Jean-Louis Kerouac aka Jack was born on March 12th, 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts to Leo and Gabrielle who were immigrants from Quebec, Canada. Kerouac learned to speak French at home then he learned how to speak English at school. His father owned a print shop and his mother stayed a home. In the summer of 1926 Jack's older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever at nine years old. The family was overcome by grief and became more involved in church as is shown in some of his books. Jack loved to play sports and read on his free time. He was on the basketball, track, and football team. Even though he wanted to start writing he felt that playing a sport wound help him more in his future. During the great depression his family struggled financially and his father became an alcoholic and gambler while his mother got a job at a local shoe store to provide for her family. In 1936 the family was devastated by the Merrimack River flooding that wiped out there printing shop which only increased his fathers alcohol addiction and the family lived live in poverty, but jack shined in his sports as he was the star running back at his high school Lowell High. With this he obtained a college scholarship. After graduating Lowell in the year 1939 he received his scholarship to Columbia University. But before attending university he went to Horace Mann preparatory school for boys for a year in Brooklyn at the age of 17.(biography.com) During his freshman year at Columbia university he cracked his tibia. He also argued to mush with his coach, Coach Lou Little, who benched him. While being benched jack began writing for the Columbia Daily Spectator student newspaper with sports articles and later joined the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity. As his footb... ... middle of paper ... ... about experience.(Beat movement) By 1960’s he had finished his most known novels. But by 1969 Kerouac became broke, an alcoholic and had already married his third wife Stella Sampas in 1966. During one of his rampages at a local bar he was beaten by some of the other drunken customers and a few days later he died while watching television from internal hemorrhaging in St. Petersburg, Florida at the age of 47.(Weinreich) Kerouac was buried at Edson Commentary, his hometown, and is honored with a Doctor of Letters degree from his University Lowell. Jim Irsay, Indianapolis Colts owner paid about 2.43 million dollars for the original scroll of Kerouac’s most famous novel and put it on an exhibition tour that ended in 2009.(poemhunter) Kerouac had only one child which was from his second marriage with Joan Haverty who had a daughter named Jan Kerouac.(biography.com)
The author Ralph Ellison is a renowned writer and scholar with significant nonfiction stories credited to his name. He was born in Oklahoma City about the year 1913. His family had a small business wherein his father worked as a foreman but soon died when he was only three years old. After several years, he later found out that his father wished that he would someday become a poet after the great American essayist popularly known as Ralph Waldo Emerson who became his namesake. His mother was Ida Millsap Ellison who was involved as a political activist campaigning for the Socialist Party. Moreover, she was arrested several times in violation of the segregation orders.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is about a father and son who are surrounded by an apocalyptic world where they are trying to survive. Many of McCarthy’s books are about negative or violent times like Blood Meridian and All The Pretty Horses. McCarthy enjoys writing about the terror in the real world. When writing literature, he avoids using commas and quotation marks.. Many works of literature have a plethora of themes throughout them, in The Road, the theme that sticks out the most is paternal love. The boy is the only thing that stands between the man and death. Aside from that, the father doesn’t kill anyone for food, he only takes the life of people who threaten the boy. Lastly, the man allows the boy have the last of their supplies, food,
Science and Technology have a strong influence on the daily lives of the citizens in the world state. The first influence is through the use of drugs and in particular, soma. Soma is a drug that is used in the world state by everyone to create false happiness. When john, Bernard and Helmholtz meet Mustafa mond the leader of the world state, Mond explains the beneficial effects of simply consuming one drug on a daily basis. “Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your mortality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears-that’s what soma is.” (Helmholtz, 162) In the world state, there is only praise for the drug known as soma, as there are no side effects the members of society fear of. Science and technology has reached a point where it allows a simple tablet to relieve its citizens of any sort of problem that they may encounter. Furthermore Soma is produced in large quantities for consumption in order to suppress understanding of what is around the members of society. Secondly, along with the Soma consumption, the citizens are also influenced by science in everyday life by not being able to gain knowledge. methods of gaining knowledge include: reading books or anything that promotes an idea. Using technology, the world state prohibits any type of reading. When small children are being conditioned to keep away from books, the procedure is presented, “Crumpling the illuminated pages of the books, the director waited until all were happily busy. Then, ‘Watch carefully,’ he said. And, lifting his hand, he gave the signal... There was a violent explosion... The children screamed; their faces were distorted with terror.” (16) even at a young age...
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World introduces us to a futuristic technological world where monogamy is shunned, science is used in order to maintain stability, and society is divided by 5 castes consisting of alphas(highest), betas, gammas, deltas, and epsilons(lowest). In the Brave New World, the author demonstrates how society mandates people’s beliefs using many characters throughout the novel.
In Aldous Huxley's novel, "Brave New World" he introduces a character named, Bernard Marx an alpha part of the upper higher class who does not quite fit in. Bernard is cursed by the surrounding rumors of something going wrong during his conditioning that he becomes bitter and isolates himself from those around him in the World State. Huxley's character experiences both alienation and enrichment to being exiled from a society that heavily relies on technology and forms of entertainment with little to no morals.
Jack Kerouac, was born on March 12, 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, as the youngest of three children. Jack decided to be a writer after his brother Gerard died at the age of nine. From the life and death experience of his brother's death, and the Catholic faith of his childhood, he developed a spiritual tendency in his character that would last throughout his life. The fact that Kerouac was a spiritual "seeker," may be the most vital aspect of his life. In post WWII, Eisenhower America, Jack Kerouac came from a poor rustic industrial community to change the face of American Culture forever. He chronicled the wild rebellious culture of "the Beats" in the late 50's and early 60's, paving the way for a more accepting American Society and the tolerance of alternative lifestyles enjoyed today.
After two years of school at Columbia Kerouac made a decision that would change his life. He always believed he learned more outside of the classroom than in; and so after a series of arguments with his coach, he quit the team. Not long after he dropped out of school as well. He served briefly in the navy, and drinking heavily, was discharged on psychiatric grounds(Clark, 52). Upon his return home he got a job with as a Merchant Marine. When he wasn't working he spent his time with Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cass...
To most, Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities is that book about the poor people and the French Revolution that isn’t Les Miserables where he ravages the rich people, calling them “tigerish,” (Dickens 33) following the lord “ignorancem” (Dickens 33) and saying that they “held life as of no account,” (Dickens 221) right? Wrong. Yes, A Tale of Two Cities is a book by Dickens mostly about the poor people and the French Revolution (that isn’t Les Miserables) wherein he makes metaphorically eviscerates the rich people, but these are all references to the poor, the downtrodden, the little guy, in short, the people we and Dickens are supposed to root for. Dickens, for a genuine friend of the poor, as shown in his books A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, and Oliver Twist, and as someone who wrote to the masses, disparages the poor quite a bit in A Tale of Two Cities. In the words of Frederick Busch “[Dickens] fears revolution, … the downtrodden in revolt become, to Dickens, downright revolting.” It is not that the gentry in A Tale of Two Cities are the protagonists; rather, that the poor are antagonists as well. To sum, when blood rains from the sky, no one’s hands are clean.
Brave New World, a novel written by Aldous Huxley, can be compared and contrasted with an episode of The Twilight Zone, a fantasy, science-fiction television series, called “Number 12 Looks Just Like You.” Brave New World is a highly regarded and renowned work of literature as The Twilight Zone is considered one of the greatest television series of all time. Brave New World and The Twilight Zone’s episode “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” can be compared and contrasted on the basis of science, youth, and the government.
On The Road is an autobiographical first-person book written in 1951 and based on Kerouac's experiences of the late 1940's. At the time, America was undergoing drastic changes and the sense of sterility brought on by a mechanized Cold War era society resu lted in a feeling of existential dislocation for many. Numerous Americans began to experience a sense of purposelessness and the air was rife with disillusionment. Kerouac was one of these restless postwar young people and he longed for...something. A n ew kind of hero? A return to a Romantic tradition and simpler days? When Kerouac met Neal Cassady, he knew Cassady was the kind of hero he had been seeking. Eventually, as Robert Hipkiss notes, "Kerouac began to see Neal as an 'archetypal American Man' "....and, in fact, when Kerouac created Dean Moriarty out of Neal, "he created a new symbol of flaming American youth, the American hero of the Beat Generation" (32-3). Indeed, as Hipkiss argues, Dean Moriarty
The nineteenth century was a time of economic, technologic, and population growth. These changes created problems in everyone’s daily lives. Two examples of things that affected the lives of many were disease and sanitation. Disease and sanitation led to high mortality rates in Nineteenth- Century England. This relates to North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell as it takes place during nineteenth century England and multiple characters died presumably due to disease.
John Steinbeck lead a life filled with words, from his award winning novels to the hundreds letters he wrote to friends during his career. He was born in Salinas, California on February 27, 1902, and lived there for the first sixteen years of his life until he graduated from Salinas High School in 1918. He took classes at Stanford, but spent more of his college years working to pay tuition than then he spent in the classroom. 1924 brought his first publication, two short stories in the Standford Spectator, but in 1925 he left his schooling and went to New York for a time. By 1926, he was back in California and his first book, Cup of Gold, was published the year the of great stock market crash, but had little success. In 1930, he married Carol Henning, and the two lived in Pacific Grove, CA for the next several years. These years were lean; Steinbeck was having trouble selling his work, even with the help of his literary agents, McIntosh and Otis. Often, selling a short story for 50$ or so was the difference between eating or not.
In many works of literature a character conquers great obstacles to achieve a worthy goal. Sometimes the obstacles are personal impediment, at other times it consists of the attitude and beliefs of others. In the book The Stranger by Albert Camus, shows the character Meursault who is an emotionless character that let’s other people show their opinions and emotions into him giving him a type of feeling even if Meursault doesn’t care. Meursault contains occasion of his emotional indifference between his friends and social indifference. This essay will be about the character’s struggle contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole.
Charles Dickens, a very successful writer who was born in 1812, wrote many famous novels during his life. Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities about the French Revolution in 1859, sixty years after it ended, and was still able to capture so many details in the captivating yet heartbreaking novel. Dickens’ usage of many symbols and metaphors throughout the novel is extremely effective. Through these symbols, Dickens skillfully incorporates various themes in the story. Fate is a significant theme that he expresses by using the symbols of the shadow, knitting, and fountains.
The Old Man and the Sea is novella written by Ernest Hemingway in 1952. It tells the epic journey and struggles of the old fisherman, Santiago, and his younger fishing partner, Manolin. The story goes into detail the day to day life struggles that a fisherman off the coast of Africa endures. The majority of the story focuses on one particular trip out sea. In life, one will go through a number of stages in life. Infancy, Youth , Adulthood, and Old Age are all key stages. As one grows, they mature through these various stages. When one reaches old age, there is often a lot of doubt surrounding their lives. Serenity, and independence are often the two most questioned. These are some questions that Santiago has to ask himself as well.