КОНСПЕКТ ЛЕКЦИИ 17

Творческий путь Роберта Фроста. Темы традиционной фермерской жизни: доступный подход, обманчивая простота. Карл Сэндберг – певец индустриальной Америки. Становление национальной драматургии: Юджин О’Нил как создатель американского театра. Влияние европейской традиции на формирование стиля драматурга.

Wright, Richard (1908-1960), American writer, whose novels and short stories helped redefine discussions of race relations in America in the mid-20th century. Wright publicly opposed racial prejudice and was perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson in the United States for his generation of blacks. His most acclaimed works are the novel Native Son (1940) and the autobiographical memoir Black Boy (1945).

Richard Nathaniel Wright was born outside of Natchez, Mississippi. His father left the family when Wright was still young and his mother, a schoolteacher, was stricken with a paralyzing illness when he was a child. Raised mostly by relatives, Wright left school at the age of 17. He subsequently moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he worked at odd jobs and began to educate himself.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Wright worked on various writing and editing projects for the Federal Writers' Project in Chicago. Wright’s first book, Uncle Tom's Children (1938; revised 1940), consisted of four novellas that dramatize racial prejudice. The book won first prize in a writing competition sponsored by the Writers’ Project. In 1937 Wright moved to New York City. He worked there on a Writers’ Project guidebook to the city entitled New York Panorama (1938) and wrote the book’s essay on the Harlem neighborhood. Wright had joined the Communist Party while in Chicago, and once in New York he published reviews and political essays in Communist Party publications such as New Masses. Wright remained an active member of the party into the 1940s before leaving over ideological issues.

After winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1939, Wright completed his novel Native Son. The book explores the violent psychological pressures that drive Bigger Thomas, a young black man, to murder. In the story, Thomas, a 20-year-old from the largely black South Side of Chicago, takes a job as a chauffeur for a wealthy white family whose fortune is based on real estate dealings in black neighborhoods. The daughter of the family seduces Bigger, and he accidentally smothers her to death when he fears they will be discovered together in bed. The quick-paced melodrama of the first half of the novel then yields to a more deliberate treatment of Bigger’s trial for murder. In the second half of the book, Wright presents a careful psychological and social examination of the story’s events—and of American race relations. Native Son was an immediate sensation with white and black readers, and this wide appeal helped make Wright the first black American writer to have a Book-of-the-Month club selection.

Wright moved to France in the late 1940s. He published several more novels during his lifetime, including The Outsider (1953), and The Long Dream (1958), about a boy’s childhood in Mississippi.

Wright also produced a considerable body of nonfiction. His first autobiographical work, Black Boy, reveals in bitter personal terms the devastating impact of racial prejudice on young black males in the United States. Black Boy points out the many psychological and cultural similarities between 20th-century racism and its predecessor, slavery. In 1941 Wright collaborated with photographer Edwin Rosskam on 12 Million Black Voices, a folk history of blacks in America.

Hughes, Langston (1902-1967), American writer, known for the use of jazz and black folk rhythms in his poetry. James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, and educated at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He published his first poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” in Crisis magazine in 1921 and studied at Columbia University from 1921 to 1922. He then lived for a time in Paris. After his return to the United States, he worked as a busboy in Washington, D.C. There, in 1925, his literary skills were discovered after he left three of his poems beside the plate of American poet Vachel Lindsay, who recognized Hughes’s abilities and subsequently helped publicize Hughes’s work.

Hughes wrote in many genres, but he is best known for his poetry, in which he disregarded classical forms in favor of musical rhythms and the oral and improvisatory traditions of black culture. In the 1920s, when he lived in New York City, he was a prominent figure during the Harlem Renaissance and was referred to as the Poet Laureate of Harlem. His innovations in form and voice influenced many black writers. Hughes also wrote the drama Mulatto (1935), which was performed on Broadway 373 times. Beginning in the 1930s, Hughes was active in social and political causes, using his poetry as a vehicle for social protest. He traveled to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Haiti, and Japan, and he served as the Madrid correspondent for a Baltimore, Maryland, newspaper during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

In the 1940s, Hughes wrote a newspaper column in the voice of the character Simple (also called Jesse B. Semple), who expressed the thoughts of young black Americans. Simple’s plain speech, humor, and use of dialect belied his wisdom and common sense. The character became famous and later figured in many of Hughes’s short stories.

Frost, Robert (1874-1963), American poet, who drew his images from the New England countryside and his language from New England speech. Although Frost’s images and voice often seem familiar and old, his observations have an edge of skepticism and irony that make his work, upon rereading, never as old-fashioned, easy, or carefree as it first appears. In being both traditional and skeptical, Frost’s poetry helped provide a link between the American poetry of the 19th century and that of the 20th century.

Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco, California, the son of William Prescott Frost, Jr., of New Hampshire and Isabelle Moodie of Scotland. He was named after Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate armies during the American Civil War (1861-1865). When Frost was 11 years old, his father died of tuberculosis. The Frost family then moved to Massachusetts, where William Frost wanted to be buried. Frost attended high school in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and began writing poetry. He attended Dartmouth College briefly but withdrew during his first year and went to work. In 1895 he married Elinor White. The couple eventually had six children, two of whom died young. From 1897 to 1899 Frost attended Harvard College, but he left before receiving a degree. In the early 1900s the family owned a small poultry farm in New Hampshire, and Frost taught at a small private school nearby.

Frost continued to write poetry, but he was unsuccessful at publishing his work. Seeking better literary opportunities, the Frosts sold their farm and moved to England in 1912. In England, Frost achieved his first literary success. His book of poems A Boy's Will (1913) was printed by the first English publisher that Frost approached. The work established Frost as an author and was representative of his lifelong poetic style: sparse and technically precise, yet evocative in the use of simple and earthy imagery. His second collection, North of Boston, was published in 1914 and also won praise.

In England Frost met other American poets, including fellow New Englander Amy Lowell and the avant-garde writer Ezra Pound. But Frost’s work during this time was associated with that of the Georgian poets, a group of English writers whose lyric poetry celebrated the English countryside.

In 1915 Frost and his family returned to the United States, where his poetry had become popular. He continued to write for the rest of his life, while living on farms in Vermont and New Hampshire and teaching literature at Amherst College, the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and Dartmouth College. In 1961, at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, Frost became the first poet to read a poem—"The Gift Outright”—at a presidential inauguration.

Frost's poetry mainly reflects life in rural New England, and the language he used was the uncomplicated speech of that region. Although Frost concentrates on ordinary subject matter, he evokes a wide range of emotions, and his poems often shift dramatically from humorous tones to tragic ones. Much of his poetry is concerned with how people interact with their environment, and though he saw the beauty of nature, he also saw its potential dangers.

Frost disliked free verse, which was popular with many writers of his time, and instead used traditional metrical and rhythmical schemes. He often wrote in the standard meter of blank verse (lines with five stresses) but ran sentences over several lines so that the poetic meter plays subtly under the rhythms of natural speech. The first lines of "Birches" (1916) illustrate this distinctive approach to rhythm: "When I see birches bend to left and right/ Across the lines of straighter darker trees,/ I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.”

Frost listened to the speech in his country world north of Boston, and he recorded it. He had what he called "The ruling passion in man ... a gregarious instinct to keep together by minding each other's business." Frost continued to mind his neighbors’ speech and business in his volume Mountain Interval (1916), which included the poems "The Road Not Taken," "An Old Man's Winter Night," "Birches," "Putting in the Seed," "Snow," and "A Time to Talk."

Frost’s 1923 volume New Hampshire earned him the first of four Pulitzer Prizes that he would win over the next 20 years. "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is perhaps Frost’s best-known poem. The poem’s ending, in which the line “And miles to go before I sleep” is repeated, indicates Frost’s philosophy of continual and productive work—whether it be work on his New England farm, or the written work required to create his poetry.

Frost's Collected Poems (1930) won him his second Pulitzer Prize. And his next two collections—A Further Range (1936) and A Witness Tree (1942)—also won Pulitzers. He then wrote two plays in blank verse. The first, A Masque of Reason (1945), received lukewarm praise from critics. The second, A Masque of Mercy (1947), which is a modern treatment of Christian biblical figures, was more successful. Frost's final volumes of poetry were Steeple Bush (1947) and In the Clearing (1962). The masterpiece of the first collection is "Directive." In this complex poem, rich words and images direct a reader to escape the present that is “now too much for us” by remembering a past time and place, which memory has “...made simple by the loss/ of detail...” The poem concludes with symbolic lines about the value of returning to one’s roots: "Here are your waters and your watering place./ Drink and be whole again beyond confusion."

Sandburg, Carl (1878-1967), American poet and biographer, known for his unrhymed free verse which uses precise and vivid images to portray the energy and brutality of American urban industrial life. Sandburg also wrote what is generally considered the definitive biography of United States president Abraham Lincoln.

Sandburg was born and raised in Galesburg, Illinois. Both of his parents were Swedish immigrants. In his late adolescence, Sandburg worked odd jobs and spent a year traveling in the Midwest. He served with a company of volunteers in Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War (1898). After the war, he attended Lombard College (now Knox College) in Galesburg. Sandburg left college without a degree in 1902. He subsequently undertook newspaper and advertising work. He also became an organizer for the Social Democratic Party in Wisconsin and served as secretary to the Socialist mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from 1910 to 1912.

In 1913 Sandburg moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he worked as a journalist, writing editorials for the Chicago Daily News from 1918 to 1933. In 1914 Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” was published in the magazine Poetry, and he was awarded the magazine’s Levinson prize that same year.

“Hog Butcher for the World, /Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,/ Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;/ Stormy, husky, brawling,/ City of the Big Shoulders . . . ”

In this and the succeeding volumes Cornhuskers (1918), Smoke and Steel (1920), Slabs of the Sunburnt West (1922), and Good Morning, America (1928), Sandburg became the bard of the Midwest, serenading its artists, praising its workers, lamenting the degradation of its poor, and looking lovingly at its countryside. To many who read "Fog" (1916), "I Am the People, the Mob” (1916), "Grass” (1918), and the 21 sections of Good Morning, America, Sandburg was successor to 19th-century poet Walt Whitman as the proclaimer of the American spirit. This impression was confirmed by The People, Yes (1936), an excursion into social history, folklore, and political faith, which included a declaration of confidence in the American working person.

Sandburg's prose masterpiece is the monumental biography Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years (two volumes, 1926) and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (four volumes, 1939), the latter of which earned him the 1940 Pulitzer Prize in history. When the houses of Congress came together in February 1959 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Lincoln, Sandburg was invited to address the joint session. He was the first private citizen so honored. Sandburg expressed his response to World War II (1939-1945) in prose and verse in Home Front Memo (1943) and wrote a historical novel, Remembrance Rock (1948), based on American history between the 17th and the 20th centuries. Sandburg also wrote the children’s books Rootabaga Stories (1922), Rootabaga Pigeons (1923), and Potato Face (1930) to entertain his three daughters.

Sandburg also became known as a performer of folk songs, which he sang in a craggy voice to simple guitar accompaniment. He collected folk songs and related materials in The American Songbag (1927) and Carl Sandburg's New American Songbag (1950).

O'Neill, Eugene (1888-1953), American playwright, whose work dramatizes the plight of people driven by elemental passions, by memory and dream, and by an awareness of the forces that threaten to overwhelm them. His early plays, appearing between 1916 and 1920, helped initiate American theater’s shift away from elegant parlor dramas and toward gritty naturalistic plays.

O’Neill’s later plays covered varied ground, leaping from expressionism—an attempt to depict subjective feelings or emotions rather than objective reality—to comedy, and finally to modern reworkings of classical myth. His best tragic plays reflect his statement that he was “always conscious of the Force behind—Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, whatever one calls it—Mystery certainly—and of the one eternal tragedy of Man in his glorious, self-destructive struggle….”

O’Neill won Pulitzer Prizes in drama for his plays Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1921), Strange Interlude (1928), and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956). In 1936 he became the first American dramatist to win the Nobel Prize in literature.

Eugene Gladstone O’Neill was born in a New York City hotel room, the second son of James and Ella O’Neill. For most of Eugene’s childhood the family lived on the road. His father was an Irish-born actor. “You might say I started as a trouper,” O’Neill would recall. “I knew only actors and the stage. My mother nursed me in the wings and in dressing rooms.”

O’Neill was educated in Catholic schools until, as a teenager, he insisted on attending a nonreligious boarding school. He spent his boyhood summers at the family’s summer home in New London, Connecticut, the setting of several of his plays. O’Neill’s mother had become addicted to morphine after being prescribed it while giving birth to him, and when he was 15 years old O’Neill discovered his mother’s addiction. He then entered an emotionally turbulent period characterized by drunken sprees, including one for which he was thrown out of Princeton University. Despite his problems with alcohol, O’Neill was a voracious reader. He especially liked Irish-born writer George Bernard Shaw, Russian political activist Emma Goldman, and German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

From 1909 to 1912 O’Neill jumped from experience to experience. He prospected for gold in Honduras, served as an assistant manager of a theatrical troupe organized by his father, went to South America and South Africa as a seaman, toured as an actor with his father’s troupe, and worked as a newspaper reporter in New London. His time at sea provided vivid memories that would enliven his early plays.

A turning point in O’Neill’s life came in 1912. Early that year, he tried to commit suicide. In the fall, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a Connecticut sanatorium, where he wrote his first plays. He avidly read Swedish playwright August Strindberg, “who first gave me the vision of what modern drama could be.” Resolved “to be an artist or nothing else,” he took a playwriting seminar at Harvard University and was soon writing one-act plays.

Longer, more deeply felt plays appeared in the 1920s. Many of these dramas were strongly influenced by the psychoanalytical theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and they stripped away people’s civilized veneers and probed their inner psyches. Beyond the Horizon focuses on the fruitless dreams of a farm family. The Emperor Jones (1920), which was one of the first American plays with a lead role for black actors, concerns the leader of a West Indies island whose subjects rebel, drive him into the jungle, and finally kill him. It uses expressionistic techniques such as distorting time and action to expose characters’ emotional states. Anna Christie features a noble prostitute, slang-filled dialogue, and the use of the fog and the sea to symbolize different states of mind.

In The Hairy Ape (1922) a ship’s stoker, the person who feeds coal into the ship’s furnace, is transformed into an animalistic rough. All God’s Chillun’s Got Wings (1924) dramatizes problems associated with a racially mixed marriage. Desire Under the Elms (1925) alludes to themes of Greek mythology and uses New England farm life as the setting for a tragic tale involving adultery, incest, and infanticide. The Great God Brown (1926) probes the psychology of a businessman, and the hugely popular nine-act Strange Interlude follows the life of a woman from daughter to wife to mother, using interior monologue to trace her quest for happiness.

O’Neill continued exploring the interior self in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), in which the tragic Greek story of Electra provides mythic resonance to the story of a New England family confronted by death during the Civil War (1861-1865). O’Neill produced his only comedy in 1933.

In 1934 O’Neill entered a highly creative but withdrawn period. No new play appeared on Broadway for several years, but O’Neill continued writing while he lived contentedly with his third wife. In the mid-1940s his plays again began to be produced. The most important were The Iceman Cometh (1946), A Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956), and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1957). Of these, only Iceman appeared during O’Neill’s lifetime. Set in 1912, Iceman depicts a group of New York City saloon lodgers, feeding their dreams with booze and chatter, disrupted by an intrusive salesman. In A Moon for the Misbegotten, O’Neill fictionalized the close relationship between his alcoholic brother, Jamie, and their mother, represented as a strong Irish matron.

A Long Day’s Journey into Night is even more autobiographical. It portrays a day in the life of a failed actor, his drug-addicted wife, and their two sons, one of whom is a drunk and the other an ex-sailor with wistful memories of sea life. Haunted by failed ambitions and unachievable dreams, each member of the Tyrone family represents the average person drifting toward the “night” of death. Poet T. S. Eliot said it was “one of the most moving plays I have ever seen,” and critic Brendan Gill described it as “the finest play written in English in my lifetime.”

During the last years of his life, O’Neill suffered from a crippling nervous disorder similar to Parkinson’s disease, which eventually ended his writing.