6.5. Famous People of America

Mark Twain – Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in a small town on the Mississippi River and became a river pilot. Later he went to west and worked as a newspaper reporter. His pen-name was Mark Twain. He wrote “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” published in 1876. Tom is really Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn is his close boyhood friend, Tom Blankenship. The book tells of the boy’s adventures. Other books: “The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn”, “Tom Sawyer”, and “Huckleberry Finn”, “Life on the Mississippi”.

Abraham Lincoln – the 16^th president of the U.S. was born in 1809 in Kentucky. His family was poor, he did not go to school and taught himself to read and write. Later he studied law, and became a lawyer and them a politician. His nickname was “Honest Abe”.

He became a president in 1860 and in 1861 a war between the North and he South began. The Civil War was 4 years; it ended in April 9, 1865. Six day later, President Lincoln was shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth and died the next morning.

Tomas Alva Edison was born in 1847. He was sick and his mother taught him lessons. He read the first scientific books, built a laboratory in his house and began to invent things. At the age of 23 he made a special telegraphic machine and sold it for a lot of money.

He started his own laboratory at Manio Park, New Jersey. He hired mechanics and chemists to help him and invented; over 1,300 inventions belong to him: wax paper, fire alarm, the battery, motion pictures, the phonograph (a record player), and the light bulb. He died in 1931 when he was 84 years.

Ernest Hemingway – the greatest American writer of the XX th c. He was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. He was a legend man, an adventurer, a brave war correspondent, an amateur boxer, a hunter, a deep-sea fisherman, the victim of three car accidents and two plane crashes, a man of four wives and many loves, but above all a brilliant writer of stories and novels.

His life provided the background for his stories and novels: “A Farewell to Arms”, story of love between an American lieutenant and an English nurse in WW I. “For whom the Bell Tolls” – novel of war, love and death in the Spanish Civil War. The last years he lived in Cuba and wrote “The Old Man and the Sea”. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.

He committed suicide (because of cancer), as his father had done it before him under similar circumstances.

Theodore Roosevelt – the 26^th President of the U.S. (from 1901 to 1909). He was a boxer, a soldier, a rancher, and an explorer. He had asthma. Because of boxing he became blind in one eye. His nickname was – “Teddy”. While hunting he did not shoot a little bear; he said the bear was too small. The next day this story was in the newspapers and little was named “Teddy”, and toy bears for children – “teddy bears”. When he left the White House he went to hunt in Africa then to South America to explore the unknown places.

Answer the questions:

1. What famous people of America do you know?

2. In what spheres of the social life are they well-known?

3. What books by Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway did you read and liked most of all?

Task 1. Tell about one of the U.S. Presidents and what deeds he is famous for.