哈伯·李的这部经典小说的故事背景发生在大萧条时期的美国南方小镇。对于高中生来说,这本小说是个不可多得的选择。
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本书获1960年普利策奖。三十年代,美国大萧条时期南部的一个小镇,三个天真孩子的生活因为两桩冤案而改变。赢弱而失语的人、固守太多偏见的无知的人,还有恪守原则的善良的律师父亲,迫使他们艰难地去理解成人世界里的偏见和冷漠,去理解真相所包含的危机和无奈,同时试着去理解,坏人的内心也可能无辜。
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提及二十世纪二十年代,即美国的“爵士时代”时,应该没有人不会想起弗朗西斯·斯·菲茨杰拉德写的《了不起的盖茨比》。这部小说让老师和学生都对那个年代无比着迷。
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二十世纪二十年代的美国,空气里弥漫着欢歌与纵饮的气息。一个偶然的机会,穷职员尼克闯入了挥金如土的大富翁盖茨比隐秘的世界,惊讶地发现,他内心惟一的牵绊竟是河对岸那盏小小的绿灯——灯影婆娑中,住着心爱的黛西。然而,冰冷的现实容不下缥缈的梦,到头来,盖茨比心中的女神只不过是凡尘俗世的物质女郎。当一切真相大白,盖茨比的悲剧人生亦如烟花般,璀璨只是一瞬,幻灭才是永恒。一阕华丽的“爵士时代”的挽歌,在菲茨杰拉德笔下,如诗如梦,在美国当代文学史上留下了墨色浓重的印痕。二十世纪末,美国学术界权威在百年英语文学长河中选出一百部最优秀的小说,《了不起的盖茨比》众望所归,高居第二位,傲然跻身当代经典行列。小说采用印象派的描写手法,笔调既热烈又冷静,为奠定菲茨杰拉德在世界文学史上的地位起到了不可或缺的作用。
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约翰·斯坦贝克写的这部描述风沙肆虐地区的农民被迫向西部转移以寻求生计的小说,是大萧条时期贫苦人民的生活的真实写照。
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Shocking and controversial when it was first published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic remains his undisputed masterpiece. Set against the background of dust bowl Oklahoma and Californian migrant life, it tells of the Joad family, who, like thousands of others, are forced to travel West in search of the promised land. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and broken dreams, yet out of their suffering Steinbeck created a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision; an eloquent tribute to the endurance and dignity of the human spirit.
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小说《野性的呼唤》,通过一只名叫巴克的狗的视角来描写和透视世界,是杰克·伦敦关于自我反省和自我认同的一本著作。
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巴克原是米勒法官家的一只爱犬,经过了文明的教化,一直生活在美国南部加州一个温暖的山谷里。后被卖到美国北部寒冷偏远、盛产黄金的阿拉斯加,成了一只拉雪橇的狗。经历了无数磨难后,他不愿意屈服于自己的命运,最后回归荒野,成为狼群首领的英勇、仁爱的狗。在小说中,杰克·伦敦运用拟人手法,把狗眼中的世界及人类的本质刻画地淋漓尽致,反映了“优胜劣汰,适者生存”的客观现实。巴克渴望并奔向了自由,这也正是作家的追求和理想的体现。
这,就是美国近现代著名的现实主义作家——杰克·伦敦(1876—1916)写的杰出的长篇小说《野性的呼唤》的故事。
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拉尔夫·埃里森的这本关于种族歧视的经典小说不容错过。然而,可悲的是,小说中主人公遇到的许多问题在当今美国世界依旧存在着。
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Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is the story of a young black man whose name the reader never learns. He is a young man from the South who is haunted by his grandfather's deathbed warning against conforming to the wishes of white people because the young man sees that as the way to be successful.
The narrator's first real glimpse at the cruel manipulation of white people comes when he is invited to the local men's club to read the speech he prepared for his high school graduation. He gives the speech and is rewarded with a briefcase and a scholarship to a black college, but only after he endures the humiliation of performing for the white men there. He and several black boys are forced to box each other and then scramble around a rug pulsing with electric current to grab coins while the white men laugh at their pain.
The narrator goes off to college and determines to model himself after Dr. Bledsoe, the college's dean and a successful black man who is well respected in his community and his field. Unfortunately, the narrator makes a dreadful mistake when he is chauffeuring Mr. Norton, a wealthy white man who a great deal of money to the college. He inadvertently reveals the seedier side of the black race by allowing the man to stop and speak with Joe Trueblood, a poor, black man ostracized from the black community because he got his own daughter pregnant. After the upsetting encounter with Trueblood, the white man is feeling weak and needs a drink, so the young man takes him to the closest place he can think of, the local black bar and brothel. After a disastrous encounter with a mentally altered war veteran, the narrator takes Mr. Norton back to campus.
Dr. Bledsoe is so furious with the narrator's indiscretion and stupidity that he expels him. Dr. Bledsoe offers him some hope, however, by offering to write him several letters of recommendation to deliver to the school's trustees in New York. The dean tells the young man that if he makes enough money for tuition, he can come back to school.
The young man sets out for the city unaware that the letters of recommendation are really a hoax just to get him quietly away from the school. Once he finds out about the letters, he is so broke that he takes a job in a paint factory where he has an accident. He wakes up in the factory hospital where they are doing painful experiments on him that leave him disoriented. He recovers somewhat and is released only to dump a spittoon on some man whom he mistakes for Dr. Bledsoe at his boarding house.
After that incident, he moves into a room in a kindly woman's apartment and stays there without a job until he gets caught up with the Communist party. They give him a position as a speaker in Harlem and he works with them until he becomes so disillusioned by their politics and betrayal that he gets caught up in a riot in Harlem and falls into a manhole. He builds himself a room in the cellar of an all-white building and hibernates there contemplating his relationship to reality and the invisibility he feels is caused by his race. He lives in that hole until he runs into Mr. Norton one day in the subway and realizes that he will no longer conform to white expectations of him. Instead, he will reclaim his humanity by being who he is and no longer struggling to change that.
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这是关于第一次世界大战最好的小说之一。欧内斯特·海明威以第一次世界大战为背景,描述了一个美籍救护车司机和一个英国护士的爱情故事。
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《永别了,武器》是美国诺贝尔文学奖获得者海明威的主要作品之一。美国青年弗瑞德里克·亨利在第一次世界大战后期志愿参加红十字会驾驶救护车,在意大利北部战线抢救伤员。在一次执行任务时,亨利被炮弹击中受伤,在米兰医院养伤期间得到了英国籍护士凯瑟琳的悉心护理,两人陷入了热恋。亨利伤愈后重返前线,随意大利部队撤退时目睹战争的种种残酷景象,毅然脱离部队,和凯瑟琳会合后逃往瑞士。结果凯瑟琳在难产中死去。海明威根据自己的参战经历,以战争与爱情为主线,吟唱了一曲哀婉动人的悲歌,曾多次被搬上银幕,堪称现代文学的经典名篇。
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雷.布莱伯利的这部经典中篇小说描述了一个未来世界。在这个世界里,消防员的工作不是灭火,而是纵火和烧书。学生们享受由这种快速阅读带来的震撼心灵的快感。
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Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books. The classic novel of a post-literate future, Fahrenheit 451 stands alongside Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World as a prophetic account of Western civilization's enslavement by the media, drugs and conformity. Bradbury's powerful and poetic prose combines with uncanny insight into the potential of technology to creat a novel which, fifty years on from first publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock
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