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John Updike’s Major Works
- A & P (1961)
- The Centaur (1963)
- Rabbit Is Rich (1982)
- The Witches if Eastwick (1984)
- Rabbit at Rest (1990)
- In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996)
- Frank O’Connor
FrankO’Connor was the pen name that Michael )’Donovan )1903-1966) adopted when he feared that to be known as a writer would hurt his career in civil service. He was born in Cork, Ireland’s second city. Desperate poverty forced his parents to take him out of school after he had completed only fourth grade. During the troubles of 1918-21 that led to the new Irish Free State, he served as a director of Dublin’s influential Abbey Theatre. America offered O’Connor-O’Donovan early hospitality: in 1931 The Atlantic printed his first story. In the 1950s he lived in America, teaching at Northwestern and Harvard. For a time he regularly appeared ib CBS television on Sunday mornings, just sitting and telling stories. Also a fine literary critic, he wrote The Mirror in the Roadway (1956), a study of the novel, and The Lonely Voice (1963), a study of the short story. In Kings, Lords & Commons (1959), he proved himself a master translator of Gaelic poetry. O’Connor toiled hard over his stories, trying to polish each to the perfection of a good lyric. “First Confession” appeared in print in three versions because he kept rewriting it. The story is based upon his boyhood memories.
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Frank O’Connor’s Major Works:
1. First Confession (1952)
- The Mirror in the Roadway (1956)
- The Lonely Voice (1963)
- Kings, Lords & commons (1959)
- D.H. Lawrence
David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) was born in Nottinghamshire, England, child of a coalminer and a schoolteacher who hated her husband’s toil and vowed that her son should escape it. He took up fiction writing, attaining early success. During World War I, Lawrence and his wife were unjustly suspected of treason (he because of his pacifism, she because of her aristocratic German birth). After the armistice they left England, and , seeking a climate healthier for Lawrence, who suffered from tuberculosis, wandered in Italy, France, Australia, Mexico and impassioned spokesman for our unconscious, instinctive natures, which we moderns (he argues) have neglected in favor of our overweening intellects. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), he strove to restore explicit sexuality to English fiction. The book, which today seems tame and repetitious, was long banned in Britain and the United States. Deeper Lawrence novels include Sons and Lovers (1913), a veiled account of his breaking away his fiercely possessive mother; The Rainbow (1915); Women in Love (1921); and The Plumed Serpent (1926), about a revival of pagan religion in Mexico. Besides fiction, Lawrence left a rich legacy of poetry, essays, criticism (Studies in Classic American Literature, 1923, is especially shrewd and funny), and travel writing. Lawrence exerted deep influence on others, both by the message in his work and by his personal magnetism.
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D. H. Lawrence’s Major Works
1. The Rocking-Horse Winner (1933)
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)
- Sons and Lovers (1913)
- The Rainbow (1915)
- Women in Love (1921)
- The Plumed Serpent (1926)
A4 Choose a famous writer of your choice and do a card report (on A4 size paper)
Title of story: A & P
Date of its original publication: 1961
Author’s Name: John Updike (1932-1961)
Central Character: Sammy is the protagonist. He undergoes an initiation into
maturity. He places himself in Jeopardy by defying his
boss in the process of defying a young woman. He
empathizes with the girls, seeing them not as mindless
and mere sex objects but as human beings who are
being bullied. He is willing to quit because he wants to
make a gesture on behalf of the pretty girls, a sincere one.
He is endowed with a sensitivity, that is noticeably absent
In Lengel.
Other Characters: 1. Lengel is the manager of the supermarket as well as
Sammy’s boss.
2. Queenie is the leader of the three girls. She knows
what she is doing.
Setting: In a supermarket
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Narrator: First Person
Events in Summary:
The story revolves around the protagonist, Sammy, who is the main character in the story, rises to a kind of heroism. Despite the conventional story, he comes to feel sympathy for the girls as human beings. He undergoes an initiation into maturity. He places himself in jeopardy by defying his boss in the process of defending against their needless humiliation, and in so doing he asserts his criticism of supermarket society, a deadly world of “sheep” and “houseslaves” whom dynamic couldn’t budge from their dull routines.
He comes from a family of proletarian beer drinkers and thinks martinis are garnished with mint. His language is sometimes pedestrian. He is capable of fresh and accurate observations. He is endowed with a sensitivity that is noticeably absent in Lengel.
The story reaches its climax when Sammy quits from his job. He just doesn’t border his future although he knows that he will definitely faces problems with her future.
Tone: Sympathy of a young man towards the girls./ Machismo and sexist behaviour of a man towards a woman. It is humourous (humour)
Style: The story was written through Sammy on the life as workers in a supermarket society.
Irony: Sammy, assumed that he could make a good protest against their needless humiliation, but in the end his life will be more difficult and challenging---- irony of pride.
Theme: Sympathy / Individual versus society
Symbols:
Evaluation: The story has a very strong message of the generation gaps in a Society. It also reveals a contrast between Sammy and Lengel, who being older and conservative, but he lacks sensitivity towards the girls. He is the sort of people who cares about himself and does not bother about other people’s problem. 10
POETRY
- What is poetry?
According to the Dictionary Literary Terms written by Dr Rosli Talif, poetry is an imaginative response to an experience, emotion, or incident in rhythmic language and through figerativeexpression. The word “poem” or “poetry” originates from the Greek word poiema, meaning “something made or fashioned [in word].” The term is comprehensive and applies to a wide variety of spoken and written forms, styles, patterns, and subjects; therefore, it is not possible to give a precise definition of it here. However, one of the attributes of poetry is that it is rich in sentiment and emotion and shows little interest in fact or logic. Poetry does not perceive or express things in the language of science, where accuracy and precision are of paramount importance, but in a language that is SENSUOUS, emotionally charged, and enriched by IMAGINATION. Here are some definitions of poetry given by some of the best poetic minds. Alighieri Dante (1265-1321) defined poetry as “things that are true expressed in words that are beautiful.” In the words of Wordsworth (1770-1850), poetry is “ the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” According to Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), it is “a revelation in words by means of the words,” and in the words of Robert Frost (1874-1963), poetry is “a way pf remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.”
- Provide a brief biography of 5 major poets and their major works.
- Robert Frost
Robert Frost (1874-1963), though born in San Francisco, came to be popularly known as a spokesman of rural New England. In periods of farming, teaching school, and raising chickens and writing for poultry journals, Frost struggled until his late thirties to
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support his family and to publish his poems, with little success. Moving to English to writeand farm in1912-15,he had his first book published in London: A Boy’s Will (1913). Returning to American, he settled in New Hampshire, later teaching for many years (in a casual way) at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Audiences responded warmly to the poet’s public readings; he was awarded four Pulitzer Prizes. In his later years the white-haired Frost became a sort of elder statesman and poet laureate of the John F Kennedy administration: invited to read a poem at President Kennedy’s inauguration, and dispatched to Russia as a cultural emissary. Frost is sometimes admired for putting colloquial Yankee speech into poetry---and he did, but more essentially he mastered the art of laying conversational American speech along a metrical line. In a three-volume biography (1966-76), Lawrance Thompson made Frost out to be an overweening egotist who tormented his family, and we are only now coming around again to seeing him as more than that.
Robert Frost’s Major Works:
- The Telephone
- The Silken Tent
- Desert Places
- Fire and Ice
- The Secret Sits
- Acquainted with the night
- The Road not Taken
- Never Again Would Birds’ song be the Same.
- Birches
- Mending Wall
- Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
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- Design
- Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
- The Sound of Sense
- “Out, Out –“
- Nothing Gold Can Stay
(B) William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was born in England’s Lake District , whose landscapes and people were to inform many of his poems. As a young man he visited France, sympathized with the Revolution, and met a young Frenchwoman who bore him a child. The Reign of Terror prevented him from returning to France, and he and Annette Vallon never married. With his sister Dorothy (1771-1855, he settled in Dorsetshire. Later they moved to Grasmere, in the Lake District, where Wordsworth lived the rest of his life. In 1798 his friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge resulted in their joint publication of Lyrical Ballads, a book credited with introducing Romanticism to English poetry. (wordsworth contributed “Tintern Abbey” and other poems.) The second edition of 1800. Wordsworth supplied a preface calling for a poetry written “in the real language of men.” Time brought him a small official job, a marriage, a swing from left to right in his political sentiments, and appointment as poet laureate. Although he kept on writing, readers have generally preferred his earlier poems. The Prelude, a long poem-memoir completed in 1805, did not appear until after the poet’s death. One of the most original of writers, Wordsworth---especially for his poems of nature and simple rustics---occupiesa popular place in English poetry, much like that of Robert Frost in America.
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William Wordsworth’s Major Works:
- A Slumber did my spirit seal
- The World is too much with us
- I Wondered Lonely as a Cloud
- My Heart Leaps up when I behold
- Mutability
- Composed Upon Westminster Bridge
© Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was born in Reading, Pennsylvania; his father was a successful lawyer; his mother, a former schoolteacher. As a special student at Harvard Advocate, but he did not want a liberal arts degree. Instead, he became a lawyer in New York City, and up 1916 joined the legal staff of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. In 1936 he was elected a vice-president. Stevens, who would write poems in his head while walking to work and then dictate them to his secretary, was a leading expert on surety claims. Once asked how he was able to combine poetry and insurance, he replied that the two occupations had an element in common: “calculated risk.” As a young man in New York, Stevens made lasting friendships with poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams, but he did not seek literary society. Though his poems are full of references to Europe and remote places, his only travels were annual vacation trips to Key West. He printed his early poems in Poetry magazine, but did not publish a book until Harmonium appeared in 1923, when he was forty-four. Living quietly in Hartford, Connecticut, Stevens sought to discover order in a chaotic world with his subtle and exotic imagination. His critical essays, collected in The Necessary Angel (1951), and his Letters (1966), edited by his daughter Holly Stevens, reveal a penetrating, philosophic mind. His Collected Poems (1954). Published on his seventy-fifth birthday, garnered major prizes and belated recognition for Stevens as a major American poet.
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Wallace Stevens’s Major Works
- Disillusionment of Ten O’clock
- Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird
- Anecdote of the jar
- Peter Quince at the Clavier
- The Emperor of ice cream
- William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), poet and playwright, an Irishman of English ancestry, was born in Dublin, the son of painter John Butler Yeats. For a time he studied art himself and was irregularly schooled in Dublin and in London. Early in life Yeats sought to transform Irish folklore and legend into mellifluous poems. He overcame shyness to take an active part in cataclysmic events: he became involved in the movement for an Irish nation (partly drawn into it by his unrequited love for Maud Gonne, a crusading nationalist) and in founding the Irish National Theatre, which in 1904 moved to the renowned Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Dublin audiences were difficult: in 1899 they jeered Yeats’s first play, The Countess Cathleen, for portraying a woman who, defying the church, sells her soul to the devil to buy bread for starving peasants. Eventually Yeats retired from the fray, to write plays given in drawing rooms, like Purgatory. After the establishment of the Irish Free State, Yeats served as a senator (1922-28). His lifelong interest in the occult culminated in his writing of A Vision (1937), a view of History as governed by the phases of the moon; Yeats believed the book inspired by spirit masters who dictated communications to his wife, George Hyde-Lees. Had Yeats stopped writing in 1900, he would be remembered as an outstanding minor Victorian. Instead, he went on to become one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.
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William Butler Yeats’s Major Works
- The Lake Isle of Innisfree
- Who Goes With Fergus?
- Leda and the Swan
- The Second Coming
- Sailing to Byzantium
- Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop
- Long-Legged Fly
- The Magi
- When You Are Old
- Robert Burns
Robert Burns (1759-1796), the preeminent poet of Scotland, was born in a two-room farm cottage in Alloway, a hamlet on the River Doon, the son of a farmer who worked himself to death. For most of his days Burns too struggled to farm poor soil. Though his schooling lasted only three years, he eagerly read Shakespeare and Pope as a boy and let poetry pour from his own pen. Only in 1786, when he felt he needed money to emigrate to Jamaica, did he publish his Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, depicting Scottish rural life with warm humor, tender compassion, and rugged exuberance. The book scored an immediate hit and Burns remained in Scotland for the rest of his days. After Edinburgh’s stylish society, which had lionized him for a time, let him drop, he returned to his plough, married Jean Armour (who earlier had borne him two sets of twins), and continued to farm until 1791, when he retired to the earlier life of a tax official. But worn from toil, hardship, and poverty, Burns died at thirty-seven. Among his legacies are songs, such as “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton,” “Comin’ Through the Rye,” and a song stiff heard in this country each New Year’s eve, “Auld Lang
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Syne.”Like Hugh MacDiarmid, Burns wrote poetry in both standard English and Scots dialect--- in the latter whenever, as in “The jolly Beggars” and “Address to the Unco Guid’” he expressed defiantly unconventional views.
Robert Burn’s Major Works:
- Oh, my love is like a red, red rose
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B3 A Concise Explication of a short poem
An Unfolding of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”
Stanley Burnshaw writes in Robert Frost Himself (New York: Braziller, 1986), that Frost often said “The Road Not Taken” was about himself combined with Edward Thomas, a Welsh poet and good friend. Knowing this, Burnshaw confessed, didn’t contribute much to his understanding of the poem. Still, the story is tantalizing. In Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph (New York: Holt, 1970) biographer Lawrance Thompson tells about the excruciations through which this dour Welshman (Thomas) went each time he was required to make a choice,” This amused Frost, who once said to Thomas “No matter which Road you take, you’ll always sigh, and wish you’d taken another.
Starting with the title, “The Road Not Taken”, any reader of this poem will probably think that someone regrets for not making the other choice.
Indeed the two roads in this poem are aptly symbolic of the choices we have to make almost every day of our lives.
One interpretation is that throughout life, we are faced with many difficult decisions. We should strive to be unique when making these decisions. Making decisions in “The Road Not Taken” Frost emphasizes that every person is a traveler choosing the roads to follow on the map of their continuous journey-life. There is never a straight path that leads a person one sole direction in which to head. Regardless of the original message that Robert Frost had intended to convey, his poem , “The Road Not Taken” , has left its readers with many different interpretations. It is one’s past, present and the attitude with which he looks upon in the woods that represent something or with which he looks into the future that will benefit him.
It is possible to travel down every path. In an attempt to make a decision, the traveler “looks down one as far as I could”. The road that will be chosen leads to the unknown, as does every choice in life. No matter how much he strains his eyes, eventually the road surpasses his vision.
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Frost, from the Twentieth Century, is well known not only for his elegant style, but for his use of great symbolism throughout his works. In “The Road Not Taken”, he depicted his theme and meaning through a four stanza poem which consisted of a set rhyme scheme (A,B,A,A,B).
The first stanza draws a picture centering on the fact that someone can only make one choice out of the two choices. After making the decision, he should plan for his future. He should plan step by step ahead which will lead to his good prospect in future.
As normal people, after we had made one choice, we tend to regret for not taking the other choice. In second stanza, the writer mentions that perhaps the other choice is much better than the choice we had made earlier.
In the third stanza, the writer wondered whether he should go back to the very first time and have a chance to make another choice.
No matter which choice you choose, you’ll always regret/sigh, and wish you have chosen another.
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C. Drama
- Define a play.
According to the module “ A Survey of Prose Forms and Poetry in English of UPM, a play is a work of storytelling in which actors represent the characters. It is a work of art made of words. The playwright devoted thought, care, and skill to the selection and arrangement of language.
Most plays are written not to be read in books but to be performed. Reading a play, however, may afford advantages. It is better to know some masterpieces by reading them than never know them at all.
- Provide a brief biography of 5 major playwrights and their major works.
(A) William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (1564-1616), the supreme writer of English, was born, baptized, and buried in the market town of Stratford-on-Avon, eighty miles from London. Son of a glove maker and merchant who was high bailiff (or mayor) of the town, he probably attended grammar school and learned to read Lain authors in the original. At eighteen he married Anne Hathaway, twenty-six, by whom he had three children, including twins. By 1592 he had become well known and envied as an actor and playwright in London. From 1594 until he retired, he belonged to the same theatrical company, the Lord Chamber-lains’s Men (later renamed the King’s Men in honor of their patron, James I), for whom he wrote thirty-six plays---some of them, such as Hamlet and King Lear, profound moved into the Globe in 1599, and in 1608 bought the fashionable Blackfriars as reworkings of old plays. As an actor, Shakespeare is believed to have played
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supporting roles, such as Hamlet’s father’s ghost. The company prospered, well; Shakespeare owned an interest in both theaters. When plagues shut down the theaters from 1592 to 1594, Shakespeare turned to story poems; his great Sonnets (published only in 1609) probably also date from the 1590s. Plays were regarded as entertainments of little literary merit, like comic books today, and Shakespeare did not bother to supervise their publication. After The Tempest (1611), the last play entirely from his had, he retired to Stratford, where since 1597 he had owned the second largest house in town. Most critics agree that when he wrote Othello, about 11604, Shakespeare was at the height of his powers.
William Shakespeare’s Major Works
- The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice
- The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
- The Tempest
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona
- The Merry Wives of Windsor
- Measure for measure
- The Comedy of Errors
- Much ado About Nothing
- Love’s Labour’s Lost
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- The Merchant of Venice
- As You Like It
- The Taming of the Shrew
- All’s Well that ends well
- Twelfth Night
- Romeo and Juliet
- Julius Caesar
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- Sophocles
Sophocles (496?-406 B.C.), tragic Dramatist, priest, for a time one of ten Athenian generals, was among three great ancient Greek writers of tragedy. (The other two were his contemporaries: Aeschylus, he senior, and Euripides, his junior. Sophocles won his first victory in the Athian spring drama competition in 468 B.C., when a tragedy he had written defeated a tragedy by Aeschylus. He went on to win many prizes, writing more than 120 plays, of which only seven have survived in their entirety--- Ajax, Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes, The Trachinian Women, and Oedipus atr Colonus. (Of the lost plays, about a thousand fragments remain.) In his long life, Sophocles saw Greece rise to supremacy over the Persian Empire . He enjoyed the favor of the statesman Pericles,who , making peace with enemy Sparta ruled Athens during a Golden Age (461-429 B.C.), during which the Parthenon was built and music, art, drama, and philosophy flourished. The playwright lived onto see his native city-state in decline, its strength drained by the disastrous Peloponnesian War. His last play, Oedipus at Colonus, set twenty years after the events of Oedipus the King ,shows the former king in old age, ragged and blind, cast into exile by his sons, but still accompanied by his faithfully daughter Antigone. It was written when Sophocles was b=nearly ninety. Oedipus the King is believed to have been first produced in 425 B.C., five years after plague had broken out in Athens.
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Sophocles’s Major Works:
- Oedipus the King (425 B.C.)
- Ajax
- Antigone
- Electra
- Philoctetes
- The Trachinian Women
- Oedipus at Colonus
( C ) Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) was born in Skien, a seaport In Norway. When he was six, his father’s business losses suddenly reduced his wealthy family to poverty. After a brief attempt to study medicine, young Ibsen worked as a stage manager in provincial Bergen; then, becoming known as a playwright , moved to Oslo as artistic director of the National Theater---practical experiences that gained him firm grounding in his craft. Discouraged when his theater failed and the king turned down his plea for a grant to enable him to write, Ibsen left Norway and for twenty-seven years lived in Italy and Germany. There, in his middle years (1879-1891), he wrote most of his famed plays about small-town life, among them A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy Of The People, The Wild Duck, and Hedda Gabler. Introducing social problems to the stage, these plays aroused storms of controversy. Although best known as a realist, , Ibsen early in his career wrote poetic dramas based on Norwegian history and folklore: the tragedy Brand (1866) and the powerful, wildly fantastic Peer Gynt (1867). He
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ended as a Symbolist in John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899), both encompassing huge mountains that heaven-assaulting heroes try to climb. Late in life Ibsen returned to Oslo, horored at last both at home and abroad.
Henrik Insen’s Major Works:
- A Doll’s House (1879)
- Ghosts
- An Enemy of the People
- The Wild duck
- Hedda Gabler
- When We Dead Awaken (1899)
- Brand (1866)
- Peer Gynt (1867)
- Symbolist in John Gabriel Borkman (1896)
(D) Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller (b.1915) was born into a lower –income Jewish family in New York’s Harlem but grew up in Brooklyn. He studied playwriting at the University of Michigan, later wrote radio scripts, and in World War II worked as a steamfitter. When the New York Drama Critics named his All My Sons best play of 1947, Miller told an interviewer, “I don’t see how you can write anything decent without using as your basis the question of right and wrong. “ (The play is about a guilty manufacturer of defective aircraft parts.) Death if a Salesman (1949) made Miller famous. The Crucible (1953), a dramatic indictment of the Salem witch trials, gained him further attention at a time when Senator Joseph Mc-
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Carthy was conducting loyalty investigations. For a while (1956-1961), miller was the husband of actress Marilyn Monroe, whom the main character of his After the Fall (1964) resembles. Among Miller’s other plays are A View from the Bridge (1955); The Price (1968); The Creation of the World and Other Businesses (1972); Playing for Time (1980); written for television ; and Broken Glass (1994). He has written two novels, Focus (1945) and The Misfits (1960), which he made into a screenplay featuring Monroe.
Arthur Miller’s Major Works:
1. All My Sons (1947)
2 Death of a Salesman (1949)
- The Crucible (1953)
- After The Fall (1964)
- A View from the Bridge (1955)
- The Price (1968)
- The Creation of the World and other Businesses (1972)
- Playing For Time (1980)
- Broken Glass (1994)
- Focus (1945)
- The Misfits (1960)
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- Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams (1914-1983) was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi, went to high school in St.Louis, and was graduated from the University of Iowa. As a n undergraduate, h e say a performance of Ibsen’s Ghosts and determined to be a playwright himself. His family bore a close resemblance to the Wingfields in The Glass Menagerie: his mother came from a line of Southern blue bloods (Tennessee pioneers); his sister Rose suffered from incapacitating shyness; and as a young man Williams himself, like Tom, worked at a job he disliked (in a shoe factory where his father worked), wrote poetry, sought refuge in moviegoing, and finally lefthome to wander and hold odd jobs. He worked as a bellhop in a New Orleans hotel; a teletype operator in Jacksonville, Florida; an usher and a waiter in New York. In 1945 The Glass Menagerie scored a success on Broadway, winning a Drama Critics Circle award. Two years later Williams received a Pulitzer Prize for A Streetcar Named Desire, a grim, powerful study of a woman’s illusions and frustrations, set in New Orleans. In 1955, another Pulitzer Prize went to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Beside other plays, including Summer and Smoke(1948), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), The Night of the Iguana (1961), Small Craft Warnings (1973), Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), and A House Not Meant to Stand (1981), Williams wrote two novels, poetry, essays, short stories, and Memoirs (1975)
Tennessee Williams’s Major Works:
- The Glass Menagerie (1945)
- Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)
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- Summer and Smoke (1948)
- Sweet Bird of Youth (1959)
- The Night of the Iguana (1961)
- Small Craft Warning (1973)
- Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980)
- A House Not Meant to Stand (1981)
- Choose a famous playwright of your choice and do a card report (on A 4 size paper).
Edward Albee, The Sandbox, 1960
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