On July 2, 1961, he rose early and with two charges of a double-barreled shotgun, he killed himself. He put life back on the page , said critic Alfred Kazin, made us see, feel, and taste the gift of life .... To read Hemingway was always to feel more alive. s style of writing is striking. He is a great master of the pause. This is when we see how the action of his story continues during the silences, during the time his characters say nothing. This action is always full of meaningperfected the art of conveying emotion with few words. In contrast to the Romantic writers, who often emphasize abundance and even excess, Hemingway is a Classicist in his restraints and understatements. He believed that the strongest effect came with an economy of means.
Robert Penn Warren
1905-1989Penn Warren is one of the most versatile, prolific and distinguished writers of the twentieth century. He has written poetry, stories, novels, plays, criticism, essays, textbooks, and a biography.was born in Guthrie, Kentucky. When he was sixteen he entered Vanderbilt University, where he began to write poetry. After graduating from Vanderbilt in 1925, he studied at the University of California, Yale and Oxford. In 1935 he became one of the founding editors of the literary magazine The Southern Review.Penn Warren stood out as a masterful rhetorician, a poet, and an influential critic and pedagogue. He wrote a series of deliberately melodramatic novels in which both past and present conflicts of the South were made to serve universally: Night Rider (1939), and At Heaven s Gate (1943), All King s Men (1947) which won him the first Pulitzer Prize.Pen Warren is also the author of the collections of poems Thirty Six Poems (1935), Eleven Poems on the Same Theme (1942 ), Selected Poems (1923-1943), Brother to Dragons (1935), a drama in verse Promises, Poems (1954-1957), which won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1959. In 1980 he won a third Pulitzer Prize for Now and Then (1979) - another collection of poetry. the King s Men (1946), a study of political morality based on the career of Huey Long, is one of the memorable novels of the century. The novel won Penn Warren another Pulitzer Prize. It is an account of vicious politics of a Southern State governor.has consistently used southern settings and characters in both his poetry and prose, but at the same time he focuses on universal themes. In his work he emphasizes love of the land, continuity between generations, and the need for self-knowledge and fulfillment in an often violent world.the King s Men is a political satire. It unfolds a broad panorama of political life in a Southern State, throwing light on the dirty intrigues and machinations resorted to by those who aspire to secure a higher position in the administration. Here Warren touches upon one of the most fateful questions of American experience, - the sources, uses and abuses of great political power in a democratic society and the individual s responsibility to that society and to himself. It is a general belief that the novel drew partly from the career of Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana in 1935, one of the most bizarre and audacious figures in the 20th century public life in America. Warren himself denied this.events are narrated by Jack Burden, a newspaper reporter, the Boss s political aide and confidential agent. The central figure of the book is Willie Stark, the Boss . Formerly a simple peasant boy from upstate Louisiana, he rises from the position of County Treasurer in Mason City to that of Governor of the state. Striving for power Willie Stark shuns from no means to achieve his end. Willie Stark is a man who exercises a tremendous imaginative appeal over the people, but his methods are dirty. To achieve his aim he bribes, threatens, buys and sells men, uses blackmail and violence, employs various techniques of reputation-blackening. Willie is a complex person, not a simple demagogue, as some critics think. Power-mad and dictatorial, he seemingly works for the good of the poor folk. He is a man with a mission , with a would-be strong social conscience and a burning desire to bring to the rednecks their full share of the blessings of modern society. He has an avid taste for power which corrupts him and brings about his downfall.Burden, the protagonist, is a descendent of an old Southern family. He throws himself into the main currents of politics and power to escape from the atmosphere of his form...
