(famous English and American authors, your favourite author – life, works, style of writing, plots, settings)
1) My favourite author – Isaac Asimov
• born in 1920 in Petrovichi, Russia
• in 1923 emigrated to New York, USA
• 1934 first story
• studies at Columbia University, biology and chemistry
• 1939 first professional story in Amazing Stories
• died in 1992
• short stories about robots: Robbie, Reason, Lair!, Runaround, Evidence, Little Lost Robot, The Bicentennial Man – published in collection I, Robot
• novels about robots: The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Drawn, Robots and Empire
• famous Laws of Robotics (from Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D., as quoted in I, Robot)
1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the 1st Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the 1st or 2nd Law.
• 1951-53 famous trilogy Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation (describes “future history” of galactic empire), in 1966 Best All-time Novel Series Hugo Award, then additional 4 parts
• novels The Gods Themselves, The End of Eternity, series of novels about Lucky Starr
• 1989 Nemesis; story for film Fantastic Voyage
• influenced by Karel Capek’s RUR, a lot of Hugo and Nebula awards, author of words “robotics”, “positronic”, “psychohistory”
2) English Literature
• oldest epic poem The Song of Beowulf, form Anglo-Saxon period
• religious literature by John Wycliff, influenced John Huss
• Middle Ages: Geoffrey Chaucer (14th century, Canterbury Tales – about pilgrims on their way to Canterbury)
• Renaissance (without William Shakespeare)
o Sir Thomas More (philosopher, Utopia)
o Christopher Marlowe (The Tragical history of Doctor Faust – inspiration for Goethe)
• Baroque: John Milton (Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained)
• Enlightenment
o Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels)
o Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe)
• Romanism
o Sir Walter Scott (Ivanhoe, Rob Roy)
o George Gordon Byron (Child Harold’s Pilgrimage)
o Percy Bysshe Shelley (Prometheus Unbound; his wife, Mary Shelley, wrote Frankenstein)
• Victorian age: Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Papers of the Pickwick Club, Christmas stories)
• 1st half of 20th century
o Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (detective stories with Sherlock Holmes)
o Agatha Christie (detective stories with Hercule Poirot)
o Herbert George Wells (The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine)
o George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion – My Fair Lady)
• 2nd half of 20th century (“Angry Young Men”)
o John Osborne (Look Back in Anger)
o Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim)
3) American Literature
• 19th century
o Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tow Sawyer)
o Edgar Allan Poe (Murder in the Morgue Street, poem The Raven)
o Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)
• prose in 20th century (without Ernest Hemingway): William Faulkner, John Steinbeck
• poetry in 20th century: Allen Ginsberg (Howl)
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