Tara Road

Leo Tolstoy was born on August 28, 1828 at Yasnya Polyana, in Tula Province, the fourth of five children. His parents died when he was a child. Relatives brought him up. In 1844 Tolstoy started his studies of law and oriental languages at Kazan University, but he never got a degree.

Tolstoy was treated for venereal disease in 1847, and for most of the rest of his life was troubled by his tendency to debauch himself on a grand scale. After contracting heavy gambling debts, Tolstoy accompanied his elder brother to the Caucasus in 1851, and joined an artillery regiment. In the 1850s Tolstoy also began his literary career, publishing the autobiographical trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth.

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Truman Capote was born in New Orleans, as the son of a salesman and a 16-year-old beauty queen, Lillie Mae Faulk. His father, “Arch” Persons, worked as a clerk for a steamboat company. Arch never stuck at any job for long, and was always leaving home in search for new opportunities. The unhappy marriage gradually disintegrated. When Capote was four, his parents eventually divorced.

In his childhood Capote made friends with Harper Lee, who portrayed him as Dill in her world famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

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Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, starting his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.

During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises. Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms, the study of an American ambulance officer’s disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea, the story of an old fisherman’s journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.

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John Steinbeck is an American writer, who described in his work the struggle of people who depend on the soil for their livelihood. He was born in Salinas, California. Steinbeck was educated at Stanford University.

When he was in his twenties, he worked as a ranch hand and fruit picker. His first novel, Cup of Gold, romanticizes the life and exploits of the famous 17th-century Welsh pirate Sir Henry Morgan. In The Pastures of Heaven, a group of short stories depicting a community of California farmers, Steinbeck first dealt with the hardworking people and social themes associated with most of his works. His other early books include To a God Unknown, the story of a farmer whose belief in a pagan fertility cult impels him, during a severe drought, to sacrifice his own life; Tortilla Flat, a sympathetic portrayal of Americans of Mexican descent dwelling near Monterey, California; In Dubious Battle, a novel concerned with a strike of migratory fruit pickers; and Of Mice and Men, a tragic story of two itinerant farm laborers yearning for a small farm of their own.

Steinbeck’s most widely known work is The Grapes of Wrath. The stark account of the Joad family from the impoverished Oklahoma Dust Bowl and their migration to California during the economic depression of the 1930s.

Steinbeck’s other works include The Moon Is Down, Cannery Row, The Wayward Bus, East of Eden, The Winter of Our Discontent, and America and Americans. In 1962 he wrote Travels with Charley, an autobiographical account of a trip across the United States accompanied by a pet poodle. Steinbeck was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in literature. His modernization of the Arthurian legends, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, was published posthumously in 1976.

Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, England. She was the seventh child of eight. Her constant companion throughout her life was her sister, Cassandra. She never married. Jane has almost no formal education.By the time she was 23 years old, Austen had written three novels, Elinor and Marianne, First Impressions, and Susan. In 1801, her family moved to Bath. When her father died 4 years later, Jane, Cassandra, and their mother moved several times, settling in Chawton. There is where she wrote most of her work. All of Austen’s novels were originally published anonymously. Pride and Prejudice was an instant success as was Emma.

Two common themes in Austen’s books are the loss of illusions, usually leading characters to a more mature outlook, and the class between traditional moral ideals and the everyday demands of life. She is regarded as one of the greatest novelists of the 19th and 20th centuries.