English Literature

Henry David Thoreau  (1817 - 1862)  Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister,development critic, surveyor and historian and a leading Transcendentalist.  Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings and his essay Resistance to Civil Government. (Also known as Civil Disobedience).  Thoreau's philosophy of Civil Disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.  Thoreau had taken up a version of P. B. Shelley's principle in the political poem The Mask of Anarchy(1819).  In 1854, he would publish as Walden or Life in the Woods recounting the 2 years, 2 months and 2 days that he had spent at Walden Pond.  He was influenced by Indian Spiritual thought.  Robert Frost wrote of Thoreau, “In one book...he surpasses everything we have had in America”. Mahatma Gandhi

Nathaniel Hawthorne  (1804 – 1864)   Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer.  Hawthorne published his first work, a novel titled Fanshowe (1828): he later tried to suppress it, feeling it was not equal to the standard of his later work.  He published several short stories in various periodicals, which he collected in 1837 as Twice Told Tales, and later in 1842. His fiction works are considered part of Romantic Movement and more specifically Dark Romanticism.  In 1836, Hawthorne served as editor of the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge.  Hawthorne wrote most of the tales collected in Mosses from an Old Manse.  Hawthorne became friends with Herman Melville in 1850, who read his short story collection. Mosses from an Old Manse, and his unsigned review of the collection titled Hawthorne and his Mosses, were printed in “The Literary World”.  Melville, who composing Moby-Dick at the time, wrote that these stories revealed a dark s

 Arthur Miller  (1915-2005)  Arthur Asher Miller was a prolific American playwright, essayist and prominent figure in 20th century American Theatre.  Among his most popular Works/Plays are:   All My Sons (1947) Death of a Salesman (1947)  The Crucible (1953)  A View from the Bridge (1955) He also wrote several screenplays and most noted among them is his work on The Misfits (1956). Thedrama ‘Death of a Salesman’ is among the finest American plays of 20th century.  In 1947, Miller's play ' All My Sons ' established his reputation as a playwright. Critics regarded it as a very depressing play in a time of great optimism.  His Death of a Salesman (1949) won all the three major awards of America i.e. Pulitzer Prize  Tony Award for best author and  The New York Drama Critic Circles Award   In 1956, One act version of Miller's verse drama “A View from the Bridge " opened on a broad way in a joint bill with a well-known play A Memory of Two Mondays.  In 1964,

Ralph Waldo Emerson  (1803 - 1882)      Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer and poet who led the Transcendentalism  Movement of Mid-19 century.   He expressed the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay 'Nature'. Following this ground breaking work he gave a speech entitled “The American Scholar” in 1837, which Oliver Holmes Sr. considered to America’s “Intellectual Declaration of Independence”.  His well-known essays are :  Self-Reliance The Over Soul  Circles   The Poet and  Experience  Emerson is one of the several figures who took a more pantheist or Pandeist approach by rejecting views of god as separate from World. When asked to sum up his work, he said his central doctrine was “ Infinitude of the Private Man ” He is also known as a mentor and friend of fellow transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.  Emerson anonymously published his first essay Nature on 9 Sep 1838.   The transcendental group began to publish its flagship journal

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf  by Edward Albee. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , play in three acts by Edward Albee , published and produced in 1962. The action takes place in the living room of a middle-aged couple, George and Martha , who have come home from a faculty party drunk and quarrelsome. When Nick, a young biology professor, and his mousy wife, Honey, stop by for a nightcap, they are enlisted as fellow fighters, and the battle begins. A long night of malicious games, insults, humiliations, betrayals, painful confrontations, and savage witticisms ensues. The secrets of both couples are laid bare, and illusions are viciously exposed. When, in a climactic moment, George decides to “kill” the son they have invented to compensate for their childlessness, George and Martha finally face the truth and, in a quiet ending to a noisy play, stand together against the world, sharing their sorrow.

Song of Myself by Walt Whitman 1, 6, 20, 52  Song of Myself 1 I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air, Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same, I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, Hoping to cease not till death. (10) Creeds and schools in abeyance, Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten. I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check with original energy. .................................................................................... 6 A child said What is the grass ? fetching it to me with full hands; (100) How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the ?ag of my disp

 One’s-Self I Sing One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse. Of physiology from top to toe I sing, Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far, The Female equally with the Male I sing. Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power, Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing.