Examining Literatures Reflection of Society through Individual Actions

Categories: The Road

Reflection, Pages 5 (1147 words)

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Literature is an art of reflecting the life an individuals in the society with their relative actions in the society. The term ‘Literature’ is derived from Latin word litaritura / litteratura “writing formed with letters”. It can be distinguished according to major forms such as the novel, short story, drama, and the works are categorized according to the historical period and genre.

The term emerged during the Romantic period in which it began to demarcate “imaginative” literature. Literary genre is a mode of categorizing literature.

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It’s a French term for “a literary type or class”. The history of literature is the flow of development of civilization. When it was defined as a written work, Ancient Egyptian literature along with Sumerian literature are considered the world’s oldest literature.Literature in it’s form provides about how the society has evolved and about the norms during each of the different periods throughout the history. Literature represents the life of the society and it’s individuals.

Chilean-American author Isabel Allende wrote her debut novel, 'House of Spirits,' to great acclaim in 1982. The novel began as a letter to her dying grandfather and is a work of magical realism charting the history of Chile. Allende began writing 'House of Spirits' on Jan. 8, and subsequently has begun writing all of her books on that day. Most of her works usually contain elements of magical realism and vivid female characters. 'City of Beasts' (2002) has been another large commercial success.

Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' (1987) was named best novel of the past 25 years in a 2006 New York Times Book Review survey.

The searingly painful novel offers a very personal window into the horrors of slavery and its aftermath. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and Toni Morrison, a luminary of African-American literature, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Philip Roth (1933–2018) seems to have won more book awards than any other late-20th-century American writer. He won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for The Plot Against America (2005) and a PEN/Nabokov Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2006. His mostly Jewish-themed work usually explores a fraught and conflicted relationship with Jewish tradition. In Everyman (2006), Roth's 27th novel, he stuck to one of his familiar later themes: what it's like growing old Jewish in America.

During his long career that spanned decades and reached into the 21st century, John Updike (1932–2009) was one of only three writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. Some of Updike's most renowned novels included his Rabbit Angstrom novels, 'Of the Farm' (1965), and 'Olinger Stories: A Selection' (1964). His four Rabbit Angstrom novels were named in 2006 among the best novels of the past 25 years in a New York Times Book Review survey. He famously described his subject as 'the American small town, Protestant middle class.

Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island on July 20, 1933.Cormac was raised Roman Catholic. From 1957-59, McCarthy returned to the university, where he published two stories, “A Drowning Incident” and “Wake for Susan” in the student literary magazine, The Phoenix, calling himself C. J. McCarthy, Jr. While at the university, he won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960.

He later married Lee Holleman, who had been a student at the University of Tennessee, and the couple settled in Sevier County, Tennessee. They had one son, Cullen. His first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published, McCarthy had received a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Outer Dark was published by Random House in 1968.

Child of God was published in 1973. From 1974-75, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener’s Son, which premiered in January 1977. This screenplay, too, was based on actual historical events; the locale was South Carolina.

In 1979, McCarthy published his fourth novel, Suttree, a book which had occupied his writing life on and off for twenty or so years.

Blood Meridian was published in 1985, but received little review attention at the time. Now, however, it is considered a turning point in his career. Some critics prefer his recent western writing, of which Blood Meridian was the first example. Others feel that he has strayed too far from his roots, that his westerns lack something. But Blood Meridian, followed closely by Suttree, is now generally regarded as McCarthy’s finest work to date. McCarthy did extensive research for the novel. The author visited all the locales of the book and even learned Spanish to further his research.

All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of The Border Trilogy, was published by Knopf in 1992. Unlike McCarthy’s earlier books, this one became a publishing sensation, garnering many excellent reviews. It became a New York Times bestseller, and sold 190,000 copies in hardcover within the first six months of publication. It finally gave McCarthy the wide readership that had eluded him for many years.

McCarthy edited and revised a play he had written in the mid-1970s, which was published in the summer of 1994 by Ecco Press. Called The Stonemason, the tragedy explores the fortunes of three generations of a black family in Kentucky. Shortly after the publication of The Stonemason, Knopf released the second volume of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing. It began life with a first printing of 200,000 copies, a large printing for a work of literary fiction.

The third volume of The Border Trilogy was published in 1998; Cities of the Plainunites John Grady Cole, the main character of All the Pretty Horses, with The Crossing‘s Billy Parham, and centers on Cole’s doomed relationship with a Mexican prostitute. Not as well-received by critics as the first two books in the Border Trilogy, Cities of the Plain is nonetheless notable for its epilogue, which reaches back to Suttree in its imagery and simultaneously casts the entire Border Trilogy in a new and fascinating light, unifying the previous two volumes of the trilogy.

Sometime around the publication of Cities of the Plain, McCarthy married for a third time; he and his wife Jennifer Winkley have one child, John Francis, born 1999. 2005 brought the publication of No Country for Old Men, which was adapted into an award-winning film by Joel and Ethan Coen.In 2006, Alfred A. Knopf published The Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. McCarthy granted an interview with Oprah Winfrey, who had chosen The Road for her Book Club. The Roadwas awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Literature, and it also won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

The Sunset Limited arrived in 2006. Commissioned by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater, it premiered in May, with publication thereafter.

Early 2013 brought the announcement that McCarthy had penned an original screenplay, The Counselor. Little is currently known about the screenplay, but Ridley Scott directed, and the film is slated for U.S. release in October of 2013. The story apparently deals with territory and themes similar to that explored in No Country for Old Men.