Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein was an avant-garde American writer, an eccentric, and a self-styled genius, whose Paris home was a salon for the leading artists and writers of the period between World Wars I and II.
Stein and her brother were among the first collectors of works by the Cubists and other experimental painters of the period, such as Pablo Picasso (who painted her portrait), Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque, several of whom became her friends. At her salon they mingled with expatriate American writers, such as Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, and other visitors drawn by her literary reputation. Her literary and artistic judgments were revered, and her chance remarks could make or destroy reputations. In her own work, she attempted to parallel the theories of Cubism, specifically in her concentration on the illumination of the present moment and her use of slightly varied repetitions and extreme simplification and fragmentation.
Representative of the work being done by twentieth-century women artists, writers, and readers, Stein's writing gave readers an intimate sense of a woman's life and concerns. In a period when writers prided themselves on being able to shape language to new kinds of expressions, Gertrude Stein moved back into the most traditional relationship between writer and word: letting language find its own patterns, to express whatever meaning the reader might favor, viewing written art as a system of true and mutable communication.

Something for the BOYS - Jack London

Jack London, whose life symbolized the power of will, was the most successful writer in America in the early 20th Century. His vigorous stories of men and animals against the environment, and survival against hardships were drawn mainly from his own experience. An illegitimate child, London passed his childhood in poverty in the Oakland slums. At the age of 17, he ventured to sea on a sealing ship. The turning point of his life was a thirty-day imprisonment that was so degrading it made him decide to turn to education and pursue a career in writing. His years in the Klondike searching for gold left their mark in his best short stories; among them, The Call of the Wild, and White Fang. His best novel, The Sea-Wolf, was based on his experiences at sea. His work embraced the concepts of unconfined individualism and Darwinism in its exploration of the laws of nature. He retired to his ranch near Sonoma, where he died at age 40 of various diseases and drug treatments.
If you would like to read one of his most famous short stories, click on the link on this page, and enjoy "To Build a Fire". There are two versions - why not read both and tell me which one you liked best?

F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Here was a new generation, a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success, grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths to man shaken."

Does that sound like your generation? Actually, it was the American generation of the 1920s as described by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American short-story writer and novelist, known for his depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s). With the glamorous Zelda Sayre (1900-48), Fitzgerald lived a colorful life of parties and money-spending. At the beginning of one of his stories Fitzgerald wrote the rich "are different from you and me". This privileged world he depicted in such novels as THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED (1922) and THE GREAT GATSBY (1925), which is widely considered Fitzgerald's finest novel.
I have chosen a funny short story for you to read, entitled, "Myra Meets His Family" about a girl who goes through a lot of trouble to marry an eligible young man. Click on the Link on this page, enjoy the story, and then tell me what you think!

Kate Chopin - "Desiree's Baby"

Kate Chopin was born Katherine O'Flaherty, in St. Louis, Missouri. Her parents were from Irish and Creole backgrounds. When Chopin was widowed at 32, she began writing to support herself and her six children. She was widely accepted as a writer of local color fiction, and was generally successful until the publication of her scandalous novel "The Awakening", in 1899. Perched between the social conservatism of the nineteenth century and dealing with tabooed themes too soon for the growingly open twentieth, the novel's sexually aware and shocking protagonist, Edna Pontillier, pushed Chopin into literary oblivion. Chopin, and her memorable characters and stories, finally emerged from society's morally imposed ostracization during the resurgence of women's rights in the early 1970's.

Kate Chopin anticipated so much: daytime dramas, women's pictures, The Feminine Mystique, open marriages, women's liberation, talk shows, Mars vs. Venus, self-help and consciousness raising. But in 1899 she was a lonely pioneer.
To find out more about her, and to read more of her stories, click on the link "Kate Chopin" next to this post, and let me know what you find!

The Raven - E.A. Poe ( A Halloween Treat)

To see a video of The Raven, acted by The Simpsons and narrated by James Earl Jones,
go to the "Links" on the left side of this page and click on "The Raven".
Then, write to me and tell me what you think about it, and about the poem itself!
Happy Halloween!

Random Thoughts

This is the place you can write your thoughts about literature, languages,your university, and your future - whenever you want! Other students are invited to encourage you, help you with things you don't understand, or simply converse with you in this type of format. Try it - it's fun and interesting, if you make it that way. Just one idea - let's try to keep it positive, and not use it to complain about the usual things.
To start, click on the word 'comments' below, read what others have written, and write your own thoughts.
By the way, if you want a specific assignment, there is one below. Enjoy!

Travelling with Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American humorist, satirist, novelist, writer, and lecturer.
Although Twain was confounded by financial and business affairs, his humor and wit were keen, and he enjoyed immense public popularity. At his peak, he was probably the most popular American celebrity of his time. In 1907, crowds at the Jamestown Exposition thronged just to get a glimpse of him. He had dozens of famous friends, including William Dean Howells, Booker T. Washington, Nikola Tesla, Helen Keller, and Henry Huttleston Rogers. Fellow American author William Faulkner is credited with writing that Twain was "the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs." Twain died in 1910 and is buried in Elmira, New York.

He wrote:

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." —Mark Twain, 1857

What does this mean to you? How has travelling changed your life, if at all? Do you think modern tourism encourages this kind of thinking, or not? Write your thoughts and post them to this site. I look forward to reading them all!