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.

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. hey 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.

IRWIN SHAW 1913-1984

One of the most prominent American novelists, short-story writer and playwright of the twentieth century, Irwin Shaw (real name Irwin Gilbert Shamforoff), was born on 27 February, 1913 in Bronx, New York in the family of immigrants from Russia. Irwin left Brooklyn College after failing in freshman mathematics, worked in a cosmetic factory, a department store and a furniture company as a message boy. During his life he tried different other jobs - he worked as a driver, a professional football player, and a teacher.

On his return to the college he worked in the students' magazine and wrote plays for a dramatic society. After graduation from, the college in 1934 with a bachelor's degree he went to Hollywood to create screenplays. Later he remembered that he had been writing under a great influence of Ernest Hemingway whom he considered to be his literary teacher.

During World War II Irwin Shaw served in the American Army, fought in Northern Africa and Europe, and witnessed the liberation of Paris.

Irwin Shaw took up writing realizing that it was his inborn vocation. In 1936 he completed his first work, the play Bury the Dead and enjoyed country-wide popularity at once. It was a rapid-fire grotesque, an antiwar drama: killed soldiers revolted against being buried, they came up outside their burial places giving no peace to the alive with a call to join them in their march against human annihilation. Then appeared his other works: a collection of short stories Sailor Off the Bremen (1939), the novels Five Decades (1940), Young Lions (1948). After a short break there appeared The Troubled Air (1951), Rich Man, Poor-Man (1970).

Rich Man, Poor Man.It is a story about the fate of the Jordache family, the parents Axel and Mary Jordache and their three children -Tommy, Rudolf and Gretchen. Nurtured on traditional views of American success, each pursues the illusion of happiness in his own way, determined to achieve his "brightright." Starting with their teen-age years in a Hudson River town, Irwin Shaw follows the Jordaches from Greenwich Village to Hollywood, from a small town in Ohio to a luxury resort in the Mediterranean. Robert Cromie wrote in Saturday Review, that "Irwin Shaw has the gift of all great storytellers: he creates characters as genuine as that odd couple across the street, the curious patrons of the corner bar, the tragic figures from the headlines. They are individuals who walk into the living room of your mind, ensconce themselves, and refuse to be dislodged."

Axel Jordache fled from Germany where he had killed a man, robbed him and came to America. "God bless America. He had killed to get there," Axel thinks to himself. Here he marries a young girl Mary Pease. But there was never love between them. "It was only a year after the wedding, but he already hated her... She knew that she had entered upon her sentence of life imprisonment." Problems rolled over very fast. Gretchen, a neat, proper, beautiful girl (as Rudolph thought about her) after an unsuccessful try to sell her body to two black soldiers whom she attended at the hospital where she worked after her job at the Boylan Brick and Tile Works for the offer of eight hundred dollars, became the mistress of Teddy Boylan, a man without enthusiasm, self-indulgent and cynical. Later she got married to Willie, but the marriage was not happy either. She succeeded later in theatrical and cinema business somehow. Thomas (who smelled like a wild animal, as Rudolph said about him) had soon to leave school and leave his family and the town. He was sent to live at his uncle's place. But there too he got into trouble and was accused of statutory rape. His father had to go there to settle the matter. He paid five thousand dollars to the man to free Thomas from prison. But he did that not for Thomas. He did it for Rudolph. He didn't want his beloved son to start life with a brother in a jail which could ruin him as a promising successful politician and businessman. Thomas was like a rolling stone, getting all the time from one trouble into another, and finally was killed, leaving his son Wesley to move, on his own in the cruel world.

After Axel spent all the money he had saved during his life keeping a bakery in a rented house, he and his wife quarreled. It sent Axel into grief and depression. He even thought that maybe he would meet an Englishman here in America, would kill him as he had killed a man in Germany, and get back from where he came. He got too tired to live. For the last time he made the portion of rolls. Before putting them in the oven, "he kneaded the poison into the roll thoroughly, then reshaped the roll and put it back into the pan. My message to the world, he thought." He left the bakery, went to the river, got in the boat and let it be carried in the middle of the stream, and drowned himself. His body had never been found.

Rudolph had a talent for music and played the trumpet in the school band. He was handsome, well-mannered, well-spoken, admired by his teachers, affectionate. He was the only child in the family who 'kissed his mother when he left for school and when he came back. He was the hope of the family, unlike the younger son, Thomas, and their daughter - they were, as mother says "inhabitants of her house. Rudolph is her blood". He really succeeded in life and became the Mayor of Whitby. He cared about his parents, and he tried to help Gretchen and Thomas in their life. When Thomas intended to return five thousand dollars, he owed to the family, the money collected for the education of Rudolph, he didn't take it. He put the money in the bank in Thomas's name. It made the capital of sixty thousand dollars soon for Thomas. But it didn't bring him happiness, it didn't save him from death he was coming to all his life.

 

The deep changes in the life of the American society in the late 70s inspired Shaw to create Evening in Byzantium and Bread Upon the Water.

Irwin Shaw is also known as a playwright. He is the author of such works as Plain People, The Brooklyn Idyll, Sons and Soldiers, The Assasin.

Irwin Shaw spent the last years of his life in France and Switzerland where he mostly wrote memoirs and critical essays. In 1979 he visited the USA and it proved the creation of the novel The Top of the Hill. Some other works of Irwin Shaw are novels Voices of a Summer Day, Lucy Crown, Two Weeks in Another Town and short story collections Welcome to the City, Act of Faith, Mixed Company, Love on a Dark Street.

Irwin Shaw died on 16 May 1984 in Switzerland.

BERNARD MALAMUD 1914-1986

Bernard Malamud was born on April 26, 1914 in New York, the older of two sons of a Russian immigrant storekeeper. His mother died when he was fourteen. He grew up in Brooklyn in a household without books, music, or pictures on the wall. During the Great Depression, he worked at the census office and at a yarn factory to help support his family, but he felt these youthful deprivations were important to him as a writer.

After attending City College of New York and Columbia University, Malamud began publishing short stories in a number of well-known magazines. Malamud taught English in New York City high schools and fiction at Oregon State University and Bennington College in Vermont.

Malamud is often referred to as a “Jewish writer.” He is a Jewish writer in the same sense that Dickens is a social-protest writer, or Jane Austen a domestic novelist.

Suffering is Malamud's theme, and upon it he works a thousand variations: some comical, some menacing; some austere, some grotesque; some imaginative, others classic. The Jew as symbol for suffering mankind is hardly an original idea. The tormented characters of Bernard Malamud's fiction, although fated often to despair, curse, submit, and turn aside, still cling to the Romantic's determination to reject old evidence, to present a new solution.

It is a strange fact that Malamud's first novel has nothing to do with the Jews.

In 1952 he published his first novel The Natural. It depicts the life of a gifted baseball player. The young natural - the almost supernaturally gifted athlete - Roy Hobbs, begins his career by striking out the Whammer, greatest man in the game. This is not only pure American folklore, it is also right out of Frazer: the young God kills the old and takes his place. Roy thus earns the right to be cut down by a crazed woman assassin who wants to kill all the brightest and best men in sports, the heroes of the nation. He is not killed, however; only crippled. He is haunted by bad memories and evil women. After years, he pulls himself to the top again, only to be himself struck out by a new bright-faced boy. He is then plunged into a final scandal and humiliation, because of his own foolish lusts. But as he goes down he crushes the evil that has preyed on him; and there are the usual signs that he will rise again; a good woman waits for him.

The Natural was made into a popular film in 1984. After that several other works appeared, including The Assistant (1958), A New Life (1961), Pictures of Fidelman (1969), The Tenants (1971), and Dubin's Lives (1979).

The relationship between two men is the heart of the second novel The Assistant. They are the grocer and assistant, aggressor and victim. Frank Alpine, who has wandered into petty crime, becomes involved in the robbery and beating of Morris Bober, a luck-deserted Jewish grocer. The Assistant is the story of Alpine's slow, bitter self-subjection to his former victim; their lives become increasingly entangled until Alpine becomes Bober: at the grocer's death he takes his place, an assistant no longer. Out of the dirt and the deprivation of the novel's slum setting there has come, not the Naturalistic cry of pain, but an inescapable sense of mystic union: the identity of the oppressor and the oppressed. The oppressed is represented as the Jew in this novel; Alpine is Italian - "lam of Italian extraction." But from the start these distinctions are blurred; there is nothing particularly "Italian" about Alpine, except that he understands the preparation of minestrone and pizza. A short time later he is himself called a Jew, with some justice if little delicacy, by his former partner in crime. In some incomprehensible fashion Frank Alpine has taken Bober's fate upon himself.

In A New Life Malamud abandons the two-man relationship which forms the basis of most of his best work and returns to the problem of the hero solo, much as he set up in The Natural. In A New Life he puts some real effort into a heroine, Pauline Gilley, the married woman with whom Levin falls in love. She has suffered, she endures, she makes mistakes, she gives somewhat too liberally of her love. Malamud explores the new avenues opened by the relationship between Levin and Pauline with insight and affection. Levin has his new life at hand even if it may not be one of wine and song. His defeated adversary taunts him: Levin has now no money and no job, and no prospect of one; a wife of notorious weakness, poor health and inconsistency and two expensive children not his own.

He was also a prolific writer of short fiction. Through his stories in collections such as The Magic Barrel (1958), for which he received the National Book Award, Idiots First (1963), and Rembrant's Hat (1973) he conveyed - more than any other American-born writer - a sense of the Jewish present and past, the real and the surreal, fact and legend.

The story The Magic Barrel is one of the most beautiful recreations of Malamud's vision, but it is outdone in some respects at least by the remarkable Angel Levine. Here the problem of suffering is formally stated, in almost Biblical, or to be more exact, Cabalistic terms. The struggles of its humble hero Manischevits are those of Job: his business is wiped out, even the insurance; his health is ruined, but he must work on for his .wife, who is on her deathbed. He prays to God to give his sweetheart health: "Give Fanny back her health, and to me for myself that I shouldn't feel pain in every step. Kelp now or tomorrow is too late." Help comes to him from a characteristically ludicrous source: a Negro Levine who claims to be an angel sent from Heaven. At first Manischevits rejects him but finally he overcomes his pride and his logic and seeks for. his own salvation, he publicly confesses his faith and at the last his faith has restored his wife and his health to him.

In his novels and short stories Bernard Malamud depicts the struggle of ordinary people, often focusing on their desire to improve their lives. He uses the Jewish people to represent all of humanity, capturing their attempt to maintain a link of their cultural heritage while trying to cope with the realities of the modern world. While some of Malamud's characters achieve success, others experience failure. By portraying people in both victory and defeat, Malamud creates a delicate balance between tragedy and comedy in his works. Bernard Malamud's monumental work The Fixer (1966) earned him the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Set in Russia around the turn of the 20th century, it is a thinly veiled glimpse at an actual case of blood libel. Malamud underscores the suffering of his hero, Yakov Bok, and the struggle against all odds to endure.

Bernard Malamud was one of the principal figures in the group of Jewish writers whose work has enriched American literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet Malamud preferred not to be so easily pigeon-holed. He did indeed write about Jews, but he wrote for all people.

Malamud's characters are usually discovered at some barren level of bare subsistence. Though we may feel compassion for them, they themselves do not display the least self-pity. If their plight is sad, it is also triumphant, because they are surviving in heroic fashion against the odds all humans face. "As you are grooved, so you are grieved," Malamud once wrote as preamble to an account of his own bleak upbringing. It was the suffering of European Jews during World War II that convinced Malamud he had something to say as a writer. "I for one believe that not enough has been made of the tragedy of the destruction of six million Jews," he has said. "Somebody has to cry - even if it's a writer, twenty years later."

Malamud's unique drama is spun out of the commonplace, the tragicomedy of survival in a brutal world. But his stories are always informed by love and, indeed, his characters are largely redeemed by human love.

TRUMAN CAPOTE 1924-1984

Truman Capote was born in 1924 as Truman Streckfus Persons, Capote being the name of his stepfather.

Truman Capote was born and raised in New Orleans. He was brought up by aunts and cousins after his parents separated and attended school in Greenwich, Connecticut. At fourteen he started writing short stories, and some of them were published in the school paper Green Witch. He left school at fifteen and when he was eighteen he moved to New York City, where he spent several years working for The New Yorker magazine. Truman Capote wrote novels, short stories, plays, movie scripts and a variety of non-fiction works for which he won numerous awards. At the age of nineteen Capote won an O. Henry prize for his short story Miriam. Another O.Henry prize went to him in 1948 for the story Shut a Final Door. His first novel Other Voices, Other Rooms was published in 1948. It was elaborately furnished with the grotesque set against the background of the South and drew national attention. Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms is a sensitively rendered account of a boy's growth. This was followed by other early works, including A Tree of Night (1949), and The Grass Harp (1951). They focus on dark, sinister aspects of human existence. His non-fiction book In Cold Blood (1966) delves into the underlying motives of a violent crime. Capote also wrote several humorous works, including The Muses are Heard (1956) and Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958). The latter is the story of a New York cafe society playgirl, Holdiay Golightly, who is considered immoral by the society in which she lives. But the reader realizes that it is not the heroine but the society itself is abnormal and immoral.

Music for Chameleons (1980) is a collection of stories, journalistic pieces, and a "faction" report on the mass murderer of his story Handcarved Coffins. This is a history of a real criminal case written as a novel in the tone of a fictional and journalistic techniques he called "faction". In the preface to the new collection Capote reaffirms his intention to use journalistic forms to create a work of art. The last piece in the book is a dialogue between the author and his alter ego, drawing upon Flaubert's La Legende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier. Capote sees his own development reflected in the story of the adored only son who turns into a hunter of insatiable bloodlust and inadvertently kills his parents. At the end of the story Julien, now a penitent, encounters a leper who asks him to kiss his lips. When Julien complies, the leper is transformed into God. Thus Julien becomes Saint Julien.

Along with William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and other writers he is considered part of the southern Gothic tradition.Strategies of this tradition include exaggeration, parody, irony and heightened reality. The Grass Harp has been called "a parable of freedom". Capote became skilled in what, as in In Cold Blood, he describes as a "nonfiction novel."

The Grass Harp. The story is told by Collin Fenwick, a boy of sixteen, who has been living with his two unmarried aunts Dolly and Venera Talbo. Their former coloured servant Catherine dislikes Venera who is the richest woman in the city and loves Dolly whom she calls Dolly-heart. Collin said; "Pulled and guided by the gravity of Venera's planet, we rotated separately in the outer spaces of the house."

In her youth Dolly had learned the secret of making herbal medicine, the formula of which was given to her by a Gypsy woman. Catherine and Collin help her. They spend the little money they get for their medicine together. Down the field of Indian grass where Dolly used to gather the herbs there is a tree. Dolly likes to sit up "a double-trunked China tree, really two trees, but their branches were so embraced that you could step from one into another." For her "it was a ship, that to sit up there was to sail along the cloudy coastline of every dream." She is a dreamer. She lives in this quietness of nature. But soon it is interrupted by Venera who decides to make money on Dolly's medical talent by obtaining a patent for Dolly's medicine. To get it Dolly had to open her secret - to give the formula of medicine. She is horrified by the idea that it will be used for business purposes and refuses to give the formula. She leaves the house and goes to live in the tree. Catherine, Collin, their two friends Riley Henderson and Judge Cool join her and they spend three days together discovering that they are real friends. Venera sends two parties of men to force Dolly to leave her place. But nothing helps. Finally a pouring rain makes them go home. Dolly falls ill that winter and dies. Collin can not stay in the house after that. "It was too thick with air that did not move." The readers come to understand that life without dreams is still and stale, like that air in the house that "did not move."

John Cheever (1912-1982)

John Cheever was an American short story writer and novelist, called the "Chekhov of the suburbs". Cheever's main theme was the spiritual and emotional emptiness of life. He especially described manners and morals of middle-class, suburban America, with an ironic humour which softened his basically dark vision. Although he often used his family as material, his daughter Susan Cheever has reminded that "of course none of us expected accuracy from my father. He made his living by making up stories."

John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachussetts. His father owned a shoe factory and was relatively wealthy until he lost his business in the 1929 stock market crash and deserted his family. The young Cheever was deeply upset by the breakdown of his parents' relationship. His formal education ended when he was seventeen. After leaving home, Cheever studied at Thayer Academy, but was expelled for smoking. The experience was the nucleus of his first published story, Expelle' (1930), which Malcolm Cowley bought for New Republic. For a time Cheever lived with his brother in Boston. He wrote synopses for MGM and sold stories to various magazines. After a journey in Europe, Cheever returned to the US. He settled in New York, where he was acquainted with such writers as John Dos Passos, Edward Estlin Cummings, James Agee, and James Farrell. In 1933 he attended the Yaddo writers' colony in Saratoga Springs.

A number of Cheever's early works were published in The New Republic, Collier's Story, and The Atlantic. In 1935 he began a lifelong association with the New Yorker. He married in 1941 Mary Winternitz, and published two years later his first book, The Way Some People Live, which depicted the life of Upper-Eastside and suburban residents or dealt with Cheever's own experiences as a recruit. Originally the stories had appeared in magazines. During World War II Cheever had served four years as an infantry gunner and member of the Signal Corps.

After the war Cheever worked as a teacher and wrote scripts for television. In 1951 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to become a full-time writer. Most of the stories in Cheever's second collection, The Enormous Radio and Other Stories (1953), were set in New York City. The title story bears some similarities with Alfred Hitchcock's film Rear Window (1954), in which the theme was voyeurism; in Cheever's story a woman eavesdrops on her neighbors' private conversations through a magic radio. In the mid-1950s Cheever began writing novels. The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) was strongly autobiographical, based on his mother's and father's relationship, his family's genteel decline, and own life. The book won the National Book Award in 1958. "Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. Courage tastes of blood. Stand up straight. Admire the world. Relish the love of a gentle woman. Trust in the Lord." (from The Wapshot Chronicle, 1957). In the 1960s Cheever worked briefly as a Hollywood scripwriter on a film version of D.H. Lawrence's The Lost Girl from 1920.

In 1964 Cheever spent six weeks in Russia as a part of cultural exchange program. Next year American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Howells Medal for The Wapshot Scandal (1964), in which he describes some of the characters familiar from his first novel. From 1956 to 1957 Cheever taught writing at Barnard College - a work he never liked much. However, he was teacher at the University of Iowa and at Sing Sing prison in the early 1970s, and Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Boston University (1974-75). In Boston Cheever became depressed and had drinking problems. He was a month at the Smithers Rehabilitation Center in New York City. These experiences found later place in his novel Falconer (1977), a story about college professor who makes a journey to personal rebirth during his year in Falconer Prison. In the story Ezekiel Farragut kills his brother, Eben, and becomes a heroin addict - or addicted to illusions. Farragut's discovery of religion and his escape from the prison, from the violence and despair, can be interpreted as a kind of redemption. At the end of the novel an ordinary bus stop become Farragut's passport to reality. "You are a professor and the education of the young - of all those who seek learning - is your vocation. We learn by experience, do we not, and as a professor, distinguished by the responsibilities of intellectual and moral leadership, you have chosen to commit the heinous crime of fratricide while under the influence of dangerous drugs. Aren't you ashamed?"-"I want to be sure that I get my methadone," Farragut said. (from Falconer)

Cheever's other major works include the experimental Bullet Park (1969), an allegory of the struggle between good and evil, in which Eliot Nailles, a chemist, meets Paul Hammer, who is not the ordinary citizen he seems to be. "We're the Hammers," The stranger said to the priest. Nailles did not think this funny, anticipating the fact that almost everyone else in the neighborhood would. How many hundreds or perhaps thousands cocktail parties would they have to live through, side by side: Hammer and Nailles." Hammer is the illegitimate son of a kleptomaniac, and he plans to awaken the suburban world - by burning Eliot's son Tony in a church. The Stories of John Cheever (1978) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Books Critics Circle Award, and an American Book Award.

Cheever died in 1982, at the age of 70, in Ossinning, New York. His widow, Mary, signed in 1987 a contract with a small publisher, Academy Chicago, for the right to publish Cheever's uncollected short stories. The contract led to a long legal battle, and a book of 13 stories by the author, publishd in 1994. Two of Cheever's children, Susan and Benjamin, became novelists.

Cheever contrasted often the ordinary suburban milieu with the chaotic or hidden emotional states of his characters. Several stories, such as "The Five-Fourty Eight," about the revenge of a humiliated woman, were set in the fictional suburban commuter town of Shady Hill, a fallen Paradise. Eventually Cheever's middle- or upper-middle-class characters come to face their own shortcomings. In three novels Cheever used two brothers to represent different values of modern life. One of his most famous stories, The Swimmer (1964), portrays a man, who refuses to acknowledge his failures. The protagonist, Neddy Merrill, swims his way home from one pool to another. The story inspired Frank Perry's and Sydney Pollack's film from 1968, starring Burt Lancaster in his trunks. At the end of the film the swimmer's stories about his success turn out to be a fantasy - his home is both locked and empty.