14. What I read, when and why I read it

Geoffrey Chaucer:

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340 – 1400) is considered to be the father of English poetry because he wrote in English rather than in French or Latin. His Canterbury Tales records the imagined conversations of pilgrims as they journeyed from London to Canterbury.

Jonathan Swift:

Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745) uses his black humour and irony in his satirical pamphlets. His most famous work is Gulliver´s Travels, a satire on British society.

Daniel Defoe:

Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731) is remembered for his book Robinson Crusoe, which is still one of the most popular books among children. In Moll Flanders, he gives a realistic picture of the life of a prostitute in London.

Mary Shelley:

Mary Shelley (1797 – 1851) wrote Frankenstein, which is the most well-known of the Gothic novels with the horror genre that we are so familiar with in films and on TV today.

Charles Dickens:

Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870) wrote novels where heroes and villains were taken from the hustle and bustle of Victorian London (Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations,Bleak House).

Oscar Wilde:

Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) was an Irish writer and poet who had very extravagant and shocking manners and style of dressing. He gave lectures on aestheticism/l’art-pour-l’art = art cannot be moral or immoral, decent or indecent, it can be only beautiful or ugly.All his life he was fighting with bisexuality/homosexuality (at that time illegal). His famous works are e.g. Canterville Ghost or The Picture of Dorian Gray.

George Orwell:

George Orwell (1903 – 1950) was an English novelist and journalist. His work is marked by clarity, intelligence and wit, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and belief in democratic socialism. He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Fourand the allegorical novella Animal Farm, which together have sold more copies than any two books by any other 20th-century author.

3) OTHER AMERICAN WRITERS:

Edgar Allan Poe:

Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) is celebrated as the father of the detective story, a major horror writer and poet. But he was also a man torn by tragic circumstances. His life was as bleak and dramatic as some of his works. He wrote The Raven,The Black Cat,Murders in the Rue Morgue etc.

Ernest Hemingway:

Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1961) was an American author and journalist. His economical and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. His well-known books are The Old Man and The Sea or For Whom the Bell Tolls.