Study Notes

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, Honor...

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 fam...