美国文学简史常耀信版讲义12

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Chapter Twelve：The Thirties

Social Background of This Period：

The mood of the thirties was different. The Wall Street crash of 1929 set the tone for the writing of the decade. As the Depression spread, life became a nightmarish experience of want, poverty, and absolute misery. Economic disaster, and the wretched workless existence for the masses of the people brought home to all the unnerving realization that the system had collapsed. Everything seemed to be disintegrating all of a sudden and all at once, and an ordered, rational existence proved to be impossible. There was widespread panic. If there had been any hope in the frustrating roaring twenties, there was, for many, sheer despair in the bleak years of the thirties. It is true that, when F. D. Roosevelt came into the White House, he brought with him a refreshing breeze of hope and optimism into it and into the country. Roosevelt was clever enough to borrow freely from the socialist programs of the previous decades and offered his synthesis of them as the New Deal which helped toward dispelling the crisis — laden atmosphere hanging over the country. He found ways to obtain money from financiers and industrialists to support projects like those of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Federal Theatre, all of which restored a measure of confidence to the Second World War that the country felt safe again. The war saved the United States.

Faced with the new reality of want and despair, American writers found themselves trying to find their function in the society. It was apparent that social concern was topmost in the minds of many authors, and that social involvement was to be the major feature of the literature of the thirties. Just as the crisis of 1893 was in some measure instrumental in introducing the violence of the naturalistic rhetoric in the last years of the nineteenth century, so the impact of the crisis of the thirties brought about a revival of that tradition, with the shadow of Dreiser and Norris moving behind the new literary sensibility that was appearing.

Major Writers：

John Steinbeck (1902-1968)

center of Salinas, California. A life among farmers, migrant workers, and ranchers of the Salinas Valley; Biblical lore, the knightly adventures of King Arthur, a summer course in marine biology, a devotion to The Golden Bough, and a fascination with the mysteries of the unconscious all shaped Steinbeck’s writings.

A popular student in high school, Steinbeck reluctantly attended Standford University in whose magazine his stories were first published. Leaving without a degree in 1925, Steinbeck continued working at odd jobs to support his writings. Initial success came with Cup of Gold (1929). In 1930 he married Carol Henning, received a monthly income from his parents as well as the use of a seaside cottage in Pacific Grove, and became a full-time writer. Over his thirty-year writing career, Steinbeck wrote from three general perspectives. Unhappy in California and porced, Steinbeck moved to New York City in the Forties where he remarried.

During the period that he was completing Cannery Row (1945), a novel about social withdrawal, Steinbeck was preparing a platform list of policies calling for federally supported economic and civil rights at home; economic justice and human rights abroad backed, if necessary, by military power. Steinbeck devoted her rest of his life to furthering these goals.

If his artistic powers waned in his later writings, Steinbeck’s concerns for humanity broadened. In an attempt to bring peoples closer together, he wrote about culture in the Soviet Union, England, and France. At the request of President Johnson he became a goodwill ambassador for the United

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Nations and wrote the Great Society Platform of 1964. He died in New York City and was buried in California.

A Brief Analysis of the Author’s Important Work

About The Grapes of Wrath:

John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath tells the specific story of the Joad family in order to illustrate the hardship and oppression suffered by migrant laborers during the Great Depression. The novel begins with the description of the conditions in Dust Bowl Oklahoma that ruined the crops and instigated massive foreclosures on farmland. Tom Joad, a man not yet thirty, approaches a diner dressed in spotless, somewhat formal clothing. He hitches a ride with a truck driver at the diner, who presses Tom for information until Tom finally reveals that he was just released from McAlester prison.

On his travels home, Tom meets his former preacher, Jim Casy. Steinbeck contrasts Tom's return with the arrival of bank representatives to evict the tenant farmers and the tractors to farm the land. When Tom and Casy reach the Joad's house, it has been deserted. Muley Graves tells them that the Joads have been evicted, and now stay with Uncle John. Muley's own family has left to find work in California, but Muley decided to stay himself. Tom Joad finds the rest of his family staying with Uncle John. His mother is a strong, sturdy woman who is the moral center of family life. His brother, Noah, may have been brain damaged during childbirth, while his sister, Rose of Sharon is recently married and pregnant. Her husband, Connie Rivers, has dreams of studying radios. Tom's younger brother, Al, is only sixteen and has the concerns befitting that age.

The Joads plan to go to California based on flyers they found advertising work in the fields there. Jim Casy asks to accompany the Joads to California so that he can work with people in the fields rather than preach at them. Before the family leaves, Grandpa Joad refuses to go, but the family gives him medicine and takes him with them.

Almost immediately into the journey, the Joad family loses two members. The first victim is the family dog. The second is Grandp …… 此处隐藏：17170字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……