The great gatsby

One afternoon late in October I saw Tom Buchanan. He was walking ahead of me along Fifth Avenue in his alert, aggressive way, his hands out a little from his body as if to fight off interference, his head moving sharply here and there, adapting itself to his restless eyes. Just as I slowed up to avoid overtaking him he stopped and began frowning into the window of a jewelry store. Suddenly he saw me and walked back, holding out his hand.

"What's the matter, Nick? Do you object to shaking hands with me?"

"Yes. You know what I think of you."

"You're crazy, Nick," he said quickly. "Crazy as hell. I don't know what's the matter with you."

"Tom," I inquired, "what did you say to Wilson that after­noon?"

He stared at me without a word, and I knew I had guessed right about those missing hours. I started to turn away, but he took a step after me and grabbed my arm.

"I told him the truth," he said. "He came to the door while we were getting ready to leave, and when I sent down word that we weren't in he tried to force his way upstairs. He was crazy enough to kill me if I hadn't told him who owned the car. His hand was on a revolver in his pocket every minute he was in the house-" He broke off defiantly. "What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy's, but he was a tough one. He ran over Myrtle like you'd run over a dog and never even stopped his car.

There was nothing I could say, except one unutterable fact that it wasn't true.

"And if you think I didn't have my share of suffering—look here, when I went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits there on the sideboard, I sat down and cried like a baby. By God it was awful—"

I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people. Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...

I shook hands with him, it seemed silly not to, for I felt sud­denly as though 1 were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewelry store to buy a pearl necklace—or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons—rid of my provincial squeamishness forever.

Questions and Tasks

1. To what generation did Fitzgerald belong?

2. How did years at Princeton influence Fitzgerald's views and character?

3. How did his literary career start?

4. What did he regret all his life?

5. Speak about Fitzgerald's works you have read.

6. What other writers of the "lost generation" do you know?

7. What is the life story of Jay Gatsby?

Ernest hemingway (1899 - 1961)

When the sad news of Hemingway's death was an­nounced in July, 1961 many people felt that the world had lost one of the most outstanding writers of the 20th century.

Few writers have lived as colorfully as Ernest Hemingway, whose career could have come out of one his adventurous novels.

Like Fitzgerald, Dreiser, and many other fine novelists of the 20th century, Hemingway came from the U.S. Midwest. He was born in Oak Park near Chicago, USA, in 1899. He began to write fiction in 1923, his first books were the reflection of his war experience. The novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) in which the anti-war protest is particularly powerful belong to this period.

As a boy, Hemingway spent much time hunting, fishing and exploring in the mild country of northern Michigan. Ernest was a skilful boxer and an excellent shot. Not once he ran away from home and tried different jobs which helped him to learn the gloomy side of life.

In later years, he was attracted to bullfighting in Spain, and big game-hunting in Africa. On a safari in Africa, he was badly injured when his small plane crashed; still, he continued to enjoy hunting and sport fishing, activities that inspired some of his best work. His observations provided background for many stories, in which he described man's courage in facing with strong physical forces. The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short poetic novel about a poor, old fisherman who heroically catches a huge fish devoured by sharks, won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953; the next year he received the Nobel Prize.

Hemingway was a brave soldier. He fought in Italy during World War I. He volunteered for an ambulance unit in France during World War I, but was wounded and hospitalized for six months.

In 1936—1938 he took part in the Spanish Civil War as a war correspondent. After the war, as a war correspondent based in Paris, he met expatriate American writers Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. Stein, in particular, influenced his spare style.

More than any­thing else he hated war and fascism. His impressions and his sympathies which were on the side of the Republi­cans — found reflection in the famous play The Fifth Column and in a number of short stories.

For many years Hemingway lived in Cuba and was a friend of the people of this beautiful island. His last works are Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952) which was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Hemingway's manner is characterized by deep psychologism. The inner world of human beings, their emotions are in the centre of his attention. His style is laconic and somewhat dry. Much more is implied than is expressed in plain words. This makes Hemingway a prominent short story writer.

Once he said: "The main critics of one's work are the mind and the heart. Perhaps the heart even more than the mind ... because the mind can sometimes agree to a compromise, but the heart — never! The truth — only the truth — that is what one must write."

Hemingway is arguably the most popular American novelist of this century. His sympathies are basically apolitical and humanistic, and in this sense he is universal. His simple style makes his novels easy to comprehend, and they are often set in exotic surroundings. A believer in the "cult of experience," Hemingway often involved his characters in dangerous situations in order to reveal their inner natures; in his later works, the danger sometimes becomes an occasion for masculine assertion.

Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway became a spokesperson for his generation. But instead of painting its fatal glamour as did Fitzgerald, who never fought in World War I, Hemingway wrote of war, death, and the "lost generation" of cynical survivors. His characters are not dreamers but tough bullfighters, soldiers, and athletes. If intellectual, they are deeply scarred and disillusioned.

His hallmark is a clean style devoid of unnecessary words. Often he uses understatement: In A Farewell to Arms (1929) the heroine dies in childbirth saying "I'm not a bit afraid. It's just a dirty trick." He once compared his writing to icebergs: "There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows."

Hemingway's fine ear for dialogue and exact description shows in his excellent short stories, such as "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." Critical opinion, in fact, generally holds his short stories equal or superior to his novels. His best novels include The Sun Also Rises, about the demoralized life of expatriates after World War I; A Farewell to Arms, about the tragic love affair of an American soldier and an English nurse during the war; For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), set during the Spanish Civil War; and The Old Man and the Sea.

Hemingway's works have great truth in them; truth about people and the world.