2.2. Paul and Miranda

Paul shows that he knows more than Miranda about the business of death by telling her it was a coffin screw. But

Miranda doesn’t care; she’s happy with the gold ring she got which is still too big to fit a finger, but fits her

thumb nicely. Miranda is more concerned with her future as a female, growing up to wear more feminine clothes

like her older sister Maria and avoiding the scorn of the corn cob pipe smoking crones who criticize the unisex

work clothes her father provides for her . Paul is the possessor of knowledge of death and Miranda possesses

dreams of her mature feminine future. Porter uses archetypal symbols freely here.

2.3. The grave

Death is above and beyond us and all around us and usually out of our control. A grave is something man made.

When Miranda and Paul first come upon the old cemetery, the grass is uncropped but sweet smelling, it is

neglected yet pleasant. The graves are there yet not there. A grave without a coffin is just a hole in the ground.

The grave is death. But the rabbit is life. As the graves provided treasure for the children, they began to kill and

skin the pregnant rabbit. Miranda, “excited but not frightened,” exclaims “I do not want the skin…, I won’t have

it.” “Paul buried the young rabbits again in their mother’s body, wrapped the skin around her, carried her to a

clump of sage bushes, and hid her away,” then returned to swear Miranda to secrecy. Cycle of life in the story

appears when the reader sees at least two graves---the literal grave and the rabbit. Both graves produce treasure;

both contribute in some obscure fashion to the last scene of the story. But it must always be remembered that the

rabbit is simultaneously a symbol of generation and life.

2.4. The theme

As a story moves along, readers can see a simple powerful story of two children’s contact with mysteries of life

and death. Graves provide treasure for children---- a silver dove and a gold ring, but they don’t feel comfortable

after they got a treasure, the garden is not theirs anymore. In the short and really simple story, Porter depicted

children and their reactions on things through symbolism like life and death. This theme and cycle of life have

influenced Miranda through the years.

3. Conclusion

In Porter’s stories, she frequently used symbols to express themes of rebellion and loss of innocence, and these

themes are evident in “The Grave”. It suggests the movement from innocence to knowledge, from the innocence

of the dove (which is one of the objects found in the grave), to the gold ring (which is Miranda’s sign for the

luxury of her own femininity), and to the dead mother rabbit (the mystery of birth and death). Miranda comes to

be aware of the decay and death. Particularly in “The Grave”, Porter demanded her readers to use the process of

remembering and comparing in order to understand the meaning of certain events in the story. Some years later,

standing again in the blazing sunshine, Miranda seemed to see her brother, again twelve years old, smiling in

his eyes, turning the silver over and over in his hand. The memory “Leaps from its burial place.” (CS,p84) And

the initial vision of death, the dead rabbit which she had long ago chosen, she sees now in its true colors. That

dreadful vision of death now gives way to that long ago day’s other vision of death, her unchanged brother

holding the silver dove.

Porter was not a prolific writer, but she focused on the social ideology and reflected the loneliness, depression

and bewilderment of the westerners. Though she came to nowhere in her spiritual journey, she had created a rich

spiritual world for us. Her keen sense of the times and observation, and her active involvement in the social

affairs has set good examples for us.

19.) James Thurber 1894–-1961

(Full name James Grover Thurber) American humorist, playwright, essayist, and short story writer.

See also James Thurber Contemporary Literary Criticism (Volume 5), and Volumes 11, 125.

INTRODUCTION

One of the most popular and respected humorists of the twentieth century, Thurber was often called the Mark Twain of his era. Among his admirers were Ernest Hemingway and T. S. Eliot. Along with E. B. White, Robert Benchley, and other writers under the tutelage of New Yorkereditor Harold Ross, Thurber set the standard for sophisticated humor and prose style for a generation of American readers and writers. His stories, essays, and drawings combine the mundane and the absurd to create characters and situations at once strange and familiar that continue to fascinate and amuse his audience.

Biographical Information

Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1894. When he was seven, Thurber was blinded in his left eye by an arrow while playing with his brother William. This accident led to lifelong trouble with his eyesight and resulted in total blindness for the ten years prior to his death. Thurber attended Ohio State University and worked in undergraduate journalism while a student there, eventually becoming editor of the Sun-Dial, the campus newspaper. He left the university in 1918 without a degree, in part due to his vision problem. Thurber worked as a code clerk in the State Department for the next two years, serving in both Washington and Paris. Following this, he returned to Columbus and became a reporter on the Dispatch. Thurber went on to work with the Chicago Tribune in France and the Evening Post in New York. In 1927, he joined the New Yorker and stayed there for eight years, eventually becoming a freelance writer. In 1922 Thurber married Althea Adams; they divorced in 1935. He married Helen Wismer a month later, a marriage which lasted until his death. Between the late 1920s and early 1940s, Thurber's writing achieved international fame for its eccentric humor. When the author suffered a succession of illnesses and lost his sight permanently, his writing took on a more serious tone, even one of despair. Thurber once said that his blindness was a punishment upon him for writing “meanly and mockingly of mankind.” However, he did continue to write, first with the help of magnifying glasses, then by using crayon on yellow paper. After his blindness became total, he dictated his pieces to secretaries. He died in 1961.

Major Works of Short Fiction

Of Thurber's numerous short stories, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” (1942) has become one of the best known. In the gender battles of Thurber's world, Walter Mitty stands as the archetypal non-hero. Bossed about by his wife—the prototypal Thurber woman—as though he were an irresponsible child, Mitty continually attempts escape through fantasies that feature him as the epitome of success, control, and power. Each fantasy is ultimately thwarted at its high point by Mitty's wife, with Mitty reduced once again to the “little man” so prominent in both Thurber's stories and cartoons. “The Catbird Seat” (1967), a short story with traditional structure, is another of the author's most widely known pieces. It features Mrs. Ulgine Barrows, the obnoxiously boisterous and demanding female, in confrontation with the timid “little man” Erwin Martin. As head file clerk, Martin's entire department is at risk of being closed down because of Mrs. Barrows. Martin considers simply murdering his opponent but later happens to come upon a scheme that will not only rout her but will leave him in the proverbial catbird seat. Another of Thurber's stories to deal specifically with the gender battle, “The Unicorn in the Garden” (1982) features a man whose wife has tried to institutionalize him but who triumphs instead by having her put away. Such stories have led to accusations of misogyny against Thurber. He, however, declared himself a feminist and said of his own writing, “If I have sometimes seemed to make fun of Woman, I assure you it has only been for the purpose of egging her on.”

As a satirist, Thurber's desire to communicate with brevity and clarity made the fable form irresistible to him, and some critics feel that the fable would be dead as a literary genre had Thurber not revitalized it. Thurber's fables are unique in that unlike the traditional fable, which focuses on only one event, the Thurber fable is often built entirely around a pun. Like the traditional fable form they contain animal characters, which not only think and speak, but also have human feelings and, in some cases, conditions such as a guilt complexes or educational difficulties. Among his best known fables are “The Birds and the Foxes,” “The Very Proper Gander,” “The Rabbits Who Caused All the Trouble,” and “The Unicorn in the Garden.” Accordingly, each tale ends with a moral, usually ironic. Thurber's fables were published in The New Yorker, and are collected in two volumes, Fables For Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated (1940) and Further Fables for Our Time(1956). Thurber also wrote several children's pieces, including “The White Deer” (1945), a story about a princess who inhabits the body of a white deer.

Critical Reception

Commentators vary in their views on Thurber. Louis Hasley called him “beyond question the foremost humorist of the twentieth century.” Many critics see a progression of dark pessimism during the final twenty years of Thurber's life, from the good-natured irony of the 1940 Fables for Our Time to the bitter political and social commentary of the 1956 Further Fables for Our Times. Overall, however, Thurber's wit and eccentric humor are celebrated and honored and his writing continues to be read with appreciation. And yet, behind this humor, there is a seriousness of which T. S. Eliot, who cited Thurber as an eminent humorist, said: “Unlike so much of humor, it is not merely a criticism of manners—that is, of the superficial aspects of society at a given moment—but something more profound. His writings and also his illustrations are capable of surviving the immediate environment and time out of which they spring. To some extent, they will be a document of the age they belong to.”

20.) HG Wells was born 1866 and is best known for his work in the science fiction field. He is often called the "Father of Science Fiction". He wrote such books as The Time Machine and War of the Worldsamong many others. As this article will show he had amazing ability to look years ahead, and write about technologies that were not even theories during the time. And, the question often comes up how did The Man Who Invented Tomorrow predict these things?

He predicted genetic engineering in his book published in 1896, The Island of Dr. Moureau, in which a doctor on a remote island created hybrid beings composed of humans and animals. It wasn't until 1953 that two scientists showed that DNA could be used to pass genetic information, this became the start of genetic engineering as we know it.

In The War of the Worlds, revisited recently with the film starring Tom Cruise, he wrote about lasers in 1898. It wasn't until 1917 that Albert Einstein in his paper, The Quantum Theory of Radiation, laid the groundwork for the invention of the laser. In 1928 the laser theory was proved possible.

In 1901 he wrote the novel The First Men on the Moon, in which he predicted a lunar landing. It wasn't until 1969 that the Apollo first touched down on the moon's surface.

In The World Set Free, published in 1914, he predicted the use of some atomic bombs that exploded continuously using radioactivity. He also foreshadowed in that book about the difficulty of containing these weapons and discussed the need for a world governing body to try and contain them (The UN?). The first atomic bomb was not used until 1945 when the U.S. dropped it on Japan to end the War.

In 1933 the book, The Shape of Things to Come, foretold of the second world war, in this book he predicted that Europe would fight a notch themselves and then eventually start for pulling in various other countries until we have a world war. The World War didn't officially begin until September 1939.

In his 1923 book, Men Like Gods, imagined the future in which people communicated and basically talked through wireless telephones and voice mails. Some people contend that HG Wells thought of the answering machines and e-mails at this time. The answering machine was not created until 1935, and credit for the first e-mail sent was in the year 1971.

Also in The War of the Worlds briefly touched upon the possibility of biological warfare when the aliens are ultimately beaten at the end by accident when all else failed. The first use of this type of warfare was in 1915 by the German when they use gas during WWI.

When the Sleeper Wakes, first published in 1899, he wrote about 300 foot wide conveyor systems where people traveled and there was refreshment kiosks and seats. These were complete moving highways. If you visit local large international airports you'll see the conveyor systems similar to what he wrote about.

Also in the book, When the Sleeper Wakes, he described the first automatic sliding door. The very first automatic sliding door was created in 1960 by the Horton Door Company.

It leads one to wonder if HG Wells was born hundreds of years earlier would he had been worshiped by the prophet but since he was born in 1866 he was just acknowledged as an science fiction author? And, he also lived long enough to see most of his predictions ring true.

21.) Agatha Christie was born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in Torquay, England, and grew up within an unusual but happy household. Her early career was nothing to do with the writing role that would later make her so famous, yet served as an excellent preparation for her novels: she worked first as a nurse and then at a pharmacy, perhaps explaining why so many of the murders in her books are committed with poison.

The Disappearance of Agatha Christie

She married Archibald Christie in 1914, and it was the discovery of his infidelity in 1926 that prompted one of the most famous episodes of Christie's career. On December 3rd, Archibald left the family home to visit his mistress; that same evening Christie simply disappeared. She left a letter for her secretary saying she was going to Yorkshire, and despite huge media publicity, her exact whereabouts remained unknown for eleven days.

She was eventually discovered staying at a hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, staying under a false name, and although many were quick to offer reasons for her behaviour, Christie herself never commented on the episode.

Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple

Well-known as this famous disappearance may be, it cannot come close to overshadowing the enormous professional achievements of Christie's career. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920, and marked the first appearance of the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. The little man with the distinctive moustache went on to appear in 33 novels and 54 short stories, and has also been immortalised for television audiences by actor David Suchet.

Christie's other well-known character, elderly amateur sleuth Miss Jane Marple, first appeared in a 1927 short story entitled The Tuesday Night Club. She was rumoured to have been based on Christie's grandmother, and although she appeared in far fewer books than Poirot, Christie herself was much fonder of the gentle but nosy spinster.

Miss Marple has certainly been a favourite with television audiences, and has been played by Joan Hickson, Geraldine McEwan and, most recently, Julia McKenzie.

Success of The Mousetrap

In all, Christie wrote 80 detective novels, and these have deservedly led to her being known as the "Queen of Crime". As well as being the best-selling and most-translated author in the world, her stage play The Mousetrap also holds an impressive record. The play opened in London in 1952, and after more than 23,000 performances has the honour of the longest initial run in the world.

Christie died in 1976 at the age of 85, but her literary legacy ensures her reputation will live on for decades to come.

22.) They are all classic English writers.

Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady (13 May 1907 – 19 April 1989) was a British author and playwright.

Du Maurier was often categorised as a "romantic novelist" (a term she deplored),[5] though most of her novels, with the notable exception of Frenchman's Creek, are quite different from the stereotypical format of a Georgette Heyer or a Barbara Cartland novel. Du Maurier's novels rarely have a happy ending, and her brand of romanticism is often at odds with the sinister overtones and shadows of the paranormal she so favoured. In this light, she has more in common with the "sensation novels" of Wilkie Collins and others, which she admired.[4]

Du Maurier's novel Mary Anne (1954) is a fictionalised account of the real-life story of her great-great-grandmother, Mary Anne Clarke née Thompson (1776–1852). From 1803 to 1808, Mary Anne Clarke was mistress of Frederick Augustus, Duke of York and Albany (1763–1827). He was the "Grand Old Duke of York" of the nursery rhyme, a son of King George III and brother of the later King George IV.

In Ken Follett's thriller The Key to Rebecca, du Maurier's novel Rebecca is used as the key for a code used by a German spy in World War II Cairo. Neville Chamberlain is reputed to have read Rebecca on the plane journey that led to Adolf Hitler signing the Munich Agreement.

The central character of her last novel, Rule Britannia, is an aging and eccentric actress who was based on Gertrude Lawrence and Gladys Cooper (to whom it is dedicated). However, the character is most recognisably du Maurier herself.[citation needed]

Indeed, it was in her short stories that she was able to give free rein to the harrowing and terrifying side of her imagination; "The Birds", "Don't Look Now", "The Apple Tree" and "The Blue Lenses" are exquisitely crafted tales of terror that shocked and surprised her audience in equal measure. As her biographer Margaret Forster wrote: 'She satisfied all the questionable criteria of popular fiction, and yet satisfied too the exacting requirements of "real literature".' Her stories read like classic tales of terror and suspense but written with a sure touch for character, imagery and suggestive meaning. They are a borderline case of where pop becomes art.

A more recent discovery of a collection of du Maurier's forgotten short stories, written when the author was 21, provides an intriguing insight into the writer she was to become. One of them, "The Doll", is a suspense-driven gothic tale about a young woman's obsession with a mechanical male sex doll; it has been deemed by du Maurier's son Kits Browning as being "quite ahead of its time".[6]

Perhaps more than at any other time, du Maurier was anxious as to how her bold new writing style would be received, not just by her readers (and to some extent her critics, though by then she had grown wearily accustomed to their often lukewarm reviews) but also by her immediate circle of family and friends.

In later life, she wrote nonfiction, including several biographies that were well received. This, no doubt, came from a deep-rooted desire to be accepted as a serious writer, comparing herself to her neighbour, A.L. Rowse, the celebrated historian and essayist, who lived a few miles away from her house near Fowey.

Also of interest are the "family" novels/biographies that du Maurier wrote of her own ancestry, of which Gerald, the biography of her father, was most lauded. Later she wrote The Glass-Blowers, which traces her French ancestry and gives a vivid depiction of the French Revolution. The du Mauriers is a sequel of sorts describing the somewhat problematic ways in which the family moved from France to England in the 19th century and finally Mary Anne, the novel based on the life of a notable, and infamous, English ancestor—her great-grandmother Mary Anne Clarke, former mistress of Frederick, Duke of York.

Her final novels reveal just how far her writing style had developed. The House on the Strand (1969) combines elements of "mental time-travel", a tragic love affair in 14th century Cornwall, and the dangers of using mind-altering drugs. Her final novel, Rule Britannia, written post-Vietnam, plays with the resentment of English people in general and Cornish people in particular at the increasing dominance of the U.S..

Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie DBE (née Miller; 15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 66 detective novels and more than 15 short story collections (especially those featuring Hercule Poirot or Miss Jane Marple), and her successful West End plays.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time. Her novels have sold roughly four billion copies, and her estate claims that her works rank third, after those of William Shakespeare and the Bible, as the most widely published books.[1] According to Index Translationum, Christie is the most translated individual author, with only the collective corporate works of Walt Disney Productions surpassing her.[2] Her books have been translated into at least 103 languages.[3]

Agatha Christie published two autobiographies: a posthumous one covering childhood to old age; and another chronicling several seasons of archaeological excavation in Syria and Iraq with her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan. The latter was published in 1946 with the title, Come, Tell Me How You Live.

Christie's stage play The Mousetrap holds the record for the longest initial run: it opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in London on 25 November 1952 and as of 2012 is still running after more than 24,600 performances.[4] In 1955, Christie was the first recipient of the Mystery Writers of America's highest honour, the Grand Master Award, and in the same year Witness for the Prosecution was given an Edgar Award by the MWA for Best Play. Many of her books and short stories have been filmed, some more than once (Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and 4.50 from Paddington for instance), and many have been adapted for television, radio, video games and comics.

Sir John Betjeman, (28 August 1906 – 19 May 1984) was an English poet, writer and broadcaster who described himself in Who's Who as a "poet and hack".

He was a founding member of the Victorian Society and a passionate defender of Victorian architecture. Starting his career as a journalist, he ended it as one of the most popular British Poets Laureate to date and a much-loved figure on British television.

Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. While he regarded himself primarily as a poet who composed novels mainly for financial gain, he became and continues to be widely regarded for his novels, such as Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd. The bulk of his fictional works, initially published as serials in magazines, were set in the semi-fictional county of Wessex (based on the Dorchester region where he grew up) and explored tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances.

Hardy's poetry, first published in his fifties, has come to be as well regarded as his novels and has had a significant influence over modern English poetry, especially after The Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s cited Hardy as a major figure.

Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Her realism and biting social commentary has gained her historical importance among scholars and critics.[1]

Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry.[2] She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own reading. The steadfast support of her family was critical to her development as a professional writer.[3] Her artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years into her thirties. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel which she tried then abandoned, and wrote and extensively revised three major novels and began a fourth.[B] From 1811 until 1816, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, which was eventually titled Sanditon, but died before completing it.

Austen's works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism.[4][C] Her plots, though fundamentally comic,[5] highlight the dependence of women on marriage to secure social standing and economic security.[6] Her work brought her little personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become widely accepted in academia as a great English writer. The second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of Austen scholarship and the emergence of a Janeite fan culture.

23.) Spy novels are a particular kind of long-form fiction dealing with spies and their adventures. According to experts, the genre has been around in some form or another since the 1920s. Spy novels can be serious, or they may exist just for entertainment value, and some feature dashing heroes, while others have dark antiheroes that may be very hard to sympathize with. Most spy stories rely heavily on tension, along with heavy doses of action, and they also typically have extremely complicated plotting.

Many spy stories are known for being relatively fun for people to read. These novels often romanticize the experience of living as a spy, visiting exotic foreign locations and living with fewer rules than other people. The spy, usually a dashing hero, may face many dangers during his adventure and use all sorts of advanced technology to get out of jams.

Some other spy novels have a darker bent. These stories typically try to present a more realistic look at the world of international espionage. The spy may live in poverty, constantly afraid for his or her life and trying to avoid discovery by enemy forces. In many cases, these novels exist partly as a purposeful counterpoint to the more easy-going novels that generally exist purely for entertainment.

There are also spy novels where the main character may not even be classified as a "good guy" at all. For example, some spy stories deal with characters that are basically official government assassins. The stories may deal with the ethical quandaries these characters face in their day-to-day lives as they struggle with their own personal moral code versus their sense of duty to their government.

It's very common for spy novels to have very twisted and sometimes difficult plotting. For example, it is almost traditional for the typical spy novel to have unexpected betrayals and elaborate tricks. In many cases, characters are constantly plotting against each other in inventive ways that can be difficult to predict. There are even some spy novels that are known for being especially difficult for people to understand.

Partly because of the overall excitement and fast pacing associated with the genre, the spy novel has often been translated into movie form. There are many spy films that are directly based on famous books. Some of them have been box-office blockbusters with multiple sequels, and in some cases, the films have become more famous than the novels they were based on, at least among those in the general public.

David John Moore Cornwell is a British author of spy novels. During the 1950s and the 1960s, Cornwell worked for the British intelligence services MI5 and MI6, when he began writing novels under a pen name. His third novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) became an international best-seller, and remains one of his best known works. Following the novel's success, he left MI6 to become a full-time author.

Le Carré has since established himself as an important writer of espionage fiction. In 1990, he received the Helmerich Award which is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.[1]. In 2008, The Times ranked Le Carré 22nd on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[2] In 2011, he won the Goethe Medal, a yearly prize given by the Goethe Institute.

Stylistically, the first two novels – Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962) – are mystery fiction wherein the hero George Smiley (of the SIS, the Circus) resolves the riddles of the deaths investigated; the motives are more personal than political.[18]

The spy novel œuvre of John le Carré stands in contrast to the physical action and moral certainty of the James Bond thriller established by Ian Fleming in the mid nineteen-fifties; the le Carré Cold War features unheroic political functionaries aware of the moral ambiguity of their work, and engaged in psychological more than physical drama. They experience little of the violence typically encountered in action thrillers, and have very little recourse to gadgets. Much of the conflict they are involved in is internal, rather than external and visible.[19]

Unlike the moral certainty of Fleming's British Secret Service adventures, le Carré's Circus spy stories are morally complex, and inform the reader of the fallibility of Western democracy and of the secret services protecting it, often implying the possibility of East-West moral equivalence.[19]

Most of le Carré's novels are spy stories set during the Cold War (1945–91); a notable exception is The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971), an autobiographical, stylistically uneven, mainstream novel of a man's post-marital existential crisis. Another exception from the East-West conflict is The Little Drummer Girl that uses the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, le Carré's œuvre shifted to portrayal of the new multilateral world. For example The Night Manager, his first completely post-Cold-War novel, deals with drug and arms smuggling in the murky world of Latin America drug lords, shady Caribbean banking entities, and look-the-other-way western officials.

25.) African-American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, reaching early high points with slave narrativesof the nineteenth century. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a time of flowering of literature and the arts. Writers of African-American literature have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize to Toni Morrison. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African-American culture, racism, slavery, and equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues and rap.

African-American literature has both been influenced by the great African diasporic heritage[5] and shaped it in many countries. It has been created within the larger realm of post-colonial literature, although scholars distinguish between the two, saying that "African American literature differs from most post-colonial literature in that it is written by members of a minority community who reside within a nation of vast wealth and economic power."

Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931) is an American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon and Beloved. She also was commissioned to write the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, first performed in 2005. She won the Nobel Prize in 1993 and in 1987 the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved. In April 2012, it was announced she would be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and on 29 May 2012, she received the award.

Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio to Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford. She is the second of four children in a working-class family. As a child, Morrison read fervently; among her favorite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. Morrison's father told her numerous folktales of the black community (a method of storytelling that would later work its way into Morrison's writings).

In 1949 Morrison entered Howard University, where she received a B.A. in English in 1953. She earned a Master of Arts degree in English from Cornell University in 1955, for which she wrote a thesis on suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.[4] After graduation, Morrison became an English instructor at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas (1955–57), then returned to Howard to teach English. She became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

In 1958 she married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect and fellow faculty member at Howard University. They had two children, Harold and Slade, and divorced in 1964. After the divorce she moved to Syracuse, New York, where she worked as a textbook editor. A year and a half later, she went to work as an editor at the New York City headquarters of Random House. As an editor, Morrison played a vital role in bringing black literature into the mainstream, editing books by authors such as Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Gayl Jones.

Morrison began writing fiction as part of an informal group of poets and writers at Howard who met to discuss their work. She went to one meeting with a short story about a black girl who longed to have blue eyes. She later developed the story as her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970). She wrote it while raising two children and teaching at Howard. In 2000 it was chosen as a selection for Oprah's Book Club.

In 1975 her novel Sula (1973) was nominated for the National Book Award. Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), brought her national attention. The book was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the first novel by a black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 1987 Morrison's novel Beloved became a critical success. When the novel failed to win the National Book Award as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award, a number of writers protested over the omission. Shortly afterward, it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the American Book Award. That same year, Morrison took a visiting professorship at Bard College.

Beloved was adapted into the 1998 film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. Morrison later used Margaret Garner's life story again in the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, with music by Richard Danielpour. In May 2006, The New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best American novel published in the previous twenty-five years.

Toni Morrison, on jacket of her Pulitzer Prize winning novel Beloved.

In 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her citation reads: Toni Morrison, "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." She is currently the last American to have been awarded the honor. Shortly afterward, a fire destroyed her Rockland County, New York home.

In 1996 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.[9] Morrison's lecture, entitled "The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations,"[10] began with the aphorism, "Time, it seems, has no future." She cautioned against the misuse of history to diminish expectations of the future.

Morrison was honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which is awarded to a writer "who has enriched our literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work."

Although her novels typically concentrate on black women, Morrison does not identify her works as feminist. She has stated that she thinks "it's off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I'm involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don't subscribe to patriarchy, and I don't think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it's a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things."

In addition to her novels, Morrison has also co-written books for children with her younger son, Slade Morrison, who worked as a painter and musician. Slade died on December 22, 2010, aged 45

27.) Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950),[1] better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist and journalist. His work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness of social injustice, an intense opposition to totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language and a belief in democratic socialism.

George Orwell spent his life employing the political essay and novel in pitched battle against the forces of totalitarianism, in whatever form that might have taken, be it Stalin’s Communism or the British Empire. In 1984 he put forth a vision of totalitarianism so far beyond the realms of history and (perhaps) not so far beyond the realms of possibility that it stuck permanently to our collective imaginations. To us, the state of Oceania is the logical conclusion of totalitarianism, and a dystopia that as happily free citizens we must do our best to halt, and that dictators the world over do their best to install. Thus comes the word “Orwellian”, meaning any combination of the following: an all-seeing government that controls every aspect of our lives (even, as far as it can, our thoughts), a world in which everyone and everything exists for the state, a state which exists primarily to perpetuate itself, and a political class which frequently not only lies, but tells the exact opposite of the truth, with the populace having to believe it even to the point of absurdity.

The scariest and most pernicious of Orwell’s inventions was that of “doublethink”, which really is totalitarianism taken to its extreme. It is thus described in 1984:

The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies…

If the state cannot control the minds of its people directly, it can at least force them to control their own minds, through an endlessly repeating process of “correcting” their thoughts. Doublethink is perhaps the most important feature of an Orwellian world, because without the freedom to think as you will, the last chance of rebellion is eradicated.

These are powerful ideas, which people would rather kill in infancy than suffer in perpetuity. However, a mild personality cult seems to have formed itself, centred on the prophetic figure of Orwell. Eric Blair, as he is otherwise known, is watching over his followers like Big Brother, imploring them to see Orwellianisms everywhere, even in places where they are far removed. Doublethink, or at least its milder strain, lazythink, can replicate itself in unsuspecting carriers much like the H1N1 virus—even though the society is officially vaccinated against totalitarianism. The seriousness of lazythink should not be underestimated: though it seems quite innocuous, it can lead to active involvement in unspeakable evil. How many of those who committed such terrible crimes in the name of National Socialism would not have done so had they really questioned the nature of what they were doing, and the ideology on which their actions rested? The Orwell cult probably won’t go down this route, but what their attitude leads to, quite ironically, is a stifling of debate—exactly the sort of thing that they would otherwise be quick to condemn as antithetical to a healthy, non-totalitarian society.

Not only does it stifle debate, but it chokes the natural breath of progress. A politician in an opposition party need not be so devilishly underhanded to call a government policy Orwellian, but with the use of that one word he has won a few easy points with great swathes of the voting public. Once the word is planted in the minds of people and combined with lazythink, we witness a downward spiral in which the accused government cannot do anything that’s not Orwellian, though they may have the best of intentions. It is unfortunate for Gordon Brown and his new iteration of New Labour that they quickly established themselves as serious and socialist. In that atmosphere, accusations of Ingsoc-style policy are even harder to banish. Obama has a similar (though milder) problem with the Fox News-watching American right. Although the current healthcare debate may not bring his presidency to ruin, it is likely that the accusations brought forth now will find a way to stay, even if the initial fervour ends up dissipating.

Alertness to sinister politics is a perfectly fine thing, of course. There will be times when the fears of encroaching totalitarianism are not unfounded. But being so quick to see the worst in a policy is just as counterproductive as seeing only the best. Let us not jump on the easy bandwagon with such important matters, nor try to look too clever. Rather, let us try to understand the situation in the cold light of day, with a sober and a present mind. Only if something is genuinely Orwellian should we ever use the word. In that way some of its rightful value will be restored, and Eric Blair might once again be proud to have it used in his honour.

24