Katherine anne porter 1890-1980

Porter was born in Indian Greek, Texas, and raised in poverty. After becoming a journalist she lived for several years in Mexico. There she developed an interest in writing fiction. She published her first story in 1922. Eight years later, in 1930, her first book of short stories, Flowering Judas was published. It was praised by critics and earned Porter widespread recognition.

The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship after the appearance of her first book, Porter subsequently traveled in Mexico and Europe, gathering further material for her stories, which were collected and published under the title Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1938). Her several other major works include Noon Wine (1937), Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), No Safe Harbor (1941), The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1944).

In 1962 Porter produced her novel Ship of Fools. The novel explores the social unrest and political upheaval that took place during the 1930's.

Her Collected Stories brought her the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1965.

In her work Porter explored the sense of uncertainty and disjointedness caused by the social and political changes in society in the effects of which she had a deep interest. In many of her stories, including The Jilting of Granny Weatherall she portrayed families that were drifting apart and losing an awareness of their connection with the past, as the traditional sense of the family as a community diapered with the coming of the modern age. Her works are skillfully created and written in a clear, elegant style.

Although Porter is not primarily identified as a regional writer, many of her works draw on the rural landscapes of her youth and make effective use of her upbringing as a southern Roman Catholic, and effective use of stream of consciousness, a technique Porter often employs in her stories.

John steinbeck 1902-1968

Like Sinclair Lewis, John Steibeck is held in higher critical esteem outside the United States than in it in his time, largely because he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1963 and the international fame it confers.

During the 1930's, the Great Depression cost millions of people their jobs and shook their faith in the American promise. Big business and the corporate farm seemed untouched by hard times. They were angrily perceived by many as impersonal and indifferent to human hardship.

Many novelists of the time were moved by this sense of injustice and turned their pens to a by-product of the Depression known as "the protest novel." Among these writers, John Steinbeck was the most widely praised and successful.

Steinbeck was born in California's Salinas Valley in 1902, the son of a county treasurer and a schoolteacher. Although he graduated from high school and spent some time at Stanford University, in between various jobs, he took more pride in the many jobs he held as a young man than in his formal education. After leaving the University he spent the next five years drifting across the country, reading, writing, and working at odd jobs. He worked as a hood carrier, fruit picker, apprentice painter, laboratory assistant, care-taker, surveyor, and writer. He wrote seventeen novels in all, in addition to stories, plays, film-scripts, and a great deal of journalism.

Steinbeck had little success as a writer until 1935 when he published his third novel Tortilla Flat, a humorous story about a Mexican-American colony in Monterey. Steinbeck's first major success came in 1937 with Of Mice and Men, a short, best-selling novel which Steinbeck himself adapted into a Broadway play and motion picture. It is a tale of two drifters, itinerant farm-hands, migrants, George and the powerful but mentally handicapped Lennie whose dream of owning their own farm ends in tragedy. Steinbeck portrayed their odd friendship with great sympathy and understanding. Steinbeck changed a pathetic situation into an affirmative acceptance of life's brutal conflicts, along with its possibilities for fellowship and courage.

He followed this success by joining some Oklahoma farmers - known as "Okies" - who were embarking with great hope to California. Steinbeck lived and worked with them over the next two years, experiencing first-hand the disappointment and injustice they encountered. The result was his strongest and most enduring, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which follows the travails of a poor Oklahoma family that loses its farm during the Depression and travels to California to seek work. Family members suffer conditions of feudal oppression by rich landowners.

The Grapes of Wrath tells of the Joad family and their forced migration from the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma to California, the region that promised work at decent wages and a chance to buy land. Once arrived, however, the Joads find only the exploitation and poverty of labor camps. Gradually they learn the real meaning of the term "Okies" - Oklahoma farmers, dispossessed of their land and forced to become migrant farmers in California, people who never even had a chance.

The Grapes of Wrath was an angry book that spoke out on behalf of the migrant workers. Steinbeck sharply criticized a system that bankrupted thousands of farmers and turned them from their own land, making them into paid help for the big growers. When the novel appeared, it was greeted with outbursts of praise and condemnation, and it became the most widely read of all the protest novels of the 1930's. The book leaves the reader with the feeling which Steinbeck wanted to instill - that the poor can endure by helping one another, and perhaps also that they can expect no help from anyone else.

The Grapes of Wrath won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and established Steinbeck as one of the most highly regarded writers of his day. Steinbeck produced several more successful works during his later years, including Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947), East of Eden (1952), and Winter of Our Discontent (1961).

Toward the end of his life, Steinbeck achieved a gratifying success with the award of the Nobel Prize in 1963, and with the publication in that year of Travels with Charley, a nostalgic account of a trip across America with his aged poodle Charley. But his reputation is grounded on those earlier novels which portray California as the real and symbolic land of American promise.

Steinbeck creates vivid portraits of the landscape and demonstrates how people are shaped and manipulated by their environments. John Steinbeck's themes come from the poverty, desperation, and social injustice that he witnessed during the Great Depression of the 1930's, a time when many people suffered under conditions beyond their control. His works reflect his belief in the need for social justice and his hope that people can learn from the suffering of others. Though many of his characters suffered tragic fates, they almost always managed to retain a sense of dignity throughout their struggles.

JAMES ALBERT MICHENER 1907-1997

James Albert Michener was born on February 3, 1907. He never knew his real parents and was brought up by a Quaker widow in Pennsylvania. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and made his first trip across the Pacific at that time. His book Tales of the South Pacific won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947. Despite his substantial commercial success, he was known to be a humble man and was an active philanthropist.

James Albert Michener is a Pulitzer prize-winning author renowned for his historical epics. One of the world's most revered and best-loved novelists, Michener was one of America's most respected senior citizens. A prolific novelist and relentless researcher, Michener wrote many books.

His many beloved works include Tales of the South Pacific, which was adapted for Broadway and film as "South Pacific", Caravans, Centennial, The Drifters, The Fires of Spring, Hawaii, Poland, Texas, and Return to Paradise, Recessional and The Source.

Recessional. As the new young director of the Palms, a Florida retirement home, Andy Zorn suffers no shortage of loving support and wise advice from his "elders," a group of passionate, outspoken residents who refuse to accept the passive roles that society and family have handed them.

Set in the Palms, a Florida retirement center, Recessional follows several residents over the course of a year as their individual narratives - humorous, moving, or sometimes triumphant - unfold. Chris Mallory reluctantly relinquishes his driver's license at the age of ninety, but refuses to hang up his dancing shoes. The Palm's five self-appointed elders, all once outstanding in their respective careers, hotly debate current affairs and plot a daring flying adventure; Laura Oliphant, former head of a private school for girls, never stops learning and never stops educating others, especially about the natural wonders of Florida; and Reverend Helen Quade, the Palms's unofficial pastor, finds an unexpected romance. We meet, too, the families of some of the Palms's residents - among them an independent, unconventional young woman who owes her success to the aunt who encouraged her always to follow her own instincts; and the devoted children of one resident who grapple with difficult decisions about their elderly mother's final days. When they are confronted with any important question that affects their closely knit community, the Palms residents band together and offer the new director, Andy Zorn, both their support and their suggestions.

Andy Zorn, a young doctor running from a past scandal, has been hired by geriatric mogul John Taggart to revitalize the Palms, a Tampa retirement community that's fallen into a minor malaise of both profits and morale. Unjust malpractice suits have driven Andy Zorn, M.D., from obstetrics, and he begins a new life as director of a retirement community, The Palms, more than a thousand miles away from his Chicago home. The Palms offers well-off retirees comfortable apartments as well as nursing home and hospice facilities if the need arises. Andy's main job is to turn this place into a moneymaking proposition for its wealthy owner.

Michener applies his research to the ravages of old age that plague the Palms' population, but the novel is overloaded with details which often seem unnecessary for the story he's telling. Some episodes and characters are touching: the tale of a seemingly mismatched couple in which the husband cares for the wife after she contracts Alzheimer's; a series of stories about four elder statesmen in the home who conspire to build and fly an airplane; and the saga of a widow who must make some difficult decisions after a biopsy for breast cancer; the romantic subplot between Zorn and a handicapped woman whom he rescues after a car accident. The doctor's efforts to provide care for an AIDS patient outside the home have similar problems with realism - the worst offense being a series of passages told from the perspective of a rattlesnake.

EUDORA WELTY

1909-2001

Eudora Welty was born on April 13, 1909 in the Southern city of Jackson, Mississippi, where she had lived almost her whole life. As the daughter of an insurance man and a school-teacher, she enjoyed a conventional girlhood. She recalls pleading with her brothers to teach her golf, sharing their enthusiasm for baseball, and bicycling to the library in two petticoats to forestall the librarian's caustic remark, "I can see straight through you."

Welty attended Mississippi State College for Women, studied at the University of Wisconsin from which she graduated in 1929. She did graduate work at Columbia University School of Business, anticipating a career in advertising. However, she was unable to find a steady job in advertising. The depression sent her home to Jackson with a belief, which did not fail her. She hoped she that she would succeed as a writer of fiction.

She worked as a publicist for a government agency for several years traveling throughout Mississippi, taking photographs and interviewing people. Her experience and observations inspired her to write fiction. Eudora Welty is known for her searching studies of small-town life in the South. She has lived in Mississippi all of her life, and her affection for the South can be seen in her work. Her long-life friends were R.P.Warren and Katherine Anne Porter.

Her first short story Death of a Travelling Salesman was published in a small magazine in 1936. Since then she published numerous collections of short stories, including A Curtain of Green (1941), The Wide Net and Other Stories (1943). These were followed by The Golden Apples (1949), one of her best-known volumes of short stories, The Bride of Innishfallen and Other Stories (1955), Thirteen Stories (1965). Welty's short stories appeared in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, published in 1980 which reveals the whole range of her artistry over four decades of writing. The Wide Net is a comedy of misunderstanding between newlyweds. The young wife threatens to kill herself, and the husband calls the community together to drag the river for her body. The description of the forest in autumn is elegiac, knowing that all things must come to an end, and yet inevitably return.

Her longer fiction consists of the novelette The Robber Bridegroom (1942). She is also the author of several novels, including Delta Wedding (1945), The Ponder Heart (1954), which was made into a Broadway play, Losing Battles (1970), Welty's fine comic novel about a family reunion in the rural South. Two years later, in 1972,

Welty produced The Optimist's Daughter, a poignant short novel about family conflicts; this book won her the Pulitzer Prize in