Study Notes

American Literature   Desire Under The Elms     Eugene O’Neill  Eugene O’Neill : Life and Work   Eugene O’Neill was born in 1888 in New York. His parents were devout Catholics, and his father James O'Neill was an actor-manager. The family travelled round the country with James O’Neill, but their home was unsettled in more ways than this. None of them were in good health, the father drank heavily and the mother took drugs. His education at Princeton University was cut short in 1906, when he was suspended before the final examination. In 1909, he married Katherine Jenkins, and was divorced in 1912. He lived a dissolute life, drinking and gambling, until his illness during the same year. In 1918 he married Agnes Boulton, and they had two children. In 1928, after his divorce, he married his third wife, Charlotte Monterary, an actress with whom he lived happily until his death . It was during his months of convalescence, around 1912, that he wrote the first short plays, eleven of which

American Literature    A View From The Bridge Arthur Miller  Arthur Miller : Life and Work  Arthur Miller was born in Manhattan in 1917 in a conventional, well-to-do Jewish family. As a boy, he was a good athlete, interested in sports, and decidedly nonintellectual by nature. When he was thirteen, economic conditions forced his father to give up his business and to move the family to a small house in Brooklyn. During the next ten years, he worked as a delivery boy for a bakery, a dishwasher, a waiter, a warehouse clerk, a truck driver, a factory labourer, a singer at a local radio station, and a writer of over thirty radio plays. All this experience left him with a great respect for hard work. After his schooling, Miller began reading works of Shakespeare, Brecht, Shaw, O’Neill, Ibsen and others and was deeply influenced by them. In 1934, Miller enrolled in journalism in the University of Michigan, and eighteen months later, began writing plays. His first play, Honors at Dawn, a piece

American Literature   The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  Mark Twain About the author Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) was born in 1835 in Missouri. During his boyhood, he had all the advantages and disadvantages of growing up in a country environment, and grew up in tune with the life around him. Upon his father’s death , he became a printer’s apprentice, but could not earn much, and decided to become a river pilot. After piloting steamers for about four years, he went back to the printing trade. He wrote short pieces for the newspapers he worked on, and met many writers during the course of his work. Mark Twain was a talented writer, speaker and humorist whose own personality shined through his work. As his writing grew in popularity, he became a public figure and iconic American whose work represents some of the best in the genre of realism.   His "The Innocents Abroad " brought him success and he married Olivia Langdon, from a socially prominent New York family. He m