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Учебное пособие по практическому курсу английского языка (для II курса)

Unit I

John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck was born in 1902 to a middle class family in California. His outlook developed under the influence of sharp contrasts between the rich and the poor, between the Californian "paradise" and hunger and poverty of humiliated and homeless seasonal farmhands.

Steinbeck's novels can all be classified as social novels dealing with the economic problems of rural labour, but there is also a streak of worship of the soil in his books, which does not always agree with his matter-of-fact sociological approach. After the rough and earthy humour of Tortilla Flat, he moved on to more serious fiction, often aggressive in its social criticism, to In Dubious Battle (1936), which deals with the strikes of the migratory fruit pickers on California plantations. This was followed by Of Mice and Men (1937), which brought Steinbeck the first recognition and fame as well as the possibility to devote himself entirely to literature, and a series of admirable short stories collected in the volume The Long Valley (1938).1 In his early writings Steinbeck criticizes though inconsistently and sometimes vaguely the so-called mercenary "civilization". His heroes evoke sympathy, understanding and compassion. These books are about the ruined lives of the poor crushed by harsh reality.

John Steinbeck is generally regarded as a writer of the thirties. What is widely considered his finest, most ambitious novel, The Grapes of Wrath, was published in 1939. The book, about a dispossessed Oklahoma family and its struggle to carve out a new life in California at the height of the Depression, captured the mood and angst of the nation during this time period.2 It is a novel about farmers hit by the crisis and their sufferings. At the same time Steinbeck shows the revival of Man,

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http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1962/steinbeck-bio

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2 http://www.biography.com/people/john-steinbeck-9493358

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how he gradually comes to realize the true meaning of life and need to work for the good of other people. The novel aroused a stormy polemic in America. Steinbeck was accused of slander and in a number of US states the novel was banned.

Following that great success, Steinbeck served as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune during World War II. He also travelled to Mexico to collect marine life with his friend Edward F. Ricketts, a marine biologist. Their collaboration resulted in the book Sea of Cortez (1941), which describes the marine life in the Gulf of California. In the last 25 years of his life Steinbeck wrote books including Cannery Row (1945), Burning Bright (1950), East of Eden (1952), The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), and Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962).

Steinbeck's postwar writings reflect the contradictions in the outlook of the author which stem from the general crisis of the American social and spiritual life. Still his story "The Pearl", the novel "The Winter of Our Discontent" and some others develop the social and literary tendencies of his progressive earlier works. In 1962 Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

And all the more painful is the fact that in 1966 Steinbeck supported the American aggressors in Viet Nam, which mars his reputation as a humanitarian writer. He died of heart disease on December 20, 1968, in his New York City home.3

His novel "Travels with Charley in Search of America" was published in 1961. In 1960, when Steinbeck was almost 60 years old, he set out to rediscover his native land. Accompanied only by a French poodle named Charley, he travelled the length and breadth of the United States. He also visited his native place. Below is an excerpt from the novel relating his impressions of the changes he saw.

For more details check out the following video: http://www.biography.com/people/john-steinbeck-9493358/videos

3 http://www.biography.com/people/john-steinbeck-9493358?page=2

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Read the text several times. Consult the Notes. Look up all the new words.

TEXT

The Pacific is my home ocean; I knew it first, grew up on its shore, collected marine animals along the coast. I know its moods, its color, its nature. It was very far inland that I caught the first smell of the Pacific. When one has been long at sea, the smell of land reaches far out to greet one. And the same is true when one has been long inland. I believe I smelled the sea rocks, the excitement of churning sea water and the odor of washed shells.

I remembered lovely eastern Washington 1 very well and the noble Columbia River... 2 And, while there were dams and power lines I hadn't seen, it was not greatly changed from what I remembered. It was only as I approached Seattle3 that the unbelievable change became apparent.

Of course, I had been reading about the population explosion on the West Coast, but for West Coast most people substitute California. People swarming in, cities doubling and trebling in numbers of inhabitants... It was here in Washington that I saw it first. I remembered Seattle as a town sitting on hills ... — a little city of space and trees and gardens, its houses matched to such a background. It is no longer so. The tops of hills are shaved off... The highways eight lanes wide cut like glaciers through the land. This Seattle had no relation to the one I remembered. The traffic rushed with murderous intensity. On the outskirts of this place I once knew well I could not find my way. Along what had been country lanes rich with berries, high wire fences and mile-long factories stretched, and the yellow smoke of progress hung over all, fighting the sea winds' efforts to drive them off.

This sounds as though I bemoan an older time, which is the preoccupation of the old, or cultivate an opposition to change... It is not so. This Seattle was not something changed that I once knew. It was a new thing. Set down there not knowing it was Seattle, I could not have told where I was. Everywhere frantic growth... Bulldozers rolled up the green forests and heaped the resulting trash for burning. The torn white lumber was piled beside gray walls. I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.

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Next day I walked in the old port of Seattle, where the fish and crabs and shrimps lay beautifully on white beds of ice and where the washed and shining vegetables were arranged in pictures. I drank clam juice at stands along the waterfront. It was not much changed — a little more run-down and dingy than it was twenty years ago. And here a generality concerning the growth of American cities, seemingly true of all of them I know. When a city begins to grow and spread outward, from the edges, the center which was once its glory is in a sense abandoned to time. Then the buildings grow dark and a kind of decay sets in; poorer people move in and small businesses take the place of once flowering establishments. The district is still too good to tear down and too outmoded to be desirable. Besides, all the energy has flowed out to the new developments, to the semi -rural supermarkets, the outdoor movies, new houses with wide lawns and schools where children are confirmed in their illiteracy. The old port with narrow streets and cobbled surfaces, smoke-grimed, goes into a period of desolation inhabited at night by the vague ruins of men. Nearly every city I know has such a dying mother of violence and despair.

Notes

1.Washington — a Pacific state of the United States in the north-west.

2.the Columbia River — a river rising in south-eastern British Columbia, Canada and floating to the Pacific Ocean.

3.Seattle — a major city and seaport in west-central Washington.

Grammar Commentary

1.This sounds as though I bemoan an older time, which is the preoccupation of the old — Это звучит так, будто я сожалею о прошедших годах, что свойственно старым людям — In this sentence the substantivized adjective "old" is used with the definite article in its generic meaning. It should be noted that the number of adjectives thus substantivized is limited (e. g. the blind, the poor, the rich, the young).

2.I could not have told where I was — Я бы не мог сказать, где я нахожусь. — The combination of the modal verb could with the perfect infinitive is one of the forms expressing unreality in presentday English. The perfect infinitive refers the unreal action to the past.

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