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Henry James When he was growing up in New York, Henry was given a great deal of independence, so much in fact, that he felt isolated from other people. As a quiet child among exuberant brothers and cousins, Henry was more often an observer than a participant in their activities. When, as a young man, a back injury prevented his fighting in the Civil War, he felt even more excluded from the events of his time. While the adult Henry James developed many close friendships, he retained his attitude of observer, and devoted much of his life to solitary work on his writing.
Henry's family lived for a time in Boston, where he became acquainted with New England authors and friends of his father, began his friendship with William Dean Howells, and attended Harvard Law School. After 1866, James lived in Europe much of the time and in 1875 decided to make it his permanent home. He lived in Paris for a year, where he met Turgenev, Flaubert, and Zola. The next year he settled in London and lived there and in the English countryside for the rest of his life. In 1915, a year before his death, to show his sup- port of England in World War Ⅰ, James became a British citizen.
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Theodore Dreiser Born in small-town Indiana, Dreiser rebelled as a youth against the poverty and narrowness of the life around him. One of his high school teachers recognized his talent and paid his tuition at Indiana University. But Dreiser left college after a year because he felt it "did not concern ordinary life at all". He had various jobs in Chicago: washing dishes, shoveling coal, working in a factory, and collecting bills -- experiences which he later used in his writing. He taught himself to be a newspaper reporter and supported himself as a journalist and editor for many years while he was struggling to become recognized as a novelist.
In what was almost a convention of naturalism, Dreiser's first novel was about a prostitute, but unlike Stephen Crane's Maggie, Dreiser's heroine prospers and flourishes. The end furnished a worse shock to Dreiser's readers than his choice of subject: Carrie is not only a rather improbable success on the musical comedy stage but one of her prosperous lovers, whom she has found useful in advancing her career, has suffered a reversal of fortune as startling as Carrie's. Readers in 1900 found the "punishment" of the lover peculiarly distasteful to their notions of justice; according to the prevailing double standard of sexual morality, the woman was supposed to be punished, not the man.
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Carl Sandburg The polar opposite of R0binson, Carl Sandburg (1878--1967) played the part of the simple workman, down to the cloth cap which he often wore. Nevertheless, he was an artist with words. His language was more colloquial and his rhythms looser than Robinson's; yet he too knew tile value of form and poetic technique. As critic Louis Untermeyer puts it, there are "two Sandburgs: the muscular, heavy-fisted, hard-hitting son of the streets, and his almost unrecognizable twin, the shadow-painter, the haunter of mists, the lover of implications and overtones."
Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois, of Swedish immigrant parents. He did odd jobs, served in the Spanish American War, and worked his way through nearly four years of college afterward. From 1910 to 1912 he acted as secretary for the first Socialist mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Not long afterward he attracted public notice with his increasingly powerful poetry, especially the poem, Chicago, and he gradually became able to give most of his time to his writing. He did some literary journalism; he wrote ballads and books for children, and tie continued with his serious poetry. And all the while, his interest in Abraham Lincoln as well as models for his characters. His father was a prosperous merchant; his mother had been a schoolteacher.
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Sinclair Leis Sinclair Lewis (1885--1951) was born in the town of Sauk Center, Minnesota. He was graduated from Yale after several unhappy years there and then became a journalist and editor. His early writing was commercial and undistinguished. But when he published Main Street in 1920, he proved that he had become a very effective novelist. Main Street immediately captured America's attention, as did Scott Fitzgerald's very different This Side of Paradise, published in the same year.
In his first important novel, Lewis established the methods and subject matter that would bring him world fame and eventually a Nobel Prize in Literature -- the first American author to be so honored. That is, he described daily life in America with such a sharp eye and ear that readers could easily recognize it as part of their own experience. But he did it with such an emphasis on the comic and ridiculous that he made his readers laugh, in spite of themselves, at some of the silliness of their country. Like the noted satirists of the past, he wanted to do more than amuse. He wanted to reform the America he pictured by skilfully arousing his readers' sympathies for the non-conformist in a conformist society. The heroine of Main Street is a rebellious young woman who struggles hard to bring culture to her dead little town, and we feel a wry regret when in the end she decides to conform.
·died at the age of 89? 71. ______.
·graduated from Yale after some unhappy years there? 72. ______.
·described daily life in America and made his readers laugh at some silliness of their country? 73. ______.
·made Europe his permanent home? 74. ______.
·wrote his first novel about a prostitute? 75. ______.
·was usually too shy to take part in his brothers' activities when he was young? 76. ______.
·died in England? 77. ______.
·was a journalist and editor before being recognized as a novelist? 78. ______.
·was a Swedish-born American? 79. ______.
·wrote children's books? 80. ______.