Weitere Bücher, die Sie mögen werden

• 

  O Henry - A Short Story...

  O Henry

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  William Sydney Porter was born on 11th September 1862 in Greensboro, North Carolina. At age 3 his mother died from tuberculosis. From an early age it was clear Porter had a large appetite for reading as he absorbed the world around him. 
   
  He first attended at a school run by his aunt before enrolling at the Lindsey Street High School and then worked at his uncle’s drugstore and gained a pharmacists’ license in 1881.  
   
  A persistent cough took him to Texas in the hope that a change of climate would help his symptoms. He took on various types of work, initially from ranch hand and cook and then as varied as pharmacist, draftsman, bank teller and journalist. He also began to write, though for now, purely as a hobby. 
   
  He was a member of several singing and dramatic groups when he met 17 year old Athol Estes, daughter of a wealthy Austin family. Despite her mother’s objection owing to Athol’s tuberculosis, they began courting and in July 1887, they eloped and soon married. 
   
  Athol, impressed by his writing, encouraged him to get them published. A job as a draftsman at the Texas General Land Office paid a healthy $100 dollars per month and life was good. 
   
  But then life turned cruel. His son died a few hours after birth although a daughter, Margaret, came the following year.  His job had to be vacated but another was found at the First National Bank of Austin. The bank operated informally and Porter was careless in keeping the books. He lost that job but began writing for the humourous weekly The Rolling Stone and the Houston Post. Some time later the federal Bank auditors went through his former accounts and he was arrested on charges of embezzlement. 
   
  Porter fled the day before his trial to Honduras. Holed up for several months he began to write.  Athol had become too ill to travel to meet him and learning that her health was deteriorating he surrendered to the court in February 1897.  Bail was obtained so that he could stay with Athol during her final days.  
   
  Porter was sentenced to five years at the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus. His pharmacy qualifications got him the job of night druggist.  His sentence also gave him time to write and publish fourteen short stories. In December 1899 in McClure’s Magazine he published a short story as O Henry.  
   
  He was released two years early in July 1901, and reunited with Margaret, now 11, in Pittsburgh.  He now began his most prolific period of writing; a short story per week for the New York World, while also publishing works in other magazines.  Eventually over 600 of his short stories were published. 
   
  Porter was a heavy drinker and in 1908 his health, which had deteriorated for several years, took a dramatic turn for the worse, as did his writing. 
    
  O Henry died of cirrhosis of the liver complicated by diabetes and an enlarged heart on 5th June 1910. 
  1 - O Henry - A Short Story Collection - An Introduction - Volume 1 
  2 - The Gift of the Magi by O Henry 
  3 - A Harlem Tragedy by O Henry 
  4 - According to Their Lights by O Henry 
  5 - After Twenty Years by O Henry 
  6 - Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen by O Henry 
  7 - Transients in Arcadia by O Henry 
  8 - The Cop and the Anthem by O Henry 
  9 - The Caballero's Way by O Henry 
  10 - The Count and the Wedding Guest by O Henry 
  11 - The Dream by O Henry 
  12 - The Furnished Room by O Henry

  Zum Buch

• 

  Who Was She?

  Bayard Taylor

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Bayard Taylor (1825 - 1878) was an American writer and poet, best known for his translations of German literature, including his acclaimed Faust.Who Was She? is a romantic mystery. The narrator is on vacation and discovers what he takes to be a secluded glen unknown to anyone else. But one day, he finds a wilted bunch of flowers and a book on the flat rock where he always sits. The book contains sketches and musings, clearly by an unmarried woman. The narrator finds a way to return the book, with his own message and an unlikely and mysterious correspondence begins, from which it becomes clear that this is the start of a strange unknown quest. But one with no map, no certain destination and few clues. The only important (and multi-layered) question is "who was she?"

  Zum Buch

• 

  Mrs Bindle

  Herbert George Jenkins

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Herbert Jenkins' most popular fictional creation was Mr. Joseph Bindle, who first appeared in a humorous novel in 1916 and in a number of sequels. In the preface to the books, T. P. O'Connor said that "Bindle is the greatest Cockney that has come into being through the medium of literature since Dickens wrote Pickwick Papers". The stories are based on the comedic drama of life at work, at home and all the adventures that take place along the way. It becomes clear as the stories progress that Bindle would not be who he is without Mrs. Bindle, and this book seeks to tell the stories of the Bindles from the distaff point of view.  (Summary by Wikipedia and Don W. Jenkins)

  Zum Buch

• 

  Great Detective Stories - The...

  Various Authors

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  An anthology featuring famous sleuths: Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter", Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Crooked Man" and G.K. Chesterlon's "The Man in the Passage".

  Zum Buch

• 

  Hard Times (version 2) Locked...

  Charles Dickens

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  Hard Times was Dickens's shortest novel and the only one to be set in the industrial north of England. A fast moving story with a typical cast of larger than life characters, the novel is a vehicle for a humanist critique of both utilitarian education ('Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts', says Mr. Gradgrind in the opening paragraph) and the mutual antagonism between capital and the trade union. A humanist education system, it turns out, is Dickens's solution to the class struggle. Hard Times is set in the fictional Coketown and was partly inspired by a visit to Preston during the factory lockout that brought the town's industry to a standstill in 1853. This version is read as it appeared in 20 issues of Dickens's weekly Household Words from April to August 1854. It is followed by two earlier articles - Locked Out and On Strike - that describe Dickens' visit to Preston and do much to clarify his thinking on education and class conflict. - Summary by Phil Benson

  Zum Buch

• 

  The Shawl

  Cynthia Ozick

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  At once fiercely immediate and complex in their implications, “The Shawl” and “Rosa” succeed in imagining the unimaginable: the horror of the Holocaust and the emptiness of its aftermath. They were written in 1977 but were first published in the early 1980s in The New Yorker. Both “The Shawl” and “Rosa” won first prize in the O. Henry Prize Stories and were chosen for Best American Short Stories. 
  In “The Shawl,” a woman named Rosa Lublin watches a concentration camp guard murder her daughter. In “Rosa,” that same woman appears thirty years later, “a madwoman and a scavenger” in a Miami hotel. And in both stories there is a shawl—a shawl that can sustain a starving child or inadvertently destroy her, or even magically conjure her back to life.

  Zum Buch