USA (798448), страница 18
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I’ll just call the companies Intel Corporation (Integrated Electronics),that designed the first microprocessor, IBM (International Business Machines) that has become the world’s leading company in the big mainframe computers since the 1950s., The Apple Company, the Sun workstation, and Microsoft Corporation.
CULTURAL LIFE
Although it is a generalization, it is useful to divide the US cultural history into three broad stages.
The first stage stretches from colonial times until about the Civil war. In this period, American art, architecture, music and literature were strongly influenced by European ideas and traditions. What was fashionable or popular in London, Paris, Rome or Vienna usually set the pattern for Boston, New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia. Some of the colonial painters, like other craftsmen, came across the sea to try their luck.
The period after the Civil War saw two new genres in American painting, the creation of works, which described American landscapes and the everyday life of people, depicted mostly by a Russian artist Pavel Svirin. Scores of street scenes, gathering in village taverns, political rallies, poor women’s kitchens, factory workers, Black slaves were already on canvases.
If genre art was nourished by political and social forms, landscape paintings owed much to romantic poetry of William Cullen Bryant and books by James Fennimore Cooper. Landscapes were merged with scenes of the migrants crossing the plains and mountains in their wagons, with Indians, buffalo and death often in the background. Among the American artists of that period one can mark Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins.
A landmark in the history of American painting was made by the Armory Show of 1913 Sixteen hundred paintings by more than 300 Americans artists were shown there, representing some new genres like the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and the Cubists. Later on with the Depression, many American artist of different sties depicted the strikers, the unemployed, the Blacks, all those whose lives were crushed by the economic disaster. R. Marsh was dealing with urban poor, Ch. Burchfield and E. Hopper with dreary working class identical houses.
Like scientists many of highly creative artists were driven to America by the Second World War. In the 1950-60s abstract expressionism, pop art, minimal art and photo-realism became quite common in the USA. Some of the artists associated with such movements are Close, Davis, de Kooning, Demuth, Dine, Estes, Hanson, Johns, Kline, Lichtenstein, Motherwell, Oldenburg, Pollock, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Rothko, Segal and Warhol..
By the 60-70s New York had become one of the art capitals of the world. Now in New York alone there are around 12000 artists and sculptors, around 400 art galleries and hundreds of exhibitions and shows each season. Among the great New York museums there are the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) which houses the most complete collection of modern art in the world, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheism, The Cloisters with its fine medieval collection, the Brooklyn Museum, the Frick Collection, the Nation Museum of Design, the Museum of American Indian, the American raft Museum and the Whitney Museum of Modern Art. Besides New York Chicago is often associated with art and modern architecture. Chicago is the city where several important artists live. Some of them, like Mies van der Rohe or Philip Johnson, did much to influence modern design. In Chicago there is also the museum of Louis Sullivan, called “the father of the skyscraper”.
Literature
Like in art, American literature of the first generations was strongly dependent on British traditions and books brought from there. Before the Revolution and after it many revolutionary-minded Americans viewed literature and art as the means of independence and demanded to lay the foundations of national American literature. The originator of American short story was Washington Irving (1783-1859), the author of “The Sketch-Book” (1819) and “Alhambra”(1832). James Fennimore Cooper (1789-1851) wrote the number of novels about American frontier. His novels “The Spy” (1821) and “Last of the Michigan’s”(1926) became the first American bestsellers, translated into many world languages.. A poet and prose-writer Edgar Poe (1809-49), the author of “The Murders in the Rue Morgan” (1841), “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Gold Bug”, initiated the detective genre. Herman Melville’s masterpiece “Moby Dick” was published in 1850. Poet Henry Longfellow (1807-82) in his poems of “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855), “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “The Courtship of Miles Standish” (1858) created images of courageous Indian heroes.
Walt Whitman’s (1819-92) “Leaves of the Grass” (1855) glorified people and opposed slavery. It was a tribute to the Civil War soldiers who had laid on the battlefields and whom he had seen while serving as an army nurse. The book went through numerous editions during the author’s lifetime, swelling in content from a thin volume to the voluminous work it is today. Walt Whitman’s poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom” (1865) was dedicated to the memory of Abraham Lincoln. The strong rhythms and unusual style of Whitman’s verses, the brightness and impressiveness of his images made Whitman the greatest poet of the USA.
Travel was also a favorite subject. When F. Parkman (1823-93) published his work “The California and Oregon Trail or Life on the Prairies and in the Wigwam” (1849) and Ralph Waldo Emerson composed his memorable essay, glorifying the spirit of the youthful and vigorous United States, they became immediately popular..
Whitman, Longfellow, Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Lowell to a greater or lesser degree stood against the slavery. But their influence was relatively smaller compared to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96), the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life among the Lowly”. Like many novels of the time, it first appeared serialized in “The National Era” and copies could not be printed fast enough to keep up with the demand of the readers. “So you’re the little woman who started the big war”- said Abrahams Lincoln when he met H. Stowe at first time in 1882.
Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) composed a great number of Black folklore and published his collections of tales “Uncle Remus Stories” (1880) and “Nights with Uncle Remus” (1883).
The period after the Civil War is associated with the second stage of the US literature. The leading prose writer of the end of the 19th century was Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910). Twain was born in the state near the Mississippi River His work as a riverboat pilot steering boats up and down the river made the most important influence on him and his books. One of Twain’s first books is called “Life on the Mississippi” (1883). His “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (1976) and “Huckleberry Finn” (1884) tell about the lives of young heroes on the Mississippi river. Together with Twain’s romantic tale “The Prince and the Pauper” (1889) they are still read by children all over the world. At the same time his “Golden Age” (1873) and “A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court” (1889), exposing American vanity, corruption and hypocrisy, are full of strong satire. Incomparable depiction of colloquial speech, peculiarities of paradox, humor and wit are characteristic features of Mark Twain’s writing..
The third and present stage is marked by a tremendous surge of American creativity in all areas, by a steady self-confidence and by growing international influence of American literature. The American literature of the 20PthP century as a mirror of society was opened by Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945). In his first realistic novel “Sister Carrie” Dreiser challenged the American myth that honesty and hard work inevitably lead to success. He followed the novel with several other strong social-critical works of fiction “Jennie Gerhard” (1911), “The Financier”(1912), “The Titan”(1914), “An American Tragedy” (1925). Later T. Dreiser published two collections of stories “Free and Other Stories”(1918) and “Chains: Lesser Novels and Stories”(1927). Many of these stories dramatized the theme of love as the most powerful force in life.
O. Henry (Porter William Sidney) (1862-1910) created a great number of short stories about the life of simple, poor Americans, collected in his books “Cabbages and Kings”(1904),”The Four Million”(1906),“The Gentle Grafter”(1908).
The Northern stories by Jack London (1876-1916) were extremely popular both in the USA and abroad. His novels “The Son of Wolf” (1900), “The Sea-Wolf” (1904), “Martin Eden”(1909) and many others were translated and published in Europe and Russia.
The horrors of World War I and the period following it in the 1920s sparkled the imagination of some of the greatest writers in American literary. They include Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), the author of short stories and novels “The Great Gatsby” (1925), “Tender is the Night” (1934), “The Last Tycoon” (1941) about so-called “lost generation” and Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). Her most widely read book “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” was devoted to her life in Paris, her meeting with famous French artists and expatriate American writers such as Ernest Hemingway. The great master of the modern prose style E. Hemingway (1899-1961) in his early books “Fiesta”(1926), “ For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940) also expressed the frames of mind of the “lost generation”. E. Hemingway volunteered for an ambulance unit in Spain during World War I, but was wounded and hospitalized for six months. His first successful novel “The Sun also Rises” (1926) is about the group of American expatriates living in France and Spain who had lost their joy in life and felt wasted. His “Farewell to Arms” (1929) is another work that reflected the growing disillusionment with war. The main idea of the author is the tragic stoicism of his main characters. According to Hemingway a man must retain courage and dignity under very harsh circumstances, even facing the threat of death. While living in Cuba in the early 1950s, he wrote “The Old Man and the Sea” (1952) about the courage and fortitude of an old Cuban fisherman, awarded with the Nobel Prize in 1954.
More than ten other American writers received the Nobel Prize for Literature. The very first American to be honored by a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930 was Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951). In his popular novels “Main Street”(1920), “Babbitt”(1922) and “Arrow smith”(1925) S. Lewis could describe the lives and values of small town people with sincerity and great understanding.
William Faulkner (1897-1962), known for his novels about people living in the South “ The Sound and the Fury”(1929),”As I lay Dying”(1930),”Intruder in that Dust”(1948), received the Nobel prize in 1949. Faulkner’s style is very much different from that of Hemingway. While Hemingway wrote in short, simple sentences and used a great deal of conversation, Faulkner’s sentences sometimes carry on for almost an entire page, with a lot clauses strung together by commas.
Among the other Nobel prize winners there are a playwright Eugene 0’Neill(1888- 1953), Saul Bellow (1915), Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-91) and John Steinbeck (1902-68), noted for “Grapes of Wrath” and “The Winter of Our Discontent” picturing the complexities of life in America.
John Cheever (1912-82) published the novels and stories “The Wapshot Chronicle”(1957),”Bullety Park”(1969), “Falconer”(1977) in which he used satire to express socio-economic essence of life. J.D. Salinger (1919- ) achieved great literary success with the publication of his novel “The Catcher in the Rye”, centered on the character of 16-year-old boy, who flees his elite boarding school for the outside world only to become disillusioned by its materialism and phoniness A playwright and poet Dubose Hayward (1885-1940) wrote about the life of black American Dockers. His popular novel “Porgy” was staged in 1927 and later became the plot of opera “Porgy and Bess”. Black Americans also wrote about their experiences in American society. The. Black writer Richard Wright (1908- 1960) became well known as the author of the number of novels describing the feelings and fates of black Americans.
During the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s more Afro-Americans began to write. James Baldwin (1924-1987) is well-known writer of that time. His first novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain” (1953) is about his own life as a poor child growing up in New York ghetto, Harlem. In protest against racism in American society, J. Baldwin emigrated and lived abroad until 1977. The life of Harlem inspired the poems of one of the best known black American poets of the 20PthP century Langston Hughes (1902-67). Maya Angelou is a contemporary black American author and poet. Her first book “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” (1970) has an autobiographical character. In 1993 at President Clinton’s first inauguration ceremony, she read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning “on TV to the entire country. Alex Hayley’s epic story of the black experience “Roots” (1976) with the subsequent television special caused white America to stop and investigate its “past sins». In 1983 Alice Walker won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel ‘The Color Purple”, devoted to her struggle for equality.
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