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June 05, 2010

Pick of the Week - Great Writers

Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a representative of non-metropolitan French literature. His origin in Algeria and his experiences there in the thirties were dominating influences in his thought and work. Of semi-proletarian parents, early attached to intellectual circles of strongly revolutionary tendencies, with a deep interest in philosophy (only chance prevented him from pursuing a university career in that field), he came to France at the age of twenty-five. The man and the times met: Camus joined the resistance movement during the occupation and after the liberation was a columnist for the newspaper Combat. But his journalistic activities had been chiefly a response to the demands of the time; in 1947 Camus retired from political journalism and, besides writing his fiction and essays, was very active in the theatre as producer and playwright (e.g., Caligula, 1944). He also adapted plays by Calderon, Lope de Vega, Dino Buzzati, and Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun. His love for the theatre may be traced back to his membership in L'Equipe, an Algerian theatre group, whose "collective creation" Révolte dans les Asturies (1934) was banned for political reasons.



Novels
The Stranger(1942)
The Plague(1947)
The Fall(1956)
A Happy Death (written 1936-1938, published posthumously 1971)
The First Man (incomplete, published posthumously 1995)

Short stories
Exile and the Kingdom (1957)
The Adulterous Woman
The Renegade or a Confused Spirit
The Silent Men
The Guest
Jonas or the Artist at Work
The Growing Stone

Non-fiction
Betwixt and Between
Nuptials
The Myth of Sisyphus
The Rebel

Essays
Create Dangerously (1957)
The Ancient Greek Tragedy (1956)
The Crisis of Man (1946)
Why Spain? (1948)
Reflections on the Guillotine (1957)

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Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American writer and journalist. His distinctive writing style—known as the iceberg theory—characterized by economy and understatement, influenced 20th-century fiction, as did his apparent life of adventure and the public image he cultivated. He produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and his career peaked in 1954 when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Hemingway's fiction was successful because the characters he presented exhibited authenticity that reverberated with his audience. Many of his works are classics of American literature. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works during his lifetime, with a further three novels, four collections of short stories, and three non-fiction works published after his death.



SELECTED WORKS :

"Indian Camp" (1926)

The Sun Also Rises (1927)

A Farewell to Arms (1929)

"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (1935)

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

The Old Man and the Sea (1951)

True at First Light(1991)