Biography

Robert Frost

1874 - 1963

Robert Frost is considered by many to be the outstanding American poet of the

twentieth century. Although he was born in San Francisco, his roots were deep in the hills of

New England . Afler his father death when Robert was eleven , he and his mother returned

to New Hampshire. He attended Darmouth and Harvard Colleges for several years, but soon

returned to the family farm. He attempted to make a living by farming and teaching, al1 the

while writing poetry. He had few readers, though. Discouraged, he and his family moved to

England. While there he published two books of poetry, A Boy's Will and North of Boston,

both of which became great successes. In 1915, he returned to Arnerica as a farnous poet

with many readers. Although he won four Pulitzer prizes and remained on his farm in New

Hampshire, leaving only temporarily to serve as visiting lecturer.

Frost's poems use traditional forms and are about various aspects of nature and his

dramatic narrative feature common people who are unique individuals. He explores the

natural scenes of New England-pastures, groves birch trees, wild grapes, and blueberry

fields-to express beauty, work, and death, and he employs symbols to give philosophical

rneanings to his works. In 1960 , Frost was given a gold rnedal by Congress "in recognition

of his poetry, which has enriched the cuiture of the United States and the philosophy of the

world." The next year he read his poem inaguration of President John F. Kennedy.

In style, he also loved "the old way of being new" he always worked in the traditional forms

of poetry. Frost speaks directly. He uses a" language absolutely unliterary". And, although

he is realist, his moods are rarely as black as Robinson's. Frost liked to say he was only

having a "lover's quarrel with the world". These various qualities made him one of the best

loved poets of twentieth-century America.

Most of Frost's well known poetry is nature poetry . It has a surface a smoothness and

simplicity. Then, suddeniy, the surface breaks under our feet, like ice on a pond. We look

down into unexpected depths of meaning.

According to Frost, a good poem begins in delight and end in wisdom. It cannot give

us a complete philosophy of life. But it can sometimes help us to live with confusion of human

life. In fact, we can see a kind of philosophy in Frost's poetry. It has much in common with

Emerson's idea of "Self-reliancen.The Road Not Taken(l916 ) shows how individuals are

forced to make choices in their lives.

Later in life, with his pure white hair and old-fashioned manner, Frost became a kind

of folk hero. He made Americans think of theXgood old days" and they expected him to be a

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little bit conservative. Frosi's conservatism made him reject the new "free verse" styles of

poetry. Free verse is "like playing tennis with the net down", he once remarked.

Activities

Classroom Assianment:

Answer the questions below orally in pairs.

1. According to Frost what is a good poem like?

2. What does "The Road Not Taken" show?

3. How does he consider free Verse?

Hornework Assianment:

In your own words, explain what a poem is like according to Frost.

Literary Work

"The Road Not Taken"

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long 1 stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowih:

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh. 1 kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how the way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-

1 took the one less traveled by,

And that has made al1 the difference.

150

With al1 her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm

1 should prefer to have come boy bend them

As he went out and in to fetch the cows-

Some boys too far from town to learn baseball,

Whose only play was what he found himself,

Summer or winter, and could play alone.

Only by one he subdued his father's trees

By riding them down over and over again

Until he took the stiffness out of them,

And not one but hung limp, not one was left

For him to conquer. He learned al1 there was

To learn about not launching out too soon

And so not carrying the tree away

Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise

To the top branches, climbing carefully

With the same pains you use to fill a cup

Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,

Kicking his way down through the air to the ground

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

And so 1 dream of going back to be.

It's when I'm weary of consideration,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig's having lashed across it open.

I'd like to get away from earth a while

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth's the right place for lover:

1 don't know where it's likely to go better.

I'd like to go by climbing birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

Toward heaven. till the tree could bear no more,

But dippend its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Activities

Classroom Assianment:

Answer the following questions together as a class.

1. In the first lines of the poem, how are the birch trees described?

2. Give examples of imagery that appeal to the cense of sight and hearing.

3. Explain the metaphors in lines 9 and 12.

4. Explain the simile in lines 19-20.

5. What does it rnean to be a "swinger of birches"?

6. Why does the speaker desire to be a "swinger of birches" again?

7. Why does the speaker wish to return?

8. In your own words explain what the poem means.

Homework Assianment:

Write a paragraph describing the historical events in chronological order that took place

during Frost's lifetime.

Literary Work

"Tree at My Window"

Imagine the scene you read this boyhood memory.

Notice the contrast between speaker and the tree.

Tree at my window, window tree,

My sash is lowered when night comes on;

But let there never he curtain drawn

Between you and me.

Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,

And thing next most diffuse cloud,

Not al1 your light tongues talking aloud

Could be profound.

But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,

And if you have seen mewhen I slept,

You have seen me when 1 was taken and swept

And al1 but lost

That day she put our heads together,

Fate had her imagination about her,

Your head so rnuch concerned with outer,

Mine with inner. weather.

Activities

Classroorn Assianment:

After reading and interpreting the poem, answer the following questions in groups of three.

1. In "Tree at My Window". what is the relationship between the speaker and the tree?

2. Explain the metaphor in the second stanza.

3. Explain the last two lines.

4. How are the speaker and the tree alike?

5. How are they different?

6. What literary advices are used in the poern?

7. Give an example of symbolism.

8. What is Robert Frost trying to say in the poem above?

Hornework Assianment:

Prepare an oral report about the similarities and differences between the speaker and the

tree. Opinions should be supported.

Biography

T.S. Eliot

1888 - 1965

In the period between the two world wars, poetry and criticism were largely dominated

by a single figure , T.S. Eliot. Even more than Ezra Pound, he shaped the tastes and the

critica1 vocabulary of a generation. The Waste Land , the most startling and innovative of

Eliot's poems, had the effed of "at atom bomb"; and in the decades that followed , Eliot

becarne the major poet writing in English and the authorative voice of rnodern criticism.

Eliot was a descendent of a prorninent New England family dating from the

seventeenth century. He was born in St. Louis. Missouri. In his youth he attended a Boston

preparatory school and then entered Haward, where he studied literature and philosophy. He

served as editor of the Harvard advocate and he developed, from reading the poetry of the

French symbolists, his early poetic style. Frorn Haward, Eliot went to Europe to complete a

doctoral dissertation.

When World War I began , Eliot settled in London ; where he worked as a bank clerk

In 1917, Eliot published his first book of poems. He became an editor of the Egoist and

criticism. Then in 1922, The Waste Land became the poem that set the tone of the postwar

era. Its ranging meter and fragmented style became rnodels of modernist techniques. The

Waste Land reflects the theme and direction of Eliot's own life: the quest of salvation. In the

years that followed. Eliot's writing expressed a deepening conservatism in religion and

politics. In 1927 he startled many admirers by announcing his adoption of British citizenship

and his conversion to church of England. Eliot's poetry culminated in the religious meditations

of Four Quarters (1936-1943), in which the theme of spiritual quest becomes both personal

and universal, presenting man's effort to transcend the force of time and to achieve the "still

moment" of the eternal.

In his later years Eliot devoted himself mainly to verse drama, a genre he had long

wanted to restore to the modern stage. His first play, based upon the martyrdom of Saint

Thomas 'a Becked, Murder in the Cathedral(1935), met with some success. The later plays

include The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk

(1954), and The Elder Statesman(l958). Although Eliot's plays are often irnpressive in their

poetry, in general, their sophisticated moral and religious issues has kept them from achieving

wide popular appreciation.

The anti-romantic tendency of Eliot's literary criticism was evident with his first book

of essays, The Sacred Wood (1920). In 1948 Eliot's achievements were recognized by

awards of the British Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for literature. In the years that

followed, reputation declined, yet he continued to the end to exercise authority in the world

of letters, just as his masterpiece, The Waste Land, has remained one of the most influential

poems of the twentieth century.

T.S. Eliot was a "traditionalist." In a way his ideas reject Stein's "past-less" writing.

Perhaps because his valued a "sense of history," he lived most of his life in Europe. To Eliot,

knowledge of tradition is necessary for the poet to create "new". Poetry. If he does not

understand the past, he will not know what is new.

Another principie of the Eliot philosophy was "impersonalism." "The progress of an

artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality,"Eliot wrote. He believes

it is important to look carefully at the poetry not at the poet. We can not only say that the

poem, in come sense, has its own life ... The feeling, or emotion, resulting from the poem ¡S

something different from the feeling or emotion in the mind of the poet .

His poetry is ceriainly much greater than the poetry of Ezra Pound, another important

poet of the period. Still as Eliot realized, Pound had taught him a lot. Both describe the

spiritual emptiness of the World War l.

He was unmatched in his reputation and influence among poets writing in English

in the twentieth century, and he dominated the course of poetry and ideas about poetry

between the second world wars. Eliot lived in England frorn 1914 on, becoming a British

citizen in 1927. His poetry is complex. Eliot often uses a conversational style in his poerns

but fills them with nurnerous allusions.

Arnong his first poems, which emphasize the emptiness of the modern materialistic

world, are "The love song of J. Alfred group of poems, "Ash Wednesday," "The Journey of

the Magi," and "Song for Simeon," reflect his interest in Christianity. Even before his

conversation to the Anglican church in the 1920's, his poetry dealt with the human condition

seen in the light of religious belief.

Activities

Classroom Assianment:

Answer the following questions alone and then discuss the answers as a class.

1. What did Eliot's way of writing express?

2. Which poem was the one that was set in the postwar era?

3. What does Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" reflect?

4. Explain why the author considers knowledge of tradition necessary for the poet to create

"new" poetry.

5. What does impersonlism mean?

7. How does Eliot consider modern man?

8. How has he been considered as a poet?

Homework Assianment:

In chronological order, write an outline of the events in that took place during Eliot's life.

Literary Work

"The Hollow Men"

Eliot attempts to express the weakness of modern men who can no longer think, speak, act,

or imagine. Their emptiness and fear are caused by lack of purpose in life because they lack

faith in God. They are dead spiritually. The sing-song rhyme and rhythm at the end indicates

the chiidishness of these rnen in their vain attempt to grasp at some empty, broken rituals

as a substitute for genuine belief.

I

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rat's feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom

Remember us -if at al1 -notas lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed rnen.

I I

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death's dream kingdom

These do not appear :

There , the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column

There, is a tree swinging

And voices are

In the wind's singing

More distant and more solemn

Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer

In death's dram kingdorn

Let me also wear

Such deliberate disguises

Rat's coat. crowskin, crossed staves

In a field

Behaving as the wind behaves

No nearer -

Not that final meeting

In the twilight kingdom

III

This the dead land

This is cactus land

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplication of a dead man's hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this

In death's other kingdom

Waking alone

At the hour when we are

Trembling with tenderness

Lips that would kiss

Form prayers to broken stone

IV

The eyes are not here

There are no eyes here

In this valley of dying stars

In this hollow valley

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the humid river .

Sightless, unless

The eyes reappear

As the perpetua1 star

Multifoliate rose

Of death's twilight kingdom

The hope only

Of empty men.

v Here we go round the prickly pear

Prickly pear prickly pear

Here we go round the prickly pear

At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is

Life is

For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Activities

Classroom Assianment:

Answer the following questions in pairs orally. Discuss the answers with the class.

1. Describe the Hollow Men.

2. How do they represent the meaninglessness and hopelessness of modern man?

3. Explain the similes in lines 8 and 9.

4. Give examples of images that express barrenness, death and despair.

5. Describe the end of the world according to end of this poem. What does this signify?

6. What message is the author trying to get across7

Homework Assianment:

Make a literary analysis of the poem. Be prepared to explain it orally to the class.

Unit 5: Post World War 1 Literature (1922 - 1940)

lntroduction

American writers of the early twentieth century were born into a society that was still

young and a culture that was still raw. Throughout the 1890's, the decade in which William

Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway were born, the United States remained

on the circumference of civilization. It had no palaces or castles, Henry James once noted,

no cathedrals or abbeys or ivied ruins. Even its thriving cities were less elegant than those

of Europe. Americans took pride in the achievement of their painters and their writers, but

they knew that their life remained comparatively crude, their art and literature comparatively

thin.

To balance their sense of cultural inferiority, Americans held tightly to a sense of social

and moral superiority. Many Americans respected - and some envied - Europe for its rich

culture. But they scorned Europe's accumulated strata of gentility - piled, Henry James wrote,

"upwards into vague regions of privilege" - and they condemned its wickedness and

weariness. Even parents who sent their children to tour Europe or study there sought first to

inoculate them against Europe's decadence. However crude and raw American culture might

be, its " triumphant democracy" (to borrow the title of Andrew Carnegie's celebration of

America) was a model of come things and proof of others: a model of political freedom,

economic opportunity, and moral rectitude and proof that to remain young and vigorous a

society must remain open and democratic. In a famous address delivered in Chicago at the

American Historical Association in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner announced that American

democracy drew its force not from its European heritage but from its frontier experience.

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Twenty years later Turner reiterated his celebrated announcement: "American democracy

was born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried in the Susan Constant to Virginia, nor in

the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came stark and strong and full of life out of the American

forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier."

To live on the edge of civilization was, then from an American point of view, to be

blessed as well as deprived. Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Henry David Thoreau

captured Arnerica's characteristic ambivalence in an epigraph: "1 love the wild not less than

the good." Americans sometimes attributed their energy and good hope - twin tokens of

superiority - to their close ties to nature, their proximity to the frontier, of their love of the wild,

sometimes to what Henry James called the overriding "importance of the individual in the

American world," and sometimes to the continuing presence of divine favor. But since they

regarded these things as interrelated and interdependent. they also saw youth and simplicity

rather than age and sophistication as the bedrock of Arnerica's strength. American culture

might be raw, but American society was vital, its future assured: "The old nations of the earth

creep at a snail's pace," Andrew Carnegie wrote in 1886, "the Republic thunders past with the

rush of the express." As the spread across the continent, furthermore, and then later began

the long trek from the soil of their farms to the sidewalks of their cities, they carried their

convictions with them. The arnbivalence that New Englanders learned early to feel toward

Europe, mixing a sense of cultural inferiority with a sense of social and moral superiority,

westerners came to feel toward easterners and rural folk toward city dwellers.

By the early twentieth century, the waves of immigration that had diversified American

society were also diversifying its literature. Although come writers of the early twentieth

century came from established communities along the eastern seaboard, may came from out-

of-the-way places and diverse backgrounds. Writers were more likely to be poor, more likely

to be female, and more likely to be black. They came from al1 parts of the United States,

including Mississippi, North Carolina, Florida, California and Texas.

Together these writers transformed the cultural landscape of America and enlarged

its cultural role. In the same years in which the United Stated was emerging as a world

power, its writers were becorning a major force in the development of literary modernisrn. In

addition to producing remarkable literature, writers like Ernest Hemingway began playing

prominent roles in the cultural affairs in London and Paris. At the same time, however, they

reclaimed native literary traditions and transforrned colloquial American English into a medium

for serious fiction. "All modern American literature," Ernest Hemingway asserted, evoking

Arnerica's colloquial tradition, "comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."

The ambivalence that defines modern American literature stemmed in part from

disillusionment triggered by the First Worid War. "That's what you al1 are. . . . You are a lost

generation," Gertrude Stein said to Ernest Hemingway, describing those who had S U N ~ V ~ ~

the war. To present-day readers, the literary Erra Pound wrote, "For an old bitch gone in the

teeth, 1 For a botched civilization." But such words reflect more than a cense of

disappointment with the untidiness of history. The Great War extracted a terrible tool.

America's own substantial losses (48,000 killed, 2,900 missing, 56,000 dead from disease)

pale beside those of Germany (1.8 million killed). Russia (1.7 million). France (1.4 million),

Austria-Hungary (1.2 million), and Britain (947,000). Virtually the whole of Europe emerged

form the war not only decimated but depleted, exhausted, and debt-ridden, still racked with

inflation and political unrest. But as heinous deeds led to reprisals yet mor heinous, the war

had also taken on the aspect of terrible betrayal. "All the horrors of al1 the ages were brought

together," Winston Churchill declared, "and not only arrnies but whole population were thrust

into the midst of them. . . . Neither peoples nor rulers drew the line at any deed which they

thought could help them win. . . ." The United States entered the war reluctantly, it entered late, and it remained

uncertain of its own motives. "The world must be made safe for democracy," proclaimed

Woodrow Wilson. Given the severe losses already suffered form England across Europe to

Russia, the United States shifted the balance of power substantially. Despite its late entry,

it played a major role in determining both outcome of the war and terms of peace. By the

war's end, the United States had become a world power. Many of its citizens, including

several of its writers - some as soldiers, others as ambulance drivers - had seen the war's

slaughter first hand.

Another source of disillusionment, more varied than the Great War and more

immediate to writers who had not seen the war firsthand, was the rapid transformation of

American society that had commenced in America in the mid-nineteenth century, accelerated

with the Civil War, and then accelerated again with World War l. Americans were

accustomed, almost by birth right, to encounters with historical change and cultural

dislocation. Their story was, at least in part, the story of a shifting frontier that had first drawn

people from England and Europe to American and then across the continent to the Pacific.

Many Americans were still on the road, moving on, seemingly confident of their ability to cope

with motion and change.

When the Great Crash carne, it struck with an abruptness that remains difficult to

comprehend. With confidence collapsing and reserves disappearing, income began to fall,

banks to fail, and unemployment to rice. Soon it seemed almost everyone was poor and that

no one knew what to do - President Herbert Hoover even less than the governors and the

mayors. Bread lines and soup kitchens; "Hoovervilles", as the shanty towns that dotted the

country were called; families leaving foreclosed homes in search of come new place to make

a new start; millions of men and hundreds of thousands of young boys riding the rails, seeking

in motion a cense of release even more final than the one other people found watching

movies, listening to radio program, or dancing to the sound of the big bands - these became

the trademarks of the 1930's. To those already skeptical, as many writers were, the

magnitude of the Great Depression did nothing so much as confirm that something had gone

drastically wrong with the nation's way of life.

Activities

Classroom Assianrnent:

Discuss the answers to the following questions in groups of four.

1. Why did the United States enter World War I reluctantly?

2. Why was American culture considered to be raw?

3. How would American literature have been affected if the Allies had not won the war?

4. Describe what life was like for Americans at the end of this time period.

5. Who were the famous authors of this time period?

Homework Assianrnent:

Using the Internet, research to find out about President Herbert Hoover.

Biography

John Steinbeck

1902 - 1968

John Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California, in the heart of

Monterey County and the Salinas Valley, whose scenery and people left indelible rnarks on

rnuch of his finest fiction. His father was county treasurer and his mother a school teacher.

In highschool, Steinbeck participated in basketball and track, wrote for the school paper, and

was elected president of the senior class. In 1919 he entered Stanford University, where he

attended classes of and on for several years without taking a degree. During this period he

also worked sporadically at odd jobs - as a hand on farms and ranches. a laborer on a road

gang, a seaman on a cattle boat, a bricklayer, a surveyor, and a reporter. His single-minded

ambition, however, from the age of seventeen, was to become a writer. For ten years he

consistently wrote stories and novels - which publishers consistently rejected. But Steinbeck

rnanaged to stick through this period, even though he had very little rnoney, apparently

because his need to write was deeper than his need to be published. "lf my characters are

164

sad or happy," he said in 1931, "1 reflect their emotions. 1 have no personal nor definitive

emotions of my own. Indeed, when there is no writing in progress, I feel like and uninhabited

body. 1 think I am only truly miserable at such times."

In 1926 Steinbeck lefi California, determined to establish himself as a writer and

convinced that New York was the place to do it. Soon he was back in California, working

again at odd jobs and writing persistently. His first novel, Cup of Gold, a fictionalized account

of the pirate Henry Morgan, was published in 1929. But neither it nor Steinbeck's next two

books attracted much attention.

In 1930, however, Steinbeck met a marine biologist and naturalist, Edward F. Ricketts,

who exerted an enormous influence over his thinking and writing. Ricketts introduced

Steinbeck to theories of organisrns that today would probably be regarded as sociobiology.

Steinbeck responded with and intellectual enthusiasm that was deep and decisive; he realized

no only that he had found his "theme" but that he had been heading toward similar notions

in his writing for some time. As Steinbeck put it, "When acting as a group, men do not

partake of their ordinary natures at all. The group can change its nature. . . The greatest

group unit, that is the whole race, has qualities which the individual lacks entirely." Armed

with such biological ideas as well as with his innate storytelling power, Steinbeck became, for

a brief time, one of the most prominent writers in America.

Between 1935 and 1941 Steinbeck published his finest work: Tortilla Flat (1935), a

novel that deals with the paisanos of the Salinas Valley. In 1939, Steinbeck wrote the Pulitzer

Prize winning The Grapes of Wrath which is about the odyssey of a family of dispossessed

share croppers who migrate from the Oklahoma dust bowl to the "promised land" of

Califomia. All of Steinbeck's major works are populated by characters who display severely

reduced states of consciousness. Steinbeck is fond of portraying simpletons, idiots, illiterates,

and anirnals. In fact, animal imagery and animal behavior pervade in Steinbeck's books, from

the pirate in Tortilla Flat, who lives with his dogs in a kennel, to the famous description of a

turtle crossing a highway in The Grapes of Wrath, a progress that prefigures the human

journey.

During the Second World War, Steinbeck worked as a was correspondent and in 1942

wrote a popular tale about Nolway's resistance to the Nazis, The Moon is Down (1942), which

like many of his later books seemed to be originally conceived as a play and was quickly

turned into a highly successful Broadway production. Steinbeck's ability to write stories that

were almost scenarios was perhaps first apparent in Of Mice and Men, and it led not only to

nurnerous film adaptations of his works but to many screen writing assignments. The Pearl

(1948), a parable of a poor Mexican fisherrnan whose sudden wealth brings only misery to

his community and East of Eden (1 952), a family saga patterned aiter the biblical tale of Cain

and Abel are among come of Steinbeck's works. In 1962 John Steinbeck was awarded the

Nobel Prize for literature.

Steinbeck's greatest subject, the story of lowly, dispossessed people, of their indignant

fear and their inherent dignity. had a poignancy during the Great Depression that it has since

lost for come readers. Yet it is not a subject to be lost. The desire to become a cohesive

imagination and an articulate voice for the broken dreams and lives of common people, lies

at the heart of the work for which Steinbeck is now best remembered.

Activities

Classroom Assianment:

In groups of three, answer the following discussion questions.

1. What were come of the odd jobs that Steinbeck had?

2. Why did he continue to write even though publishers rejected him?

3. What is Steinbeck best remembered for?

4. Describe Steinbeck's literary style.

5. Discuss the differences between essays, poems, short stories, and novels.

Homework Assianment:

Watch the film called Of Mice and Men.

Literary Work

from The Peari

'ln the town they tell the story of the great pearl - how it was found and how it was lost

again. They tell of Kino, the fisherman, and of his wife, Juana, and of the baby, Coyotito.

And because the story has been told so often, it has taken root in every man's mind. And,

as with al1 retold tales that are in peoples hearts, there are only good and bad things and

black and whit things and good and evil things and no in- between anywhere.

If this story is a parable, perhaps everyone takes his own meaning from it and reads

his own life into it. In any case, they say in the town that . . .'

Kino awakened in the near dark. The stars still shone and the day had drawn only a

pale wash of light in the lower sky to the east. The roosters had been crowing for come time,

and the early pigs were already beginning their ceaseless turning of twigs and bits of wood

to see whether anything to eat had been overlooked. Outside the brush house in the tuna

clump, a covey of little birds chittered and flurried with their wings.

Kin0.s eyes opened, and he looked first at the lightening square which was the door

and then he looked at the hanging box where Coyotito slept. And last he turned his head to

Juana, his wife, who lay beside him on the mat, her blue head-shawl over her nose and over

166

her breasts and around the small of her back. Juana's eyes were open too. Kino could never

remernber seeing them closed when he awakened. Her dark eyes made little reflected stars.

She was looking at hirn as she was always looking at him when he awakened.

Kino heard the little splash of morning waves on the beach. It was very good - Kino

closed his eyes again to listen to his rnusic. Perhaps her alone did this and perhaps al1 of his

people did it. His people had one been great makers of songs so that everything they saw

or thought or did becarne a song. That was vefy long ago. The songs rernained; Kino knew

them, but no new songs were added. That does not mean that there were no personal songs.

In Kino's head there was a song now, clear and soft, and if he had been able to speak of it,

he would have called it the Song of the Farnily.

His blanket was over his nose to protect him from the dank air. His eyes flicked to a

rustle beside hirn. It was Juana arising. alrnost soundlessly. On her hard bare feet she went

to the hanging box where Coyotito slept, and she leaned over and said a little reassuring

word. Coyotito looked up for a rnornent and closed his eyes and slept again.

Juana went to the fire pit and uncovered a coa1 and fanned it alive while she broke little

pieces of brush over it.

Now Kino got up and wrapped his blanket about his head and nose and shoulders.

He slipped his feet into his sandals and went outside to watch the dawn.

Outside the door he squatted down and gathered the blanket ends about his knees.

He saw the specks of Gulf clouds flarne high in the air. And a goat carne near and sniffed at

hirn and stared with its cold yellow eyes. Behind him Juana's fire leaped into flame and threw

spears of light through the chinks of the brush-house wall and threw a wavering square of

light out the door. A late moth blustered in to find the fire. The Song of the Family carne now

frorn behind Kino. And the rhythrn of the farnily song was the grinding stone where Juana

worked the corn for the morning cakes.

The dawn carne quickly now, a wash, a glow, a lightness, and then an explosion of fire

as the sun rose out of the Gulf. Kino looked down to cover his eyes frorn the glare. He could

hear the pat of he corn-cakes in the house and the rich srnell of thern on the cooking plate.

The ants were busy on the ground. big black ones with shiny bodies, and little dusty quick

ants. Kino watched with the detachrnent of God while a dusty ant frantically tried to escape

the sand trap an ant lion had dug for hirn. A thin, timid dog carne close and, at a soft word

from Kino, curled up, arranged its tail nearly over its feet. and laid its chin delicately on the

pile. It was a black dog with yellow-gold spots where its eyebrows should have been. It was

a rnorning unlike other rnornings and yet perfect among rnornings.