O.Henry& Henry James

*,单击此处编辑母版标题样式,单击此处编辑母版文本样式,第二级,第三级,第四级,第五级,O. Henry (1862-1910),short-story writer, born William Sydney Porter in,Greenboro, North Carolina.,His father, Algernon Sidney Porter, was a physician. When William was three, his mother died, and he was raised by his parental grandmother and paternal aunt. William was an avid reader, but at the age of fifteen he left school, and then worked in a drug store and on a Texas ranch. He continued to Houston, where he had a number of jobs, including that of bank clerk. After moving in 1882 to Texas, he worked on a ranch in LaSalle County for two years. In 1887 he married Athol Estes Roach; they had one daughter and one son.,In 1894 Porter started a humorous weekly,The Rolling Stone,. It was at this time that he began heavy drinking. When the weekly failed, he joined the,Houston Post,as a reporter and columnist. In 1894 cash was found to have gone missing from the First National Bank in Austin, where Porter had worked as a bank teller. When he was called back to Austin to stand trial, Porter fled to Honduras to avoid trial. Little is known about Porters stay in Central America. After hearing news that his wife was dying, he returned in 1897 to Austin. In 1897 he was convicted of embezzling money, although there has been much debate over his actual guilt. Porter entered in 1898 a penitentiary at Columbus, Ohio.,While in prison, Porter started to write short stories to earn money to support his daughter Margaret. His first work, Whistling Dicks Christmas Stocking (1899), appeared in,McClures Magazine,. The stories of adventure in the U.S. Southwest and in Central America gained an immediately success among readers. After doing three years of the five years sentence, Porter emerged from the prison in 1901 and changed his name to O. Henry.,O. Henry moved to New York City in 1902. Henrys first collection,Cabbages and Kings, appeared in 1904. The second,The Four Million, was published two years later and included his well-known stories The Gift of the Magi and The Furnished Room.,The Trimmed Lamp,(1907) explored the lives of New Yorkers and included The Last Leaf.,Henrys best known work is perhaps the much anthologized The Ransom of Red Chief.,O. Henrys stories have a variety of settings, but most of them are laid in either New York City or Texas. His characters include shop girls and millionaires, policemen and burglars, cowboys and tramps, confidence men and southern gentlemen, and other assorted types. His manner is usually that of the garrulous taleteller, and his style is almost invariably breezy, flippant, and slangy, with puns, malapropisms, and big words used for humorous effect.,His stories are liberally sprinkled with asides in which he addresses the reader in a familiar and chatty tone. Literary allusions, often made facetiously, are common, and there are many references to other writers. Coincidence figures largely in his stories, and they often have a surprise twist, or snapper, as O. Henry called it. Unabashed sentiment and the broadest kind of comedy and burlesque are other conspicuous ingredients.,Henry James (1843-1916),Henry James (1843-1916), American-born writer, gifted with talents in literature, psychology, and philosophy. James wrote 20 novels, 112 stories, 12 plays and a number of works of literary criticism.,Henry James was born in New York City into a wealthy family. Henry James was one of the few authors in American literary history who did not have to worry about money. He toured England, France and Italy. He settled down in London in 1876 and, except for some visits to America, spent the rest of his life there. In 1915 he became a naturalized British citizen. James was not married.,Biographical Introduction,The creative life of Henry James can be divided into three distinctive periods.,In the first period (1865-1882) he produced a number of novels, among which the most important include,The American, Daisy Miller,which won him international fame and which reveals James fascination with his “,international theme,” (or American innocence in face of European sophistication), and,The Portrait of a Lady, one of the greatest books James ever wrote.,The second period of his career extended from 1882-1895, in which he dropped the “international theme” and wrote his tales of subtle studies of inter-personal relationships. As these novels were poorly received, James turned to play-writing in 1890. His plays being also failures.,In the third and final phase of his creativity (1895-1900) he wrote a few novellas and tales dealing with childhood and adolescence, which was a revival of his earlier theme of innocence in a corrupted world. The most famous of these are the enigmatic,The Turn of the Screw,and,What,Maisie,Knew,.,The three great novels,The Ambassadors,The Wings of the Dove,and,The Golden Bowl, which represent the summit of his art and thus constitute “the major phase” of his career. Here James returned to his old ground, “the international theme”.,“the international theme”: the meeting of America and Europe, American innocence in contact and contrast with European decadence and the moral and psychological complications arising there from. For the American it was a process of progression from inexperience to experience, from innocence to knowledge and maturity.,James contribution to literary criticism is immense. His criticism is both concerned with form and devoted to human values.,Contribution to literary criticism,(1)Art must be related to life; it must be life transformed and changed so that the art form would give the truthful impression of actuality.,In fact the main theme of his famous essay, “The Art of Fiction,” is that the aim of the novel to represent life.,(2) There must be freedom for the artist to choose what subject he will deal with.,(3) Dramatization: showing rather than telling. This is Jamess chief criterion.,And important authors in the 20th century do the same thing. Rather than summarizing an event, they take the reader to the event as if the reader were watching it in a movie or watching it on stage.,In his whole writing career James was concerned with “point of view” which is at the center of his aesthetic of the novel. He discovered the trick of making his characters reveal themselves with minimal intervention of the author. He used a particular method of telling the story, that is, illumination of the situation and characters through one or several minds. This method he termed “point of view.”,(4) Psychological realism: He became more interested in documenting what goes on in the characters mind psychologically.,James has been called the first of the “modern psychological novelists,” and “a realist of the inner life.”,