The Russian writer is the main representative of socialist realism. Maxim Gorky himself proclaimed this art form at the Congress of the Soviet Union of Writers. His early literary work is influenced by Russian Romanticism. He then turned to realistic storytelling, which helped him to succeed from the start. In the years from 1906 to 1911 Maxim Gorky politicized his works. In it he turned against the petty bourgeoisie. In addition to novels, Gorki also wrote literary and culturally critical essays…

Maxim Gorky was born the son of a carpenter in Nsini Novgorod on March 28, 1868.

His real name is Alexei Maximowitsch Peschkow. Maxim Gorki lost his father when he was only five years old in 1873. He spent his childhood and youth with his grandfather. In the years 1877-1879 he attended a school. Then, with the death of his mother in 1879, according to his grandfather’s will, he had to earn his own living. Over the next few years, Gorki held various jobs, such as baker, errand boy, dock worker and dishwasher.

In 1884 he moved to Kazan with the plan to study at the university. But he abandoned this plan. Gorky made contact with a group of Marxists. In 1888 he was accused of political activity and arrested. There followed constant observations by the police. In the two years 1891 and 1892 he went looking for work and wandered through the Volga region, the Ukraine, the Crimea and the Caucasus. In 1892 his first story “Makar Tschudra” was published under the stage name “Gorki”, which means something like “the bitter one”.

In the years from 1894 to 1901 further stories like “Tschelka” (1894) followed. They are written in the style of Russian Romanticism, despite its “Gorki” label. Tramps and adventurers are mostly the heroes in these works. This made Maxim Gorki one of the first writers in Russia to address the disadvantaged, the proletariat. In 1899 the writer moved to Petersburg. He made close acquaintances with members of revolutionary circles and sided with the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDRP).

Between 1899 and 1900 he met the writers Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy, with whom he became friends. In 1900 he founded the publishing house “Wissen” and became its director. In 1901 his revolutionary poetry work “The Song of the Storm Bird” was published in the Marxist magazine “Leben”. As a result, Gorky was arrested again. In 1902 his first drama entitled “Kleinbourger” came onto the market. The dramatic work “Nachtasyl” followed, which became a worldwide success. “Nachtasyl” was performed in the year of its publication at the Moscow Art Theater and a year later at the Small Theater of Max Reinhardt.

During the period of protest against the government of the Russian tsar, Maxim Gorki made social conditions the subject of his dramas. The writer found sufficient material in the Russian Revolution to determine the literary plots of his works. In 1902 he was admitted to the Russian Academy of Sciences, but a year later the admission was revoked for political reasons. In 1905 Gorky made the acquaintance of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, which then became a friendship. In the same year he took part in the protest actions and was arrested again.

Under pressure from the world public, he was released again. In 1906 he undertook a trip to the USA on behalf of the party with the purpose of providing material and political support for the revolution. It was there that the narrative work “Mother”, a novel about the proletariat, was written. Gorky processed his travel experiences in the title “The City of the Devil”. In the years 1906 to 1913 he had to go into exile on Capri. After that he returned to Russia. Between 1913 and 1923 he published his autobiographical trilogy “Childhood”, “Among Strangers” and “My Universities”. Maxim Gorky spoke out against Russian interference in World War I.

He rejected the assumption of power by the Bolsheviks in November 1917. Gorky publicly criticized Lenin’s widespread acts of terror and persecution. Censorship introduced in 1918 silenced him. In 1919, Maxim Gorky took part in the creation of the Leningrad Gorky Theater. In 1921 the poet went into exile a second time in Sorrento. The novel “The Work of Artamonov” was written in 1925 and, like many other works, deals with the fragility of Russian society. In 1931 he returned to Russia. Due to disagreements with Josef V. Stalin, the writer was forbidden to leave Russia.

In 1934 Gorky became the first chairman of the Russian Writers’ Union. He called for a literature in the spirit of socialist realism. He himself wrote his works in this style and is considered its most important representative with a strong role model character.

Maxim Gorky died in Moscow on June 18, 1936 under mysterious circumstances. These circumstances have not been clarified to this day. The suspicion is still being voiced that the writer was murdered by the Russian secret service.

What was Maxim Gorky famous for?

Gorky’s most famous works are his early short stories, written in the 1890s (“Chelkash”, “Old Izergil”, and “Twenty-Six Men and a Girl”); plays The Philistines (1901), The Lower Depths (1902) and Children of the Sun (1905); a poem, “The Song of the Stormy Petrel” (1901); his autobiographical trilogy, My Childhood.

How was Maxim Gorky involved in the Russian revolution?

He opposed the Bolshevik seizure of power during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and went on to attack the victorious Lenin’s dictatorial methods in his newspaper Novaya zhizn (“New Life”) until July 1918, when his protests were silenced by censorship on Lenin’s orders.

What is the meaning of Maxim Gorky?

Definitions of Maxim Gorki. Russian writer of plays and novels and short stories; noted for his depiction of social outcasts.

Why was Maxim Gorky exiled from Russia?

His efforts, however, were thwarted by figures such as Lenin and Grigory Zinovyev, a close ally of Lenin’s who was the head of the Petrograd Bolsheviks. In 1921 Lenin sent Gorky into exile under the pretext of Gorky’s needing specialized medical treatment abroad.

Pop culture has always loved him. The American singer Patti Smith quoted Rimbaud in her songs and last year she even bought the house in France where he wrote his wildest poems. Bob Dylan, the Doors or Kurt Cobain and before that Benjamin Britten, Luigi Nono and Paul Hindemith included the poetry of the young Frenchman in their music, as did Fernand Léger in his work. Rimbaud had not the slightest interest in the glittering world of the general public. He was more of the nerd who created his work lonely and mostly alone, immersed himself in the abysses of poetry and came to completely new insights.

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1991) was aware early on of his destiny as a gifted man. As the best student on a regular basis, often outperforming his classmates in competitions, he was the pride of his mother, who was hoping for a great career for her offspring. He grew up in the French provinces near the Belgian border, in Charleville on the banks of the Meuse. Because his father left the family early, Rimbaud grew up with his mother Vitalie and his siblings in a Catholic upbringing. He didn’t have to spend any time studying at school, he was able to do everything immediately; he won prize after prize at school and excelled at composing Latin and Greek poetry. Since everything was so easy for him, he quickly began to search for more – defiance and rebellion arose in him, which Rimbaud indicated in his youthful poem “Seven Years Old Poet”: “The mother closed the exercise book, Very proud and simple / She now stood up and went. Oh, she didn’t notice/ what his clear forehead, his black eyes said,/ how disgust gnawed at the child’s soul./ during the day, yes, he’s very obedient, clever/ he is; and yet, many a dark, strange trait/ He often speaks of evil hypocrisy…” He realizes that he is different, and what happens in these few lines is typical of all of Rimbaud’s later poetry: his work circles about his own person, he does not disregard himself and thus creates himself as his work.

This gesture is reinforced by Georges Izambard, who, a few years older than Rimbaud himself, comes to Rimbaud’s school in 1870 and becomes his teacher. The well-read Izambard opened up a new literary world for Rimbaud, into which the fifteen-year-old with the angelic face dives willingly. The two soon see each other outside of school; Rimbaud uses the teacher’s apartment, to which he has a key, as a reading refuge. Here he also finds books that his mother finds unfathomable and from which she wanted to protect him. When he brought home “The Miserables” by Victor Hugo, she felt compelled to write a letter of complaint to Izambard because “great caution is required in the choice of books to put into the hands of children”. Izambard, however, was undeterred after a conversation with his mother and gave his pupil what he wanted to read.

During these months a second feature of Rimbaud’s, his wanderlust, became apparent. When his younger brother managed to register as a volunteer in 1870, Rimbaud also believed he could leave home and boarded a train to Paris without a ticket, which resulted in a brief stay in prison. Izambard redeemed it with money. It was the first of several escapes and a prelude to Rimbaud’s stays in Africa, the idea of ​​which he developed when he later roamed the docks of London with his poet friend Verlaine and heard stories from the sailors about distant lands. But at the age of 16 and 17, the young poet had his darkest experiences.

Rimbaud saw himself as a seer. He considered himself superior to contemporary poets and despised their rhymes. “I am someone else”, he wrote in the “Letter of a Seer” to Izambard: “It is wrong to say: I think, one should rather say: one thinks me.” A higher voice speaks through the poet, that is to say, even against his will – making verses is not workshop art, as it is still often understood today – the conscious creation of poems. But Rimbaud used all available means to let himself be carried into a mood of eternity, with drugs and alcohol, but especially with occult literature. He had not yet discovered Christianity as a possible path, but his inner struggle for God began to show itself.

The search for the new poetry also included his discovery of Baudelaire (1821–1867), about whom Rimbaud writes: “But since seeing the invisible and hearing the unheard is something other than the descriptive rendering of dead things, Baudelaire is the first seer , king of poets, a true god. Unfortunately, he lived in too artificial an environment, and his much-vaunted literary form is banal. Unknown discoveries call for new literary forms.” And Rimbaud goes on to explain: “If all the old fools had not clung to the wrong conception of self, we would not need to sweep away the millions of skeletons who from time immemorial have amassed the products of their one-eyed intellect , which they are still proud of.” Rimbaud wanted to destroy the ego in order to build a new life, a new world, on its ashes. And he gave himself up to this search unreservedly, unlike Baudelaire, who, although he also threw himself into intoxication and drugs, but whose Catholicism led him to warn those around him against excess. But Rimbaud wanted to become the highest sage at all costs, “le supreme savant”.

Irish Rimbaud biographer Enid Starkie has followed his dark ways, who believed the world hungered for a new poet to guide humanity. Thus Rimbaud came across the writings of magicians and alchemists, from whom he hoped liberation for mankind and inspirational confusion of the senses. Among the authors he read was the historian Jules Michelet, who saw European history as dominated by wizards and witches rather than by the church. This also included the Kabbalist Éliphas Lévi, according to whom the magician had to reach the “point central” that enabled him to become a “thaumaturge” and thus become the master of the world. For a time, Rimbaud really believed he was on this path with his poetry, because nature obeyed him with the creation of new plants, colors and worlds. He hoped to be able to reconcile Christ and Satan, which Michelet thought only the church had stopped until now, and Rimbaud believed that this would bring about a new world order. Similar to what Picasso would later say, “For me, a picture is the sum total of destruction”, Baudelaire already had the art of “deforming” the real. Rimbaud made this the main thing, so that the orders change, “plains, deserts, horizons become the red dress of thunderstorms”, where a July morning tastes of wintry ash, or would the poets only have the “roses, those puffed-up roses/ Red on Laurel stems / And thousands of swollen octaves”. With Mallarmé, too, it is not about superficial understanding, but rather about the meaning of the poem, about which he wrote in an essay in 1896: “To name a thing means to spoil three-quarters of the enjoyment of a poem; enjoyment consists in gradual guessing; suggesting the thing, here lies the goal.” In German poetry, Georg Trakl and Gottfried Benn will follow Rimbaud.

The intensive mixing of alchemical knowledge and insights into poetry led Rimbaud to the poem “Vowels”: “A black E white I red U green O blue – vowels/ One day I will reveal your dark origins:/ A: black velvety armor of dense flocks of mosquitoes / Those whizzing over cruel stinks, shadowy parts.// E: Brightness of vapors and taut lines/ Spears of proud glaciers, shining princes blow from umbels/ I: Blood spat out purple, laughter of the fair ones/ In anger and in the drunkenness of torments… The colors dissolve images and reassemble them – in alchemy the completed work was seen as God’s vision. And yet the poems are a unique document of homelessness, which for Rimbaud even encompasses the Christian world.

Rimbaud’s collection of poems A Time in Hell (Une Saison en Enfer), in which he fought out his struggle for God, is most relevant to this feeling. It was probably above all his pride and his youthful defiance that led him to rebel against the faith. But the contradiction stands entirely under the auspices of faith, and he was never really able to escape from this. He dealt with God, faith and life in these poems. The French poet Paul Claudel wrote about Rimbaud: “Arthur Rimbaud is not a poet, he is not a writer. He is a prophet upon whom the Spirit descended, not like David, but like Saul. Such was this horror, this curse, from which he, like Jonah, sought to escape by blasphemy and flight.” A boy of 18 brings us “the most heartbreaking sob that mankind has heard since the days of Ephraim and Judah, the message of paradisiacal purity, in the midst of a dull world wallowing in an outrageous materialism.”

Rimbaud was baptized and he felt the original sin in himself. In his rebellion against God’s love, he recognizes his weakness: “The skin on my head is shrinking. Mercy! Lord I’m scared. I’m thirsty, I’m so thirsty! Oh! childhood, the grass, the rain, the sea over the pebbles, moonlight when the bell struck twelve… The devil sits in the belfry, at this hour. Maria! Holy Virgin! … Terrible, my stupidity!”

Rimbaud sees himself in another hell for all his vices, for anger, arrogance, laziness, and is afraid of losing eternity forever if he persists in his defiance. At the end of the “time in hell” he gains hope and sees a new morning, and so a poem is called, “Morning”: “When will I, across all shores and mountains, greet the birth of the new work, the new one Wisdom, the flight of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition and worship – first! – Christmas on earth?” Rimbaud hoped for universal love, which, in contrast to the idea of ​​progress in industrialization, should lead to progress in sympathy and compassion for people.

And yet he wanted to turn his back on Europe, the West. He starts anew with the indigenous peoples of Africa, where he assumed the original life to be, just as he had been looking for the origins of poetry before. His past was repugnant to him, after the failed hope of being able to realize a poet’s life in Paris. The perpetually impoverished Rimbaud, in his tattered clothes, had quickly come across as a tramp in Parisian society, and he did nothing to dispel that impression. The fact that he interjected “merde” after every verse at a poetry reading led to his being banned from the house – he was marginalized, but he felt poetically superior and his contemporaries felt that. The belated disgust after being seduced by Verlaine and their two trips to London made it even easier for Rimbaud to say goodbye.

At the age of 19, Rimbaud gave up his poetry and began his life as a wanderer between the worlds. He visited Cairo, Alexandria, Java and tried his luck as a trader in Ethiopia, Abyssinia and Yemen. In the meantime, he tried to become a roofer, bricklayer, blacksmith or glassblower on his travels, had books sent to him from home to familiarize himself with them, but he failed, just like he did as a dealer, because he simply didn’t have the necessary experience and negotiating skills. But now, in the real world beyond poetry, a whole new trait in Rimbaud became clear. He was what he often wrote about in his poetry, the compassionate, generous man. In the regions of Africa where he stayed he was well known as the one who gave away his money to the poor and who was so soft on supplicants that he hardly had enough for himself and never nearly managed to make ends meet he had always wished for. And so he had to work hard, often at great risk to his own life, when he rode through desert regions for weeks with a caravan of camels because he wanted to do business with a tribal chief, who was then three days’ journey away when Rimbaud was at his goal arrived. “I do good,” he once said in Harar, Ethiopia, “when the opportunity presents itself, it is indeed my only pleasure.”

Rimbaud fell ill. At first only the knee hurt, then the leg with unbearable pain. He had to leave Africa, traveled to Marseille, where the leg was amputated at the Immaculate Conception Hospital. He never recovered and drove home in agony until he was convinced that only the warmth of Africa could heal him. So he traveled south again with his sister Isabelle, but only ended up in the same hospital as far as Marseille. She prayed with him a lot and after the absolution the priest who had been waiting outside said to her: “What did you tell me, child? Your brother don’t believe? I have seldom seen a faith as strong as his.” Rimbaud kept asking his sister if she believed, and she said yes, one must believe. He: “Then the room has to be prepared. The priest comes back with the sacrament. You’ll see how it will be. They bring candles and beautiful lace. White blankets still belong everywhere. Am I so ill?” This conversion has been the ultimate surrender of his pride. In his last days, the hardness is said to have fallen off him and his face to have taken on the expression of spirituality.

Rimbaud died on November 10, 1891. He no longer wanted to answer the letters from Paris that the enthusiastic discoverers of his work had written to him in his last months to celebrate him as the great poet of our time. Poetry had become too far away for him, and his hope of drawing a new will to live from “new love, precisely from charity” was too close, as his biographer Yves Bonnefoy describes Rimbaud’s struggle against the misery of life.

What is Rimbaud famous for?

Arthur Rimbaud, in full Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud, (born October 20, 1854, Charleville, France—died November 10, 1891, Marseille), French poet and adventurer who won renown in the Symbolist movement and markedly influenced modern poetry.

What is Arthur Rimbaud most famous poem?

In a burst of self-confidence, Rimbaud composed “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”). This is perhaps his finest poem, and one that clearly demonstrates what his method could achieve.

Who shot Arthur Rimbaud?

On the morning of 10 July 1873, Paul Verlaine left the Brussels hotel room he shared with his lover, Arthur Rimbaud, and bought a gun. Returning to find Rimbaud packing his bags, he fired two shots, bringing a tempestuous love affair between two of France’s greatest literary heroes to a dramatic close.

What was the prophecy of Rimbaud?

In the May 15, 1871 letter he says that “Viendront d’autres horribles travailleurs” (Other horrible workers will come along)—a prophetic assertion of his role as initiator of a process that would continue long after he himself had ceased writing.

Why did Verlaine shot Rimbaud?

Verlaine bought the 7mm six-shooter in Brussels on the morning of 10 July 1873, determined to put an end to a torrid two-year affair with his teenage lover. The 29-year-old poet had abandoned his young wife and child to be with Rimbaud, who would later become a symbol of rebellious youth.

Was Rimbaud a genius?

But Rimbaud ran away from his deeds as a literary genius and homewrecker for a life as a marginally successful gunrunner in Africa. By the time of his death at 37, his books A Season in Hell and Illuminations were already gaining status as treasures of Western literature.

Why is Rimbaud so good?

Two qualities that mark almost all aspects of these works are youthful passion and aggression. In addition, Rimbaud’s writing is also rich in symbolism and metaphor, so skilfully applied that many a poet still adopts his techniques. Another feature of his work is a gleeful arrogance worthy of his young age.

What happened to Rimbaud?

He received the last rites from a priest before dying on 10 November 1891, at the age of 37. The remains were sent across France to his home town and he was buried in Charleville-Mézières.

He revolutionized the novel, but also wrote for Hollywood, he exposed the abysses of the American southern states – but he himself resided in the villa of a slave owner. William Faulkner was as contradictory as his characters.

Stockholm, December 8, 1950: William Faulkner stands on the podium in the auditorium of the Swedish Academy. A small man with a mustache and icy hair. He has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Faulkner wears tails, as was proper at the time, not his characteristic coarse tweed suit. He reads from the sheet. One seems to see his discomfort: William Faulkner never looked up during his speech. A man of the word, but not of the spoken. And certainly none for the podium, the world stage.

From the losers of modernization

No wonder, because the world Faulkner calls home is the world of the American South. More precisely: the small town of Oxford, Mississippi, where he has spent most of his life. The former wealth of the US state was earned at the expense of the black slaves who had to toil on the cotton plantations.
After the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, Mississippi experienced an unprecedented economic decline – the competitive advantage of cheap labor was gone. William Faulkner was born into this world in 1897. It shapes his novels: the guilt of white people for building their wealth on slavery. And the inability to get over defeat in the civil war.

Revolutionary storytelling

By the time the Nobel Prize was awarded, Faulkner had long since passed his prime as a writer. His two great novels were published 20 and 13 years earlier respectively. “Noise and madness”, the grandiose early work, a family history composed like a mosaic from different narrative perspectives. And “Absalom! Absalom!”, Faulkner’s Opus Magnum: also a family story, spanning several generations, also told from different perspectives. And at the same time the story of a fictional county in Mississippi, from settlement in the 1830s to the beginning of the 20th century.

“Noise and madness” consists of four chapters. Each has a different narrator with a different perspective and style of speaking. In 1929, when “Noise and madness” was published, this narrative structure was revolutionary. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf have already worked with the narrative technique of the stream of consciousness, in which the events are only described indirectly: through the thoughts, feelings and memories of the characters in the novel.

But Faulkner goes a few steps further: he creates the narrators extremely differently, fragments the chronological sequence and leaves the reader with key events and information important for understanding. This creates a mosaic that can only be deciphered in retrospect.

This polyphony is a hallmark of Faulkner’s style, Watson explains: “In doing so, he paid tribute to the fact that no one tells stories or even thinks them in a continuous and linear manner. That knowledge unfolds in spurts, just like stories. Faulkner had a basic understanding of the crisis of the ego. The ego is a dynamic phenomenon, constantly pressed, tense, contradictory, irrepressible, divided within itself. Faulkner portrayed this conflict in all of his novels.”

Contradiction between artist and citizen

As Bill Griffith knows, that didn’t exactly make him popular in his hometown of Oxford: “He wrote about things that other people here weren’t even willing to talk about, about racism, violence, adultery, about sin, debauchery and drunkenness. All of these things were not edifying and, according to popular belief at the time, should not be in novels.”

Griffith is curator at Rowan Oak, the antebellum home that William Faulkner bought in 1930 and where he lived until his death in 1961. Rowan Oak was built in 1844 by a cotton baron who owned numerous plantations down in the Mississippi Delta. He had made his fortune by exploiting black slaves.

“It’s the most fascinating contradiction in his life,” says Faulkner connoisseur Jay Watson. “In his novels and short stories, houses like this suffer terrible fates. They burn down, they fall into disrepair, the owners are evicted. As an artist he understood the compromised mansions of the early slaveholders, but as a citizen of Oxford he wanted to benefit from the status they promised in the society of the time. Basically, two completely different people lived there.”

Literally an anti-racist, politically a redneck

As much as Faulkner saw and described the abysses of Southern society, he was shaped by it himself. Not only in his way of life, as Griffith explains: “His financial situation was always tense. Faulkner had an idea of ​​what a southern gentleman should have and do. And that’s what he cultivated: the posh lifestyle of the old South.”

Politically, too, in the 1950s he made strong those positions that he questioned in his books: “I was against enforced racial segregation. Now I am just as strongly opposed to forced racial integration,” Faulkner wrote in an open letter dated March 5, 1956. Three months earlier, later Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott in response to the arrest of an African-American activist who refused to give up her seat on a bus for a white man.

Emmett Till, an African American teenager, was murdered in the summer of 1955. The killers, two white men, were acquitted by an all-white jury despite overwhelming evidence. Faulkner explicitly mentions the murder of Emmett Till in his letter. And describes it as the logical consequence of a Supreme Court ruling that found racial segregation in schools unconstitutional.

For William Faulkner, the civil rights movement would have been an opportunity to take sides in a just cause. Instead, he indulges in letters and interviews in crude historical theses, in paternalistic language and racist thoughts. He even announces that if in doubt he will “fight” for Mississippi and that he is willing to shoot black people to do so.

Writing against the lynching

In contrast to such statements is a novel like “Dust Grip”, published in 1948, which tells the story of a false suspicion: Lucas Beauchamp, an African-American plantation owner, is said to have murdered a white forest worker. A white mob then formed who wanted to lynch Beauchamp, i.e. hang him or burn him. Lynchings were common practice in rural areas of the United States well into the 1950s. Victims are mostly African American. According to estimates, a total of 4800 since the end of the American Civil War, 800 of them in Mississippi alone.

Finally, in the novel, a young white man whom Beauchamp once rescued from a creek proves his innocence. With an African American friend, he digs up the coffin of the forest worker. But the coffin is empty. The brother of the forest worker is finally arrested as the murderer.

Hollywood has made his writing more pictorial

At this time, Faulkner was already familiar with the film business: In 1931, William Falkner worked in Hollywood for the first time. As a screenwriter, like many writers of his time. The film industry promised good and, above all, fast and secure money – in contrast to months, sometimes years of lonely work on the next book, without the certainty of whether it will succeed or be a success. He worked on 20 films, seven of his own works were filmed during his lifetime.

In addition, he is also involved in the classics of film history – such as the cloak-and-dagger-schmonzette “The Love Adventures of Don Juan” or the monumental film “Land of the Pharaohs” – whose stories are far removed from the small world of his books, even if Faulkner negotiated major and, above all, universal issues there.

Nevertheless, his Hollywood experience has also shaped Faulkner’s literary and artistic work, says Jay Watson: “Literary scholars have worked out in studies that the visual dimension of his novels changed after Faulkner was in Hollywood for the first time. After that, he developed his stories more from images and less from sounds, as he did in the beginning when he was even more involved in the oral tradition of the South.”

Time for a Faulkner renaissance

Faulkner’s last novel came out in 1961: “The Reivers” takes place in Memphis, in the milieu of prostitutes and gamblers. The following year he suffered a serious riding accident, he had trained for weeks for a hunt. “He drank day and night to endure the pain in the weeks that followed,” says Bill Griffith. “Three weeks later, on July 6, 1962, he was not feeling well. He was admitted to a hospital. The next day he had a heart attack and died.”

William Faulkner was only 64 years old. His oeuvre spans 19 novels and has put the small town of Oxford, Mississippi on the literary map of the world. His early death can also be attributed to his lifestyle, says Griffith: “Faulkner smoked, drank and ate fried foods every day. You didn’t get older than 64 at the time. William Faulkner wasn’t alive for a long time, but it was a good one.”

While William Faulkner had a major influence on German post-war literature, on Heinrich Böll, Siegfried Lenz and Uwe Johnson, his novels are rarely read today, and not just in this country. Jay Watson thinks it’s time for a renaissance – right now, especially today: “Faulkner brings us closer to the dilemma of people who are confronted with dynamic transformation processes and abrupt changes. And that’s something that shapes our world today even more than the world he wrote about.”

What is William Faulkner best known for?

William Faulkner wrote numerous novels, screenplays, poems, and short stories. Today he is best remembered for his novels The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), and Absalom, Absalom!

What did William Faulkner win the Nobel Prize for?

The 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded the American author William Faulkner (1897–1962) “for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.” “for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.” The prize was awarded in 1950.

What does William Faulkner write about?

Faulkner became known for his faithful and accurate dictation of Southern speech. He also boldly illuminated social issues that many American writers left in the dark, including slavery, the “good old boys” club and Southern aristocracy.

What was William Faulkner’s writing style?

Stylistically, Faulkner is best known for his complex sentence structure. Generally, the more complex the sentence structure, the more psychologically complex a character’s thoughts.

What is William Faulkner most famous book?

• The Sound and the Fury 1929
• As I Lay Dying 1930
• A Rose for Emily 1930
• Light in August 1932
• Absalom, Absalom! 1936
• Barn Burning 1939

What is the best William Faulkner book to read first?

As I Lay Dying affords the reader, especially a first-time reader of Faulkner, more breathing space than a lot of Faulkner’s works do, and that is why I feel it is a perfect place to start with him.

What do I need to know before reading Faulkner?

• Be patient. Think of a Faulkner text as a suspense or mystery story — but with you the reader, instead of a character, as the detective.
• Be willing to re-read.
• Focus on the characters.
• Identify the historical context of the work.
• Look for the timeless tales.

Why should I read The Sound and the Fury?

With multiple narrators, narration styles, and dates, this story is bound to make your head spin at times (which might sound awful, but it’s actually really thought-provoking and fascinating and fun).

What should I read if I like Faulkner?

• Sherman Alexie.
• Sylvia Plath.
• Kate Chopin.
• James Joyce.
• Alice Walker.
• Emily Dickinson.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne.
• James Baldwin.

What are the first two books written by William Faulkner?

He then held various jobs in New York and Mississippi until 1924. Faulkner’s first published novel, Soldier’s Pay (1926), drew on his experiences in World War I (1914–1918), while Mosquitoes (1927) examined literary life in New Orleans (in 1925, Faulkner lived there with the writer Sherwood Anderson).

Above all, the English writer, linguist and literary scholar wrote epic works about a fantasy world that he equipped with Norse and Celtic mythologies. From 1920 to 1925 he was a lecturer in English at Leeds; from 1925 to 1959 professor of Germanic philology at Oxford. His most famous work is the novel trilogy “The Lord of the Rings” (German: The Lord of the Rings, 1954/1955). John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who was highly controversial in literary criticism, thus advanced to become a cult author in hippie culture. The fantastic-monmental story about “hobbits”, “orcs”, “elves” and dwarves in a fairytale world called “middle-earth” gave plenty of impetus to fantasy literature. The central theme of his works is the struggle of good against evil…

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa, to Arthur Tolkien and his wife Mable.

Tolkien moved to England with his mother and younger brother Hilary in 1896 because the brother did not like the climate there. His father died in South Africa of rheumatic fever. The family moved to Searhole, the father’s hometown. The environment there later inspired Tolkien to describe landscapes in his books. In 1904 the mother died. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and his brother were raised by a priest in Birmingham. Tolkien went to King Edwards School there. Already at this time the boy was particularly interested in ancient languages. After school, a scholarship enabled him to study Old Welsh, Finnish, English and Literature at Exeter College.

In 1915 he finished his studies. The following year he married Edith Bratt, whom he had known since childhood. In 1916 he experienced the First World War in France as a soldier. He fell ill with trench fever and was released from military service. In 1920 he accepted a professorship at the University of Leeds. There he taught as a lecturer in Old English languages. In 1925 he became a professor at Oxford University, where he taught and researched until his retirement in 1959. J.R.R. Tolkien earned a reputation as an internationally recognized luminary in his field. He invented the first fantasy stories as bedtime stories for his son Christopher. He soon wrote them down. In this way Tolkien created his two most important works entitled “The Hobbit” (1937) and “The Lord of the Rings” (1954/1955).

Tolkien’s fantastic fairy tales, novels and short stories revolve around the imaginary world of Middle-earth. The novel trilogy “The Lord of the Rings” is the continuation of the title “The Hobbit”. The trilogy consists of the following parts: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King : “The return of the King”. “The Lord of the Rings” is about the battle between good and evil powers. In a fantastic mythological plot, the exciting fairy tale is told about a ring that gives the wearer absolute power. In order to fully understand the story, the previous work “The Hobbit” must be known. Tolkien moved to Bournemourth with his wife. After her death in 1971, Tolkien returned to Oxford.

Tolkien’s last work, the story The Silmarillion, was published by his son in 1977. This tale is about the mythological beginnings of Middle-earth and the development of its peoples. The reader learns a lot of background information about the novel “The Lord of the Rings”. The volume entitled “Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middleearth” was only edited by Tolkien’s son after his death and published in 1980. The work contains some stories, but they are not related to each other. To J.R.R. Tolkien’s complete works also include technical papers and various essays. Tolkien was awarded the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth in 1972, making him Commander of the British Empire.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien died in Bournemouth on September 2, 1973.

What did J.R.R. Tolkien?

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE, was a British writer and philologist. His novel The Lord of the Rings is one of the most successful books of the 20th century and is considered a seminal work of modern fantasy literature.

What does J.R.R. Tolkien?

J.R.R. Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892. He is considered one of the most respected philologists in the world, but he is best known for being the creator of Middle-earth and the author of the legendary The Lord of the Rings. His books have been translated into more than 80 languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide.

Why did J.R.R. Tolkien Lord of the Rings?

Thus, in the late 1930s, Tolkien began writing the story of the Great War of the Ring, in which Frodo, Bilbo’s nephew, along with his friends Merry, Pippin and Sam, made the perilous journey to Mount Doom to destroy the Ring of Power forever and so that ward off evil from Middle-earth.

What were the interests of J.R.R. Tolkien?

He delves into the study of Middle English literature and devotes himself in particular to “Beowulf”, which is considered the oldest non-ecclesiastical work in the English language. Meanwhile, Tolkien has also made a name for himself as a linguist and philologist.

Who owns the rights to Lord of the Rings?

Middle-earth Enterprises, originally formed as Tolkien Enterprises, owns and markets the worldwide rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s works The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Based in Berkeley, California.

How many books are there by Tolkien?

Over 50 more or less completed books, stories, essays and poems have now been published – and new ones are still being added.