The Sad Young Men背景知识
Ⅰ. About the Author
Rod W. Horton (1910-) :
He was born in White Plains N. Y. He taught in New York University as instructor (1937-1945), assistant professor (1945-1949), associate professor of general literature (1947-1957). He worked for United States Information Service in Brazil and Portugal as cultural affairs officer (1957-1964). He was a professor of English at Temple Buell College (formerly Colorado Women’s College), Denver, Colorado from 1964 and visiting professor at University of Brazil (1954-1956), University of Coimbra (1961-1964). Publications include (with Herbert W. Edwards) Backgrounds of American Literary Thought (1952), (with Vincent F. Hopper) Backgrounds of European Literature (1954).
Herbert W. Edwards: co-author of Backgrounds of American Literary Thought.
Ⅱ. F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Sad Young Men 迷惘的一代
Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
American novelist and short-story writer. He went to Princeton University, but quit in 1917. In 1920, Fitzgerald published his first novel, This Side of Paradise. The novel deals with the post-World War I generation and their disillusioned lives. Later that year, Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre, the quintessential 1920s flapper. Fitzgerald's writings grew in popularity, and his short stories especially were in high demand. These stories appeared in 4 books: Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), All the Sad Young Men (1926), and Taps at Reveille (1935). The Great Gatsby (1925), Fitzgerald's masterpiece, discusses the pursuit and disillusionment with the American Dream. Unfortunately, this novel sold poorly and Fitzgerald descended into alcoholism. Tender is the Night (1934) was an almost autobiographical novel about Fitzgerald's life with Zelda, and also sold poorly. The Last Tycoon (1941) remained unfinished at Fitzgerald's death. F. Scott Fitzgerald is now regarded as one the most important American authors of the 20th century. He chronicles the good and the bad and especially the disillusionment that defined America in the 1920s.
The Sad Young Men or the Lost generation: referring to the same group of people.
The first name was created by F. Scott Fitzgerald in his book All the Sad Young Men and second by Gertrude Stein. These names were applied to the disillusioned intellectuals and aesthetes of the years following the First World war, who rebelled against former ideals and values, but could replace only by despair or a cynical hedonism.
The remark of Gertrude Stein, “You are all a lost generation”, addressed to Hemingway, was used as a preface to the latter’s novel, The Sun Also Rises, which brilliantly describes an expatriate group typical of the “Lost generation”, (cf. Beat Generation and Angry Young Men). https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV13x411v7T8?from=search&seid=14375832149842203472 B站视频资源
Other representative figures of lost generation: 文章中提及的代表人物
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
World-famous American novelist and short story writer. His novels include The Sun Also Rises (1927), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1951). In 1954 he was awarded the highest prize a writer can receive, the Nobel Prize in Literature.
John Dos Passos (1896-1970)
American novelist. He utilized his wartime experience as an ambulance driver in France as background for his first novel One Man's Initiation: 1917 (1920). Both critical and popular recognition came to Dos Passos with his next bitter antiwar novel, Three Soldiers (1921). Manhattan Transfer (1925), a panoramic view of life in New York City between 1890 and 1925, became immensely successful.
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
American poet, critic and translator, often called "the poet's poet" because his profound influence on 20th century writing in English. Pound believed that poetry is the highest of arts. He challenged many of the common views of his time and spent 12 years in an American mental hospital. Pound's major works include The Cantos, Riposte, and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.
Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)
Urban planner, historian, sociologist, local advocate, and architectural critic Lewis Mumford is recognized as one of the greatest urbanists of the 20th Century. His works includeThe City in History, which received the National Book Award in 1961, Technics and Civilization, and The Condition of Man.
Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941)
Writer whose prose style, derived from everyday speech, influenced American short story writing between World Wars I and II. Anderson made his name as a leading naturalistic writer with his masterwork, WINESBURG, OHIO (1919), a picture of life in a typical small Midwestern town, as seen through the eyes of its inhabitants.
Matthew Josephson (1899-1978)
American journalist and author of works on 19th-centuryFrench literature and 20th century American economic history. His major works include Galimathias (1923), Zola and His Time (1928, biography) , and Portrait of Artist as American (1930).
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
American-English poet, playwright, and literary critic, a leader of the modernist movement in literature. Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1948. His most famous work is The Waste Land, written when he was 34. On one level it described cultural and spiritual crisis, reflected in its use of fragmentation and discontinuity.
E. E. Cummings (1894-1962)
American poet and painter who first attracted attention for his eccentric punctuation, but the commonly held belief that Cummings had his name legally changed to lowercase letters is erroneous. He often dealt with the antagonism between an individual and masses, but his style brought into his poems lightness and satirical tones. As an artist Cummings painted still-life pictures and landscapes to a professional level.
Malcolm Cowley(1898- )
American critic and poet. He lived abroad in the 1920s and knew many writers of the “lost generation”, about whom he wrote in Exile's Return (1934) and Second Flowering (1973).
Eugene O’ Neill (1888-1953)
One of the greatest American playwrights, restless and bold experimenter, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1936. Among his best-known plays are Beyond the Horizon (1918), Anna Christine (1922), Desire Under the Elms(1925), and The Iceman Cometh (1939). O'Neill's plays range in style from satire to tragedy. They often depict people who have no hope of controlling their destinies.
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
American poet, who used traditional verse forms in the expression of simple, strong emotions. In 1917 her collection Renascence and Other Poems was published. MillaShe wrote several plays, notably Aria da Capo (1919), a satirical fantasy on war.
William Faulkner (1897-1962)
The man himself never stood taller than five feet, six inches tall, but in the realm of American literature, William Faulkner is a giant. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949. During what is generally considered his period of greatest artistic achievement, from The Sound and the Fury in 1929 to Go Down, Moses in 1942, Faulkner accomplished in a little over a decade more artistically than most writers accomplish over a lifetime of writing.
Sinclair Lewis (1895-1951)
American novelist, playwright, and social critic who gained popularity with satirical novels. Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, the first given to American. His best-known novels are: Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922, Sinclair Lewis’s classic commentary on middle-class society), Arrowsmith (1925), etc.
Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943)
American poet, novelist, and writer of short stories, best-known for John Brown’s Body (1928), a long epic poem on the Civil War, which Benét wrote in France. Benét received two Pulitzer prizes for his poetry. He was one of those rare poets who was both popular and critically acclaimed.
Hart Crane (1899-1932)
He began writing verse in his early teenage years, and though he never attended college, read regularly on his own, digesting the works of the Elizabethan dramatists and poets—Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Donne—and 19th-century French poets—Vildrac, Laforgue, and Rimbaud. His major work, the book-length poem, The Bridge, expresses in ecstatic terms a vision of the historical and spiritual significance of America.
Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938)
American novelist. Best known for Of Time and the River (1935) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940).
Ⅲ. Prohibition (1920-1933) 美国禁酒令
Prohibition began on January, 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect. It was a period of nearly 14 years of U.S. history in which the manufacture, sale, and transportation of liquor was made illegal. The prohibition of the sale or use of alcohol for other than religious or medicinal purposes has been called a “noble experiment”. If indeed it was, it was an experiment that failed to achieve its main goal. It did manage some partial victories: deaths from alcohol-related diseases did go down; accidents from alcohol abuse were lessened in some areas; and thousands of people did stop drinking, with likely benefits to the health and sanity of those who might otherwise have become alcoholics. On the other hand, many thousands continued to drink in defiance of the law, and the enormous sums that could be earned from the illegal production, importation and distribution of wine, whiskey and beer financed organized crime throughout the period of prohibition. Although more than 30 states had gone dry before prohibition, and many jurisdictions stayed all or partially dry after prohibition ended in 1933, many have claimed that prohibition overall did more harm than good. In any case the prohibition experiment provides some historical insight into our current drug-related problems. The struggle over prohibition also tended to drive city and country even farther apart.
Ⅳ. Puritanism and Puritans
Puritanism began during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) when some English Protestants objected to Catholic elements in worship. They also charged that bishops reinforced royal control over the church; Puritans believed that the church should be independent from the Crown. They also wanted to end abuses such as plural office holding, absenteeism, and low standards for clergy. Puritans wished to "purify" the church by several means. They gathered like-minded people into independent "congregational" churches, some declaring separation from the church of England and some remaining within it. Moderates advocated a polity or church structure called Presbyterianism, as implemented by John Knox in Scotland. In the 1630s under Archbishop Laud, congregational churches were repressed. Thousands of Puritans left England, and their "great migration" contributed to the colonial settlement of New England. Puritanism's hallmarks were the authority of Scripture, the conversion experience, and a theology of sin and grace. Their chief theological mentor was John Calvin. Puritans believed community life to be defined by covenant, or solemn agreement. The Christian life was to be a pilgrimage of joyful discipline; John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress expresses this ideal. Attitude of a party within the Established Church of England, which, under Elizabeth and the Stuarts, describe a more thoroughgoing reformation of the Church in the direction of Continental Protestantism. The word “Puritan” has been used to denote a strictness in morality that verges on intolerance, and refers to a supposed parallel with the moral severity of the early New England setters. Its religious doctrine: sin—once enters your life, no way to avoid it. People were born with incurable sin. People are sinful when they are born. They believe the seven deadly sins: wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony. Human beings are permanent sinners. In a way, sin leads to a good way. Sin helps people to be redeemed. Where there is good, there is evil, there is no one pure, everyone is capable of sin. They believe in after-world life. Strict puritans even regarded drinking, gambling and participation in theatrical performances as punishable offenses. There are two categories of Puritanism. One is the English Puritanism, the other is American Puritanism.
Ⅴ. Greenwich Village 格林威治村
It is a section of New York, on the lower west side of Manhattan noted as a center for artists, writers etc., formerly a small village of quaint houses, crooked streets, and old barns. Several generations of writers and artists have lived and worked here: 19th century: Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane turn of the 20th century: O. Henry, Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser between the 1920s and 1930s: John Dos Passos, Norman Rockwell, Sinclair Lewis, John Reed, Eugene O'Neill late 1940s and early 1950s: painters like Franz Kline; Beat writers like Jack Kerouac the 1960s: folk musicians and poets like Bob Dylan
Ⅵ. Jazz Age or Roaring Twenties 爵士乐时代/咆哮年代
The 1920s were known as the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the Age of the Lost Generation. The Roaring Twenties ushered in a rich period of American writing, distinguished by the works of such authors as Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Carl Sandburg and Ernest Hemingway. In terms of economy, at the beginning of the Roaring Twenties, the United States was converting from a wartime to peacetime economy. When weapons for World War I were no longer needed, there was a temporary stall in the economy. After a few years, the country prospered. In this decade, America became the richest nation on Earth and a culture of consumerism was born.
Ⅷ. Victorian Age (Victorian Gentility) 维多利亚盛世
Victoria (1819-1901) was queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1837-1901. Her 63-year reign was the longest in British history. Great Britain reached the height of its power during this period. It built a great colonial empire and enjoyed tremendous industrial expansion at home. As a result, the time of Victoria’s reign is often called the Victorian Age. During the Victoria Age, science and technology made great advances. The size of the middle-class grew enormously. By the 1850s, more and more people were getting an education. In addition, the government introduced democratic reforms. For example, an increasing number of people received the right to vote. In spite of the prosperity of the Victorian Age, factory and farm workers lived in terrible poverty. England was two nations, one rich and one poor. Writers like Charles Dickens, the three Bronte sisters in Victorian Age criticized the courts, the clergy, and the neglect of the poor. They attacked the greed and hypocrisy they saw in society and discussed the relationship between society and the individual.
