Nothing Behind Me Everything On The Road

A childhood such as Truman Capote (Born in New Orleans in 1924) is hard to believe because of the type of writer he was. Capote was abandoned by his mother and raised by his aunts and cousins in Monroeville, Alabama. As a child he lived a very lonely life. He struggled with dealing with the fact that his mother abandoned him. Due to this emptiness was what led him to become a writer. He (Capote) states “I began writing really sort of seriously when I was about eleven. I say seriously in the sense that like other kids go home and practice the violin or the piano or whatever; I used to go home from school every day and I would write for about three hours. I was obsessed by it”, he was definitely decided to be

Oftentimes writers would intentionally break up the continuity of a poem, story, etc., representing the fragmented nature of the times they were living in. A prime example of this is e e cummings, whose poems are extremely fragmented and not easily understood at first read. Modernist authors often jumped spontaneously from one subject to another, seemingly with no connection between the two. The idea was to leave it up to the reader to draw conclusions and pull the story together. This technique, in a more extreme form, led to expressionism, surrealism, and other movements.

Authors write to be understood and to show others their beliefs. They want to color a picture for you in the words they are writing. John Steinbeck used word choice, parallelism, and foreshadowing in Of Mice and Men in the same way a great artist creates a scene.

First, writers reflected on society's concerns. What made a deep impression on many writers was the horror of war. A man born in the Czech named Franz Kafka wrote eerie novels. An eerie novel is a scary or creepy type of book. His stories were about people in tough scary situations that they didn't understand and couldn't get away from what ever they were running from. His books rubbed some of his readers the wrong way in the years after the war. A bunch of novels back then used Freud's

You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories. (O’Brien

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born on December 22, 1960, in Brooklyn, New York. His mother was a Puerto Rican, and his father was a Haitian immigrant, the combination of both eventually led Jean-Michel's into learning creole, Spanish, and English. At an early age, Jean-Michel decided he wanted to be a cartoonist and so his mother took him to a art museums in order to stimulate his imagination. He showed a precocious talent for drawing, and his mother enrolled him as a Junior Member of the Brooklyn Museum when he was six. At the age of eight, he was extremely injured in a car accident and was hospitalized for a month. He broke his arm, suffered multiple internal injuries and underwent a splenectomy. His mother brought him a copy of his Grey’s

Throughout history, there have been many great writers. Those writers used the world around them and a bit of their own style to influence their works. The 1960s was one of the most turbulent decades in U.S. history and new styles of writing were being discovered. A curious Truman Capote used his style of new journalism, events that took place in the late 1950s and the 1960s, and the novel In Cold Blood to change the face of literature for years to come.

At a young age, Kees’s writing was heavily influenced by the Jazz Age, which spanned during his childhood, and the Great Depression, which spanned during his early adulthood. Upon graduating high school in 1931, he attended Doane College, where he decided to become a novelist. Due to his career choice, he transferred to the University of Missouri, which was known for its renowned writing course. After studying at the University of Missouri, he transferred to the University of Nebraska. It was here where he met and was mentored by Lowery C. Wimberley, the founding editor of Prarie Schooner.

The birth of the modernist movement in American literature was the result of the post-World War I social breakdown. Writers adopted a disjointed fragmented style of writing that rebelled against traditional literature. One such writer is William Faulkner, whose individual style is characterized by his use of “stream of consciousness” and writing from multiple points of view.

He was moved multiple times and attended many middle schools. His academic record wasn’t so good and neither was his college experience because he left only after a year. As a child he painted, collected postcards and took pictures of his friends and family with a small Kodak. After he quit college he moved to New york City and worked at the New York Public Library. He went to Paris to try and get better on his French but came back after a year to New York to become a writer. He also started taking pictures as well.

Langston Hughes’ life impacted his work. He was a poet, playwright, and novelist. He was from Joplin, Missouri. Hughes was born on February 1st in 1902. Both of Langston’s parents were slaves (www.biography.com). His mom, Carrie Langston Hughes, was a teacher. Hughes’ dad was James Hughes, an aspiring lawyer. His dad left his family, divorced his wife, and moved to Mexico. Langston Hughes then moved in with his grandmother, who raised him. He lived with her until he was around 13 years old(www.biography.com). When she died, he moved back with his mom and her new husband. They eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio.

Through the idea of stream of consciousness he captured his characters arbitrary manners including their thoughts and feelings. This allowed Joyce’s writing to be more understandable and convincing then previous writers. Joyce’s writing technique with the use of the epiphany, religious symbolism, and stream of consciousness gave the reader access to a deeper understanding of human experience by using subconscious associations along with the conscious thoughts of narrative for his characters.

Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner were two of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. While they lived during the same period, their writing styles differed drastically. This can be seen in texts such as Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”. Hemingway’s style puts little focus on specific character details, which makes his stories seem like they could be about any person, including the reader, while Faulkner’s style puts a lot of focus on specific character details, which makes every detail and every character seem important to the reader. Both authors have styles indirect to their points, which forces the readers to figure out information on their own and leaves the purposes of texts more open to interpretation.

Before the 20th Century, literature was pretty straightforward; the narrators were reliable, the timelines were linear, and the perspective was clear, but then somebody got the idea to mix it up. This is how we got books such as The Great Gatsby and one of our class texts, Orlando. For some, this was a startling and uncomfortable transition from what used to be considered the, “normal” format which was very up front in terms of structure and voice. Others found it to be more exciting and, while it was still weird and unsettling for those people, it forced people to think more about what the books were trying to communicate, instead of just being handed the message; they had to work for it. This has become one of the leading reasons that societies are encouraged to read; if you read a book that forces you to think, your mind becomes stronger and this promotes an increase in intelligence and creativity.

This is not to say that texts of the modernist era have no events, or that their characters sit at home all day long thinking. Many