, the language of Ulysses is intended to mirror modern life itself: a gigantic riddle waiting to be unraveled.
- Edgar Allan Poe
- Pd: Romantic. Abt: Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective-fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. believed that meaning in literature should be an undercurrent just beneath the surface. Works: "The Raven," "The Fall of the House of Usher," The Purloined Letter
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Pd: Modernism (1896-1940). Abt: literary spokesman of the "jazz age"—the decade of the 1920s. Part of the interest of his work derives from the fact that the mad, gin-drinking, morally and spiritually bankrupt men and women he wrote about led lives that closely resembled his own. Works: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned, The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night