Anderson to Steinbeck 课件.ppt

Anderson to Steinbeck Writings in 1920s-40s Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) On Nov. 28, 1912, Anderson “left business for literature,” simply walking out of his office as president of the Anderson Manufacturing Co. in Elyria, Ohio, not only giving up a dream of becoming rich in American business, but also abandoning his responsibilities as a middle-class citizen, including a wife and three small children. Life story born into a poor family in Camden, Ohio, on Sept. 13, 1876 his formative years in the town of Clyde, Ohio Worked in Chicago as a laborer in 1896-1898, then served in the Spanish American War Attended Wittenberg Academy in Springfield, Ohio, in 1900, then went to Chicago, where he soon gained some success as an advertising writer. Writing In 1916 first novel published Gained wide recognition with the publication in 1919 of Winesburg Ohio In the 1930s, began to write about labor conditions in the South died of peritonitis in Colon, Panama, on March 8, 1941. Death his epitaph in Marion’s Round Hill Cemetery proclaims, as he directed, that “Life, Not Death, Is the Great Adventure.” William Faulkner called him “the father of our generation” Thomas Wolfe: Sherwood Anderson was the only man in America who ever taught me something. Winesburg, Ohio Book of grotesques Life in death: Most of the figures share the similar history of a failed passion in life, of some kind or another. The pastoral: mock sentimentality toward the old, colloquial farmland that Winesburg represents as small town. themes Failure of absolute truth: Each of his figures grasped at least one truth as absolute and made it their mantra. The decision to base all of ones existence on an absolute truth transformed the figure into a grotesque and the truth into a lie. Rebellion against value dominating American culture Winesburg as a microcosm of the universal Characteristics Thematically: small town life Technically: a moment of intuition “I’ve come to see that the true history of life is the