Кризис традиционных ценностей и его отражение в литературе. Джером Сэлинджер, Рэй Брэдбери («451 градус по Фаренгейту»). Движение “битников”: Джек Керуак, Аллен Гинсберг

Salinger, Jerome David (1919-), American novelist and short story writer, known for his stories dealing with the intellectual and emotional struggles of adolescents who are alienated from the empty, materialistic world of their parents. Salinger's work is marked by a profound sense of craftsmanship, a keen ear for dialogue, and a deep awareness of the frustrations of life in America after World War II (1939-1945).

Jerome David Salinger was born and raised in New York City. He began writing fiction as a teenager. After graduating from the Valley Forge Military Academy in 1936, he began studies at several colleges in the New York City area, but he took no degree. He did, however, take a fiction writing class with Whit Burnett, an editor of Story magazine, who encouraged Salinger and brought out his first published story, "The Young Folks" (1940).

Over the next several years Salinger contributed short stories to popular magazines continuing to produce work even while serving in combat during World War II as a staff sergeant in the United States Army from 1942 to 1946. After returning to civilian life, Salinger continued to achieve success with his short stories, many of which were drawn from his war experiences.

At the age of 31, Salinger gained a major place in American fiction with the publication of his only novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951). The book quickly earned a reputation as a quintessential American coming-of-age tale. In the early 1960s, Salinger virtually stopped writing for publication and disappeared from public view into his rural New Hampshire home. In an interview that he granted during the 1970s, Salinger maintained that he continues to write daily, and has merely rejected publication as "a terrible invasion of his privacy." Salinger’s reclusiveness added to his cult status.

The Catcher in the Rye is narrated by Holden Caulfield, a 16-year-old boy who has just flunked out of his third private boarding school. Unwilling to remain at school until the end of the term, Holden runs away to New York City. He does not contact his parents, who live there, but instead drifts around the city for two days. The bulk of the novel is an account, at once hilariously funny and tragically moving, of Holden's adventures in Manhattan. These include disillusioning encounters with two nuns, a suave ex-schoolmate, a prostitute named Sunny, and a sympathetic former teacher who may be homosexual. Finally, drawn by his affection for his ten-year-old sister, Phoebe, Holden abandons his spree and returns home.

Salinger's depiction of Holden Caulfield is considered one of the most convincing portrayals of an adolescent in literature. Intelligent, sensitive, and imaginative, Holden desires acceptance into the adult world even though he is sickened and obsessed by what he regards as its "phonies," including his teachers, parents, and his older brother. For all his surface toughness, Holden is painfully idealistic and longs for a moral purpose in life. He tells Phoebe that he wants to be “the catcher in the rye”—the defender of childhood innocence—who would stand in a field of rye where thousands of children are playing and “catch anybody if they start to go over the cliff.”

Nine Stories (1953), an anthology of stories, won great critical acclaim. Reviewing it for the New York Times, novelist Eudora Welty praised Salinger's writing as “original, first-rate, serious and beautiful.” In one of the stories, "A Beautiful Day for a Bananafish," the author introduces the fictional Glass family, an Irish-Jewish New York family with seven children. The family's saga, colored by the suicide of the precocious oldest son, Seymour, and informed by Salinger's growing interest in Zen Buddhism, would become the center of Salinger's work during the next decade. The title characters of the twin novellas Franny and Zooey (1961) are Glass children. Franny is a high-strung college student who feels alienated from the academic world in her desperate search for spiritual meaning in life. Her brother Zooey, by contrast, is a charming and warm easy-going television actor who has made his peace with the corruption he finds in the world. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), another pair of novellas published as a single volume, are both narrated by Franny and Zooey's older brother Buddy, a writer. Salinger has described Buddy as his alter-ego. All 11 of the Glass family stories originally appeared in The New Yorker.

Bradbury, Ray (Douglas) (1920- ), American writer of science fiction, best known for his novels and collections of short stories.

He often blends science fiction with social criticism and writes about the destructive tendency in humans to use technology at the expense of morality. His Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is the portrait of an autocratic society in which the government provides all information to its citizens via television and all books are banned and burned.

Born in Waukegan, Illinois, Bradbury was an imaginative child prone to nightmares and frightening fantasies, which he later drew on for his writing. He began writing at least four hours a day when he was 12 years old. He sold his first story in 1941 and became a full-time writer in 1943. The Martian Chronicles (1950), a novel about people colonizing Mars, is one of his best-known works. Bradbury has also written poetry and scripts for plays and films. Bradbury’s early works include The Illustrated Man (1951), Dandelion Wine (1957), and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962).

Kerouac, Jack (1922-1969), poet and novelist, leader and spokesman of the Beat movement.

Kerouac gave the Beat movement its name and celebrated its code of poverty and freedom in a series of novels of which the first and best known is On the Road (1957). Of French-Canadian descent, Kerouac learned English as a second language as a schoolboy. Discharged from the Navy during World War II as a schizoid personality, he served as a merchant seaman. Thereafter he roamed the United States and Mexico, working at a variety of jobs that included railroad man and forest ranger, before he published his first novel. Dissatisfied with fictional conventions, however, Kerouac developed a new, spontaneous, nonstop, unedited method of writing that shocked more polished writers. On the Road, written in three weeks, was the first product of the new style. A formless book, it deals with a number of frenetic trips back and forth across the country by a number of penniless young people who are in love with life, beauty, jazz, sex, drugs, speed, and mysticism but have absolute contempt for alarm clocks, timetables, road maps, mortgages, pensions, and all traditional American rewards for industry. The book drew the attention of the public to a widespread subterranean culture of poets, folksingers, hipsters, mystics, and eccentrics, including the writers Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, John Clellon Holmes, Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen, all important contributors to the Beat movement. All of Kerouac's works, including The Dharma Bums (1958), The Subterraneans (1958), Doctor Sax (1959), Lonesome Traveler (1960), and Desolation Angels (1965), are autobiographical, and most of them feature other prominent Beat writers as characters.

Ginsberg, Allen (1926-1997), American poet, regarded as the spokesman for the Beat Generation of the 1950s.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Ginsberg was educated at Columbia University. During his time in New York City he met Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, who would later become integral members of the Beat movement. After graduating from Columbia in 1948, Ginsberg worked at various jobs before moving to San Francisco in the early 1950s. There he met American poets such as Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti’s bookstore, City Lights, published Ginsberg’s first book, Howl (1956). Howl was initially seized by the government under obscenity charges, but the charges eventually were dropped, and the book is now recognized as the first important poem of the Beat movement. An angry indictment of America’s false hopes and broken promises, Howl uses vivid images and long, overflowing lines to illuminate Ginsberg’s thoughts. Howl and Ginsberg’s subsequent poetry show the influence of English poet William Blake (who Ginsberg claimed once spoke to him in a vision) and American poets Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. Ginsberg’s poetry is informal, discursive, and often repetitive. Its immediacy, honesty, and explicit sexual subject matter frequently give it an improvised quality.

Beginning in the late 1950s Ginsberg began to travel throughout the world, commonly giving public readings of his poetry. In the United States young people looked to Ginsberg as a guide through the turbulent 1960s, and although some of his early poems were written under the influence of drugs, in the early 1960s Ginsberg renounced drug use as a form of inspiration. His participation in political protests was reflected in his poetry. He often took up social causes such as gay rights and, later, environmental issues. Religious philosophy also influenced Ginsberg, and he drew on Jewish and Buddhist ideas in his work and in his lifestyle.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-06