Modern English and American literature

His other work, Some Came Running (1957), a long panoramic novel about a soldier, who came home from the war, is set in a Midwestern town at the time between World War II and the Korean War. It's also the story of love, the theme which Jones was unable to handle. The love affair in Some Came Running between the writer Dave and the teacher Gwen borders on the ludicrous. A college professor of English, Gwen has developed a naive thesis about the relation of frustration in love and artistic creativity. When Dave, one of the writers about whom she has been theorizing, returns to his small midwestern hometown, Gwen immediately falls in love with him. Dave, who hates the town, has returned for a visit only to embarrass his brother. But after one meeting with Gwen, who has an undeserved reputation as a woman of the world, Dave decides to settle in the town until he succeeds in seducing her. After a visitor two, he is passionately in love with Gwen. The couple never do get together because the thirty-eight-year-old Ph.D. in literature would prefer to lose the man she loves rather than admit to him that she is still a virgin! The forty-year-old Dave, who has had plenty of experience with women, decides that Gwen will not sleep with him because she is a nymphomaniac! The interminable philosophical digressions on life and love that inflate the novel are equally sophomoric. James Jones fictional terrain is limited to that peculiar all-male world governed by strictly masculine interests, attitudes, and values. Into this world, no female can step without immediately altering its character. The female must remain on the periphery of male life - a powerful force in male consciousness, but solely as a provocative target for that intense sexual need that has nothing to do with procreation or marriage.

The Pistol (1959) is the story of an Army private who accidentally gets a pistol that comes to be his symbol of safety in war. The Thin Red Line (1962) is another war novel dealing with the life of a U. S. infantry company on Guadalcanal in 1942-1943 but its attitudes and theme belong to the 1960s. The title itself is a reflection of the main theme; it symbolizes the uncertainty of the borderline between sanity and insanity, between man and beast, life and death.

In battle, the company, made up of platoons which are made up of squads, is deployed by the battalion commander according to a pre-established plan of attack. The battalions in the regiment are deployed by the regimental commander. The regiments are deployed by the division commander; the divisions deployed by the army commander, and the armies deployed all over the globe by a staff in Washington, D.C. Within this hierarchy, which gets larger and larger as it moves up the chain and farther and farther from the battle lines, the fighting soldier is a grain of sand on a beach encircling the globe. When the men see wounded and dead for the first time they are shocked and horrified. During their first battle, they react intensely to the suffering and death of their comrades. But as the fighting continues, the dead bodies of their fellow-soldiers no longer really bother them, and they lose all compunction about killing enemy soldiers. The starving Japanese prisoners are treated inhumanly, but only because the combat situation has revealed to their captors the insignificance of the individual human life except to the being who possesses it. Jones vision of human existence is brutal and unsentimental, and he conveys it with superb artistry. His story of battle is fast-paced, tightly structured, painfully realistic. James Jones's fictional terrain is limited, but within that limited area he has presented a frightening twentieth-century view of individual man's insignificance in society and in the universe. Just Call. His novel Just Call is the reflection of life of the lost generation. The four central characters Strange, Landers, Winch and Prell are recovering in the hospital from physical and psychological damage the war inflicted on them. The burden of their hard experience tells upon their fate. Prell dies in the quarrel, Winch finishes his life by suicide in the psychiatric department of the hospital, Landers leaves the hospital and is run over by the car ten steps away from the hospital. Strange, after recovering, goes back to war in Europe. But the prospect of future life horrifies him. He comes to the railings on the deck of the ship, intentionally leans over, and falls into the cold pit of ocean blackness. His other novels are Go to the Widow-Maker (1967), The Marry Month of May (1971), A Touch of Danger (1973), and Whistle (1978). Jones published an acclaimed short-story collection, The Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories (1968), a nonfictional history of World War II from the viewpoint of the soldier, World War II (1975), and a book of essays, Viet Journal (1975). Jones also published short fiction and articles throughout his adult life.

Flannery O'Connor

1925-1964

Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1925 and was raised and spent her short life almost entirely in nearby Milledgeville, where her family had lived since before the Civil War. Although she limited herself to a rural, southern literary terrain and the body of her work was small, her place in twentieth-century American literature is secure.

She wrote steadily from 1948 until her death in 1964. For fourteen of those sixteen years she was plagued by lupus, a painful, wasting disease that she had inherited from her father and that kept her ever more confined and immobile. “I have never been anywhere but sick”, she wrote. “In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don't have it miss one of God's great mercies.”

She was educated at the Georgia State College for Women from which she graduated in 1945. She then went off to the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. After receiving her M.F.A. there in 1947, O'Connor returned to Milledgeville to live with her widowed mother. Her first novel, Wise Blood, published in 1952 when she was 27, centers on a fanatical preacher of the “Church of God without Christ”, who insists that “the blind don't see, the lame don't walk, and what's dead stays that way”, but who nevertheless is consumed by a passion to imitate His sufferings. She followed that novel with a short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), a second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), which concerns a backwoods prophet and his atheist nephew locked in struggle for the prophet's grandson. Another collection of stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge, was published posthumously in 1965. The Complete Stories (1971) won her a posthumous National Book Award.

Always disciplined as a writer, O'Connor forced herself to sit at her desk without conscious distraction of any sort at the same time every day for two hours, even if no inspiration came. “Sometimes I work for months and have to throw everything away”, she commented, “but I don't think any of that time was wasted. Something goes on that makes it easier when it does come well”. While her central concern in her fiction was the abstract idea of good and evil, she felt compelled to confine herself to the concrete. “The peculiar problem of the short-story writer”, she noted, “is how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible. He has only a short space to do it in and he can't do it by statement. He has to do it by showing, not by saying, and by showing the concrete - so that his problem is how to make the concrete work double time for him.”

From the first, she was recognized as a satirist of astonishing originality and vigor, whose targets were smugness, optimism, and self-righteousness. However, the essential element of Flannery O'Connor's life and work was that she was born a Roman Catholic and that she remained one without the slightest wavering of faith throughout her thirty-nine years. A thunder-and-lightning Christian belief pervades every story and novel she ever wrote. Her attraction to the grotesque and the violent puts off many critics and readers. They fail to appreciate that the violent motifs in her fiction grow from her passionate, Christian vision of our secular times. What she wanted to tell us, in a voice that could not be ignored, was that in our rationality we had lost the one essential - a spiritual center for our lives.

The title story of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, for example, concerns a family of six, all of whom are killed by an escaped convict, the Misfit. When the grandmother pleads with the Misfit to pray to Jesus for help, he replies: “I don't need any help. I'm doing all right by myself.” O'Connor seems to be saying that we have become so accustomed to the lack of God in our life.

Unfortunately, throughout most of her adult life, O'Connor suffered from lupus, a rare crippling auto-immune disease that had killed her father and eventually took her life. Because of her disease she set her apart from other people. O'Connor developed a deep sensitivity to misfits and outsiders. Not surprisingly, many of her most memorable characters are social outcasts or people who are in some way mentally or physically disabled. There is an underlying sense of sympathy concerning their pain and suffering.

Flannery O'Connor's work reflects her intense commitment to her personal beliefs. In her exaggerated tragic and at times shockingly violent tales, she forces us to confront such human faults as hypocrisy, insensitivity, self-centeredness, and prejudice.

Despite her short life and modest output, O'Connor is probably the most admired American woman writer of the postwar years. A collection of essays and miscellaneous prose Mastery and Manners (1961), and her selected letters, The Habit of Being (1979), reveal an engaging social side of her personality that is not always apparent in her fiction.

John Updike

1932-2009

Gifted with what seems a total recall of what it is like to grow up in the American middle class, Updike also displays a skill with language that can evoke our responses to even the most ordinary and familiar events. In short, his talent is for taking our common daily experience and endowing it with both substance and importance. He is acknowledged as a distinguished stylist.

John Updike was born on March 18, 1932 and grew up in the small town of Shillington in rural Pennsylvania. In his boyhood memoir, The Dogwood Tree, Updike portrays his youthful ambition as artistic: “... riding a thin pencil line out of Shillington, out of time altogether, into an infinity of unseen and even unborn hearts.” He describes returning to Shillington as a mature, successful writer and confronting a picture of himself as this ambitious boy. He senses disappointment: “Like some phantom conjured by this child from a glue bottle, I have executed his commands; acquired pencils, paper, and an office. Now I wait apprehensively for his next command, or at least a nod of appreciation, and he smiles through me as if I am already transparent with failure.”

After graduating from Harvard in 1954 with a BA degree, Updike studied drawing in England for a year at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, and on his return to the United States went to work for The New Yorker, a weekly magazine which has published many of his short stories. After two years there, he made the courageous decision to support his young family entirely by writing. He left New York for Massachusetts, and he had since produced impressive novels, stories, poems, and critical essays.

Following the publication of his first collection of poetry, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tamed Animals (1958), John Updike published several other collections of poetry, many novels and short stories, numerous essays and book reviews.

From the first, Updike's stories had a freshness and honesty that brought them regularly into The New Yorker's pages. They have since been collected under such titles as The Same Door (1959), Pigeon Feathers (1962), The Music School (1966) and Museums and Women (1972).

His novels have brought Updike further acclaim. The first novel Poorhouse Fair was published in 1959. Updike's The Poorhouse Fair is a narrow-gauged story, quietly yet effectively done. The story concerns a county poorhouse, its inmates, its prefect, and visitors to the annual Fair. The building housing is a decayed Victorian mansion. In the cupola, three or four stories high, Conner, the rationalistic, ambitious, idealistic homosexual prefect has his office. He sees himself as a scientifically minded director of his elderly, sickly, and indigent charges. Because he envisions future and better positions with the federal government, he wants to be successful as prefect. Therefore he attempts to institutionalize the lives of the inmates. For example, he puts name tags on chairs, claiming this gives each individual his or her chair. The inmates know better - it gives each of them a tag or number; they resent his busy work.

The entire action takes place on the day of the Fair. During the afternoon there is rain. Conner joins the inmates, wanting to show them his charity and chumminess. They resist him, and as the rain continues their resentment, like the humidity, increases. Finally the rain stops. Outside, as Conner is bent over, one of the inmates, Gregg, slightly intoxicated, throws a stone at him. The others also pelt him. Trying not to display wrath or lose his dignity, Conner walks off.

Updike's elderly indigents have few comforts, and mostly don't even want those. They want to be themselves, unorganized, experiencing the days or years left to them. Being poor, they have few illusions about their eminence or significance in the social order. The visitors to the Fair seek power, sexual encounters, and money. These three - power, sex, money - compose their dream of the world and their roles in it.

Among the most successful have been the three tales in the Rabbit series: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), and Rabbit Is Rich (1981), for which Updike was awarded a second National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. The sexual frankness of Updike's second novel brought the author to public attention. The author exposes his old anti-hero to the radicalism and sexual freedom of the youth movement of the 1960s. He takes his inspiration from the American Protestant small-town eastern middle class', treating themes on what he calls “the despair of the daily”. These novels chronicle the life of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, who lives, as his creator might have, an outwardly conventional life in a small Pennsylvania town. In revealing Rabbit's yearnings and disappointments, the uncertain course of his heart, and the dismaying fluctuations of his relationships with family and friends, Updike gives us a remarkably accurate portrait of the 1960's and I970's in the United States, the Americans, reacting to changing attitudes about national, social, and moral behavior. As always with an Updike novel, readers enjoy the feel of life - the sights, smells, and sounds that bring life into focus.

Like in all the Rabbit series John Updike's characters in Rabbit, Run can hardly be said to be participants in a dialectic. Mostly they feel. Structurally, and stylistically, Rabbit, Run is skillfully handled. The action is in the present tense - Rabbit feels, Rabbit sees, Rabbit touches...

Like the protagonist in Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, whom he resembles, Rabbit runs. Coming home from work he stops to play basketball in an alley. Characteristically, he is not concerned with the reactions of the kids to his intruding himself. He likes to show off his skills. He finds his wife Janice, swollen in pregnancy, sitting behind a locked door, watching the Mousketeers on T.V. and drinking an Old Fashioned. She has many anxieties, and he no longer finds her pretty. She asks for a cigarette. He says he has given them up. She asks whether he thinks he's a saint. A quarrel develops. He goes out, to pick up their son who is at his grandparents, Rabbit's own parents. Disgust and frustration have been building in him. From outside his parents' house he sees the boy, his parents, and his sister. Not seeming to have come to a decision, Rabbit takes off down the street. He finds his car, bought from his father-in-law, for $1000, a real bargain, because old man Springer didn't want the embarrassment of a son-in-law driving around in a `36 Buick. Rabbit drives off, out of town, from highway to highway, experiencing the twilight, mountains, fear over being pursued, exhilaration, eating a juicy hamburger, then hours later he parks in front of the apartment of Mr.Tothers, who had been his basketball coach. In the morning he catches Tothers coming out. Tothers, half-homosexual, defeated, and full of sententiousness, lets him sleep in his warm, unmade bed. That evening they go out with two tarts, and Rabbit goes home with one, Ruth, who needs $15 to pay the rent. On it goes, with Rabbit running. At the end, after he has unintentionally contributed to his son's death - Janice, in an alcoholic stupor, has allowed the child to drown - Rabbit is still experiencing, still feeling. “His hands lift of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before his heels, hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing higher and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs.” The novel catches many little ironies - Rabbit's notion that he is praising his coach when he is praising himself, or the Minister's wanting a glass of water while consoling Mrs.Springer, and many others. Human motives and actions show a welter of inconsistencies. For example, Ruth, the prostitute, is quite capable of loyalty and devotion, and in her own way, maintains her self-respect.

Other widely read Updike's novels are The Centaur (1963), partly an evocation of the author's father, a high school teacher, and partly a retelling in modern terms of the myth of Chiron, the tutor of Achilles, for which he earned the National Book Award; Of the Farm (1965), Couples (1968), a novel about wife swapping in a suburb of Boston; A Month of Sundays (1975), The Coup (1978), Roger's Version (1987). The Witches of Eastwick (1984) was made into a motion picture.

In 1990 John Updike published another bestselling novel about the life of a contemporary American “everyman”, Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom - Rabbit at Rest, for which he received his second Pulitzer Prize. It solidified his reputation as one of the most astute observers of the American middle class.

Besides his prose and poetry, Updike's essays rank with some of the most perceptive criticism of our day. Several of his critical essays have been collected in a volume entitled Hugging the Shore (1983) which won the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.

In accepting the American Book Award in 1982, Updike said to young writers: “Have faith. May you surround yourselves with parents, editors, mates, and children as supportive as mine have been. But the essential support and encouragement of course come from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it.”

In his short stories and novels John Updike vividly captures the essence of life in contemporary America. Through his depiction of ordinary situations and events, he explores many important issues of our time and offers insight into the underlying significance of everyday life. John Updike had a great influence on the generation of writers who were born after him. He was one of the finest short-story writers at work in the twentieth century, with a tender, delicately descriptive style and sharp eye for the seemingly insignificant moments in which character is revealed and fate determined.

Anne Tyler

b. 1941

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota and spent her childhood and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Then she moved with her family to Baltimore, Maryland. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. Inspired by the work of Eudora Welty, Anne Tyler devotes much of her fiction to exposing the latent, unusual characteristics of outwardly ordinary people. Her novels reveal sensitive truths about the contemporary family. Many of Tyler's novels center on a woman character, but that woman is of most interest because of her role within a family unit. Few of Tyler's women determine their own destiny, free from the responsibilities of child rearing or family participation. She published her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes in 1962. Since then she has published several more novels. Her next novels grew in dimension and impact. They were A Slipping-Down Life (1970), The Clock Winder (1972), Celestial Navigation (1974), Searching for Caleb (1976), and Earthly Possessions (1977). Tyler gained widespread critical praise with her novels Morgan's Passing (1980), Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), Saint Maybe (1991), Ladder of Years (1995), A Patchwork Planet (1998), and Back When We Were Grownups (2001). Her eleventh novel, Breathing Lessons (1988) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for fiction. She is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She is also the author of a vast number of short stories and book reviews.

Anne Tyler displays ability to create well-developed, realistic characters and evoke an emotional response through an unsentimental portrayal of the characters' tragic lives.

The Accidental Tourist. Macon and Sarah got married when they were very young. First it was interesting to learn the art of living together. But the reader discovers that they are different. Sarah is haphazard, mercurial and unconcerned while Macon is steady and methodical. Sarah thinks crowds are exciting while Macon is homesick and house-proud. House comfort is for him a kind of panacea. Macon Leary is a travel writer who hates both travel and strangeness and anything out of the ordinary. He writes series of guidebooks “The Accidental Tourist” for people forced to travel on business to pretend they never left home. He hated to travel himself but he loved the writing. For some time they learned to ignore the differences, staying two different people, and not always even friends. They had different approaches to the upbringing of their son Ethan. When the boy was murdered at the camp they blame each other because they let him go to the camp. They become even more detached from each other and finally divorce is inevitable. Grounded by loneliness, comfort, and a somewhat odd domestic life, unwillingness of Edward - Ethan's dog - to compromise makes him turn for help to Muriel - a surprising new adventure, arriving in the form of a fuzzy-haired dog obedience trainer who promises to turn his life around and thrusts him headlong into a remarkable engagement with life. She is a persistent and strong person whom fate has slept pretty hard but who didn't give up. Muriel does everything to pull Macon out of his capsule. He again learned to believe people, to love children and enjoy life. But he is afraid of his feelings and attachment to Muriel and her son Alexander. He is older, and they also are different: Muriel is fond of traveling, Macon hates it; she is energetic, vivacious, and unpredictable while Macon remains steady.

This is a beautiful love story about how one brave woman brings joy and purpose to the life of a man who has stumbled through life and finds himself sinking. Muriel is the character of a generation. She loves Macon with all her heart and she turns the accidental tourist into a happy traveler.

Michael Crichton

1942-2008

Michael Crichton is the father of techno-thriller, the author of such novels as The Andromeda Strain (1969), The Great Train Robbery (1975), Jurassic Park (1990), Rising Sun (1992), Disclosure (1993), The Lost World (1995), Airframe (1996), Timeline (1999).

Several of these novels display an intimate knowledge of the science involved as a tool to building intrigue and suspense. Primatology, international economics, Nordic history, neurobiology, biophysics and genetics are artfully explained through Crichton's knowledge and research of each subject. These bestselling novels have been translated into over 20 languages, worldwide.

Michael Crichton was born on October 23, 1942 in Chicago. His father, a journalist, moved the family to Roslyn, New York, a suburb of New York City, when Michael was 6. The oldest of four children, he was also the first to be published. The New York Times published a travel article from him when he was 14. Since Crichton's first taste of public writing was so rewarding, it helped him decide that writing was what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

Michael was a star basketball player in Roslyn High School from which he graduated in 1960. Crichton then decided to go to Harvard University and become a writer. But Harvard proved to be very disheartening for the young writer. His writing style was severely criticized and his grades hovered around a C.

At the age of eighteen he decided that it was Harvard, and not he, that was in error. Convinced of this he hesitatingly retyped an essay of George Orwell (1903-1950) and submitted it as his own. The professor did not catch his plagiarism, and gave Orwell a B. Crichton was convinced that the Harvard English Department was too hard for him. George Orwell, his real name was Eric Arthur Blair was educated in England and won a scholarship to Eton, where Aldous Huxley was won of his teachers. Orwell was a brilliant scholar and after quitting his service with the Indian Imperial Police in 1928, which he joined in Burma, he decided to make his living as a writer. For the next few years he lived in Paris and London, publishing articles and working as a tutor, teacher, dishwasher, and clerk in a bookstore. Out of his varied experiences came Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), for which he first used his pen name George Orwell, and his early novels, A Clergyman's Daughier (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). During the war years Orwell wrote many articles for newspapers as well as critical essays and books about England, among them The Lion and the Unicorn (1941).

After his experiment with Orwell, Michael Crichton decided to study anthropology. After graduating from Harvard, Crichton, now twenty-three, was a visiting lecturer in anthropology at Cambridge University, in England. Crichton also won a Henry Russell Shaw Fellowship and got to travel in Europe and North Africa for a year. Upon his return to the States, Crichton began training as a doctor. He eventually graduated with his MD from Harvard Medical School in 1969, but never became a licensed practitioner of medicine.

Crichton paid his way through medical school by writing thrillers under different names. A book written during his medical days under the name of Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need, had many lightly disguised references to people at Harvard, and they were not all complimentary. So, Crichton was in trouble when the book won the Edgar Award for the Best Mystery of the Year. He claims that grades at Harvard were given according to people's informal opinion of the student. Students, who wrote, especially those who wrote about the medical profession, were asking for trouble.

During Crichton's final year at medical school The Andromeda Strain was published. It was a bestseller and Crichton sold it to Hollywood. Crichton then gained a celebrity status around the hospital that he did not particularly want. Although, it may have helped him get the hospital directors cooperation in researching his first non-fiction publication, Five Patients: The Hospital Explained. For that book Crichton was named the 1970 Medical Writer of the Year by The Association of American Medical Writers.

He served for one year (1969-70) as a postdoctoral fellow at the Jonas Salk Institute for Biological Science in La Jolla, California, before taking up writing full time. Later, Crichton said of his decision: “To quit medicine to become a writer struck most people like quitting the Supreme Court to become a bail bondsman.”

Crichton is also the Creator and Executive Producer of the television series “ER”, which he actually created right after his medical days. The popular television series “ER” is almost a direct replay of his days in the emergency room. In 1995, ER won eight Emmys and Crichton himself received an award from the Producers Guild of America in the category of outstanding multi-episodic series. Later that year, he also was honored with the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for “ER”.

He is a computer expert who wrote one of the first books about information technology (Electronic Life, 1983) and a collector of modern art and an accomplished traveler.

Crichton has also had many experiences in the “psychic” and “spiritual” realms and has also done such “mystic” things as seeing auras, spoon bending, and an exorcism. He now lives in New York. He is also on his fourth marriage, this time to Anne-Marie Martin (since 1987), and has a daughter named Taylor.

Jurrasic Park. Reports that a lizard-like reptile is attacking infants and infirm people in coastal towns on the island of Costa Rica which are attributed by the natives to the “hubia”, or “raptor”, are ignored by the authorities. That is, until an American doctor working in Costa Rica treats two patients who have both been attacked by the “hubia”. Their test results, which indicate that they have been poisoned by mysterious venom, are passed down to Dr. Alan Grant, a renowned paleontologist who is working on a dinosaur dig in Montana with his associate Ellie Sattler.

Grant has just uncovered another fossilized velociraptor skeleton in the Montana Badlands, and is interrupted by a phone call from John Hammond, his wealthy sponsor for the dig. Hammond insists that Grant and his assistant, Dr. Ellie Sattler, fly down to Hammond's private island Isla Nublar near Costa Rica for a consultation.

They are to be joined by Gennaro, a lawyer for InGen; Ian Malcolm, a mathematician specializing in the field of chaos theory; Tim and Alexis (Lex), Hammond's young grandchildren.

John Hammond invested a lot of money into the creation of his park. “The concept of the most advanced amusement park in the world, combining the latest electronic and biological technologies” he said. “I'm not talking about rides. Everybody has rides. Coney Island has rides. And these days everybody has animatronic environments. The haunted house, the pirate den, the Wild West and the earthquake - everyone has those things. So we set out to make biological attractions. Living attractions. Attractions so astonishing they would capture the imagination of the entire world.” “And we can never forget the ultimate object of the project in Costa Rica - to make money”, Hammond said, staring out the window of the jet. “Lots and lots of money.”

When the specialists came to the island they were proposed to make tour about it. A line of Toyota Land Cruisers came out of an underground garage beneath the visitors' center. They were electric cars guided by a cable in the roadway. “Eventually we hope to drive among the animals - just as they do in African game parks”, said Ed Regis, “but, for now, sit back and enjoy the self-guided tour.” They saw many animals brought to life due to astonishing technique for recovering and cloning dinosaur DNA. Every zoo expert knew that certain animals were especially likely to get free of their cages. These animals were kept in the open as big as enclosures, separated from the roads by moats and electric fence: concrete double-layer chain-link fence twelve feet high, with spirals of wire at the top.

A tour of Hammond's crowning achievement, the as-yet-unopened theme park, Jurassic Park, proves deadly as the security systems go off-line. It was destroyed by the computer specialist Dennis Nedry who was paid for it. The lights had gone out all over the island. He was to steal embryos from the laboratory. “He entered the fertilization room. The lab was deserted; as he had anticipated, all the staff was at dinner.... The embryos were arranged by species: Stegosaurus, Apatosaurus, Hadrosaurus, Tyrannosaurus. Each embryo in a thin glass container, wrapped in silver foil, stoppered with polylene. Nedry quickly took two of each, slipping them into the shaving cream can....Nedry glanced at his watch. From here, into the park, and three minutes straight to the east dock. Three minutes from there back to the control room. Piece of cake.” But he loses his way in darkness and is killed by a dinosaur. The untamed dinosaurs overtake the island, killing anyone and anything in their path. The unwelcome human visitors are separated and each group must find a way back to safety - and stop the rampaging dinosaurs. John Hammond and all others who invented the park are killed by dinosaurs. When the situation comes out of control completely and there is a danger that the animals will reach the continent and threaten the whole planet, the government of Costa Rica gives an order to level the island and kill the animals. “The plain fact was that an ecological disaster had been narrowly averted. The government of Costa Rica felt it had been misled and deceived by John Hammond and his plans for the island.”

The Lost World. Six years after the death of John Hammond and the mysterious destruction of his Jurassic Park island of Isla Nubia, mathematician Ian Malcolm discovers a second island off Costa Rica, where Hammond created his genetically bred dinosaurs. He travels there with a scientific research team including paleobiologist Richard Levine, Sarah Harding, and two kids, Kelly and Arby, both eleven years old.

Once on the island, they find themselves on the run for their lives from some of the killer dinosaurs with whom Ian has already crossed paths, along with some new killers. The group not only has to contend with the dinosaurs, but with murderous rival scientist Lewis Dodgson and his cronies, who are out to steal the dinosaur eggs and bring them back to the mainland, as well.

“At the end of my research for Lost World, I was persuaded that a cometary impact alone, no matter how massive, was insufficient to cause dinosaur extinction. Nor would it explain the time course of that extinction, which took place over many thousands of years. However, a comet impact might well have disturbed the entire biosphere for a period of years, perhaps interfering with food supply and thus producing weakened animals susceptible to any epidemic disease that came along. Many extinctions are thought to be the result of a combination of stresses of this sort”, said Michael Crichton.

Comprehension Questions and Tasks

1. Say a few words about John Steinbeck's life. Comment on the main theme of most of his novels. Where did John Steinbeck's themes come from? Give an understanding of his literary goals and prove her realistic method of description.

2. Name the literary works written by James Albert Michener. Comment on the subject of Recessional. How does Michener reveal the features of his characters in the novel?

3. What facts from Irwin Shaw's biography do you know? Why did he take up writing realizing that it was his inborn vocation? What genres does the author use in his works? Describe the central figures of the novel Rich Man, Poor Man.

4. Tell the story of James Jones's life. What themes of life does Jones touch upon in his novels? Comment on the peculiarities of the author's style in From here to Eternity. How does Jones combine serious and ridiculous material in his works?

5. Give a brief account of Flannery O'Connor's life. Name the main themes the writer concerns in her works. What general features do the main characters of her novels have? Did Flannery O'Connor's disease influence her writings?

6. Say a few words about John Updike's life and work. Name the novels written by John Updike. In what way does the author characterize the heroes of his novels? Comment on John Updike's style.

7. Tell the story of Anne Tyler's life. What are the main types of people exist for the author? How does she reveal the features of her characters? Name the main themes the writer concerns in her works.

8. Why is Michal Crichton called the father of techno-thriller? Name the novels written by Michal Crichton. What problems does he deal with in the writings? What are the most attractive characters in Jurrasic Park? Enlarge upon the subject. Comment on the plot of The Lost World.

UNIT7. THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN DRAMA

By the end of the 19th century Henry James, Howells, and even Mark Twain had all tried their hand at playwriting. Behind them was a long struggle of American dramatists. In the 18th century there had been principally Thomas Godfrey (1736-1763), a Philadelphia poet who in 1759 had written the blank verse tragedy The Prince of Parthia, and Royall Tyler (1757-1826), a Boston lawyer, remembered for The Contrast, the first comedy by a native American, produced professionally in New York in 1787.

William Dunlap (1766-1839) helped to turn the century on a native note with his historical melodrama Andre (1798). Robert Montgomery Bird (1806-1854) tailored his historical tragedy The Gladiator (1831) and his domestic tragedy The Broker of Bogota (1834). But the receipts went to the actors, not to the playwrights. Bird, discouraged, turned to writing novels like Nick of the Woods (1837).

There was great theatrical activity in nineteenth-century America, a time when there were no movies, radio, or television. Every town of any size had its theater or “opera house” in which touring companies performed. Given the hunger for entertainment, one may wonder why no significant American drama was written in the century that produced, among others, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, and Twain.

After World War I, expressionism made itself felt, to be followed after World War II by the influence of Sartre, Brecht, and Samuel Beckett.

Despite the development of a native drama, the important impacts on modern American drama came from abroad. European drama, which was to influence modern American drama profoundly, “matured” in the last third of the nineteenth century with the achievements of three playwrights: the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), the Swede August Strindberg (1849-1912), and the Russian Anton Chekhov (1860-1904). Ibsen deliberately tackled subjects such as guilt, sexuality, and mental illness - subjects which had never before been so realistically and disturbingly portrayed on stage. Strindberg brought to his characterizations an unprecedented level of psychological complexity. And Chekhov, along with Ibsen and Strindberg, shifted the subject matter of drama from wildly theatrical displays of external action to inner action and emotions and the concerns of everyday life. Chekhov once remarked, “People don't go to the North Pole and fall off icebergs. They go to the office and quarrel with their wives and eat cabbage soup.”

These three great playwrights bequeathed to their American heirs plays about life as it is actually lived. They presented characters and situations more or less realistically, in what has been called the “slice of life” dramatic technique.

Realistic drama is based on the illusion that when we watch a play, we are looking at life through a “fourth wall” that has been removed so that we can see the action. Soon after the beginning of the twentieth century, realism became the dominant mode of American drama. As with all theatrical revolutions, the movement toward realism began apart from the commercial theatre. But soon the commercial theatre adopted realism too.

The vitalization of both the American theater and American drama came not from the Broadway stage but from the little theaters later spreading to smaller cities and college campuses. Croups like the Washington Square Players in New York City and the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod (later in New York) were celebrated trailblazers.

In Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953), American literature had its first great dramatist. O'Neill's beginnings were off-Broadway efforts, but they came as a consequence of his familiarity with the working theater (his father had been a famous actor) and his study in the “47 Workshop” at Harvard under George Pierce Baker.

The period between the two world wars saw an activity in American drama that made O'Neill part of a movement. The Adding Machine (1923) by Elmer Rice did much to bring the expressionist movement to the American stage. His Street Scene (1929) and Judgment Day (1934) were more topical but not less socially conscious. What Price Glory? (1924) by Maxwell Anderson (1888-1959) was a successful war play whose lusty language startled audiences. Sidney Howard (1891-1939), who like O'Neill, was a student at Harvard's “47 Workshop”, began a series of popular plays with They Knew What They Wanted (1924), which broadened the limits of dramatic subject matter by the realism of its story of unorthodox love. Philip Barry (1896-1949), still another “47 Workshop” student, began as a writer of urbane comedies (Paris Bound, 1927) but gained greater dramatic strength through more serious plays - Hotel Universe (1930), The Animal Kingdom (1932), and Here Comes the Clowns (1938). The finest proletarian plays of the socially conscious 1930's were by Clifford Odets (1906-1963), whose Waiting for Lefty (1935) had a vigor that his later plays could not recapture. The former shows the awakening of class consciousness of workers and intellectuals under the pressure of want and exploitation, the growth of the militant spirit of the people rising to fight their oppressors. The play opens with a prologue showing a trade union meeting discussing the question of whether to declare a strike or not. His Awake and Sing! (1935), a nostalgic family drama, became another popular success, followed by Golden Boy, the story of an Italian immigrant youth who ruins his musical talent when he is seduced by the lure of money to become a boxer and injures his hands.

Eugene O'Neill is generally considered the first important figure in American drama. It is significant that several decades after the 1920 production of his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, he is still regarded as the most important playwright America has produced.

American drama before O'Neill consisted mostly of shows and entertainments. These wildly theatrical spectacles often featured such delights as chariot races and burning cities, staged by means of special effects that dazzled audiences. Melodramas and farces were also written for famous actors, much as television shows today are created to display the personalities and talents of popular performers. In fact, O'Neill's own father, James, spent the better part of his life touring in a spectacular melodrama based on Alexander Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo.

O'Neill's early one-act plays of the sea, such as Bound Fast for Cardiff (1916), In the Zone (1917), The Long Voyage Home (1917), and The Moon of the Caribbees (1919) described hard life of the sailors whose life he knew well being a sailor himself. He became widely known in the twenties when these were followed by full-length psychological plays like Gold (1921), The Emperor Jones (1921) and Anna Christie (1922), which established his American preeminence. Most of his characters are dissatisfied with life and express their protest against the injustice of the society. In his play The Hairy Ape (1922) he creates the image of a stoker on a liner who is scorned by the rich passengers. Strange Interlude (1928) is a nine-act Freudian tragedy of frustrated desire; Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), a trilogy, is an American version of a Greek tragedy of fate. O'Neill masterly used the techniques of the antique theatre. In The Great God Brown (1926), for example, he uses masks, in other plays he restores the chorus of the Greek drama. O'Neill adopted the language of poetic symbolism. He received the Pulitzer Prize for his tragedy Beyond the Horizon.

O'Neill was always an experimenter. In The Iceman Cometh (1946) he abandons physical action on the stage for a life in words; in Long Day's Journey into Night (produced posthumously in 1956), one of his finest as well as most personal plays, his characters simply talk in a family living room. It's a powerful, extended autobiography in dramatic form focusing on his own family and their physical and psychological deterioration, as witnessed in the course of one night.

Well aware of Sigmund Freud and his new theories about complex self, O'Neill tried especially hard to reveal more than realism could normally reveal. In The Great God Brown, O'Neill experimented with using masks to differentiate between two sides of a personality. In Days Without End (1934), he had two actors play one character to achieve the same end. And in Strange Interlude characters spoke in aside to the audience, revealing thoughts and feelings that could not be expressed in dialogue. O'Neill dominated American drama in his generation; he can be said to have “put it on the map”. His plays were widely produced abroad, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936.

Next to O'Neill's, the most distinguished American plays of the 1930's and 1940's were by Thornton Wilder, also a novelist of excellence. His Our Town (1938), which has become a classic, is an idyll of the meaning of existence. The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) is an optimistic version of the theory of cyclical history.

During the post-World War II period, four dramatists in particular left their mark: William Inge (1913-1973), Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), Arthur Miller (1915-2005), and Edward Albee (b.1928).

Inge's Picnic (1953), Bus Stop (1955), and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957) show greater technical strength than originality of theme. At his best Inge is a master of dialogue, as he presents modern man's fear and trembling and self-deceits. So too is Edward Albee, whose savage dialogues of academic intellectuals in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) frighteningly balance the serenity of Wilder's Our Town as a rendering of life in America, Albee's The Zoo Story (1959) and The American Dream (1961) were earlier studies of mankind frustrated by the imposition of an ideal. The ambitious Tiny Alice (1964) was a frustration for both characters and audience.

Of the four mentioned above, Williams and Miller stand out. The post -World War II years brought Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams to prominence in American drama: Although other playwrights, such as William Inge, have contributed striking and effective plays, Miller and Williams remain the dominant figures of the second half of the century. They represent the two principal movements in modern American drama: realism and realism combined with an attempt at something more imaginative. From the beginning, American playwrights have tried to break away from realism or to blend it with more poetic expression, as in Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949), Williams's The Glass Menagerie (1944), and Thornton Wilder's Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth.

Lillian Hellman became one of America's leading playwrights and an outstanding master of the social and psychological play in the modern American theatre.

Lillian Hellman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. At the age of five her parents moved to New York. However, she was to return to New Orleans periodically. She preferred life in that Southern city.

She studied at New York University for three years, but left the university before taking a degree. Later she studied for a short time at Columbia University.

At the age of nineteen she went to work for a publishing firm. She tried her hand at book reviews and short stories and for a while wrote theatrical reviews. She also spent some time as a play-reader in Hollywood.

In 1932 she returned to New York where she worked as a play-reader for Herman Shumlin, who was later to produce and direct her first five plays. In 1934 she launched on her career as a playwright with The Children's Hour. Over the next three decades came a. succession of plays, among them The Little Foxes (1939), Watch on the Rhine (1941), Another Part of the Forest (1947), The Autumn Garden (1951) and Toys in the Attic (I960). Lillian Hellman was the author of some adaptations: My Mother, My Father and Me (1936), Montserrat (1950) and The Lark (1956). She also wrote an operette Candide (1957), and The Big Knockover: stories and short novels by Dashie Hammett (1966).

She wrote an autobiography called Scoundrel Time.

Lillian Hellman has twice been awarded the New York Drama Critic's Circle Prize for the best play of the year - Watch on the Rhine and Toys in the Attic. In 1972 an edition of all her works for the theatre was published as The Collected Plays.

Hellman's memoirs An Unfinished Woman (1969) was the winner of the National Book Award. She also received the Gold Medal for Drama from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and other awards, and also honorary degrees from various colleges and universities, in recent years Hellman has been teaching at the University of California and at Hunter College.

Lillian Hellman has devoted all her life to literature and the theatre. She reviewed books and plays for publishing houses (1927-1930), worked as a critic for the newspaper Herald Tribune (1925-1928) and wrote some scripts for Hollywood. She was the author of a film script Northern Star, which is about a Soviet kolkhoz during the Great Patriotic War.

She enriched the traditions of the American progressive theatre and the world theatre - the traditions of Ibsen, Chekhov, Gorky.