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The Great Gatsby by F.S. Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald's best work The Great Gatsby tells the life story of Jay Gatsby, the son of a poor farmer, who falls in love with a rich and beautiful girl Daisy Fay. She answers his love while his uniform conceals for a time his poverty. When war is over Daisy marries the rich Tom Buchanan.

Gatsby does everything he can to get money and social position to be worthy of Daisy. He devotes all his life to it. But he can achieve it only by bootlegging and doing some other dubious things.

When later Gatsby meets Daisy again, she believes the rumors of his large fortune, rich mansion and fashionable parties. She tells him she will leave Tom. But once, driving Jay back from New York to Long Island in his car, she runs over and kills Myrtle Wilson, her husband's mistress. Tom persuades Myrtle's husband that Gatsby was driving the car. He follows Jay and kills him.

Daisy, having learned about Gatsby's dubious source of income, leaves him even before his death, in spite of the fact that Gatsby takes the fault of Myrtle's death on himself.

The story is told by Daisy's cousin Nick, who at the beginning despises Gatsby for his vanity, vulgar parties, ill-taste, faulty language. He gradually understands the greatness of his romantic dream and the tremendous energy with which he achieves his aim. At the same time Nick sees the shallowness of Gatsby's dream, as the society he tries to get is cynical, vicious and violent.

Gatsby is contrasted to hypocritical, disillusioned and corrupt members of upper society like Tom and Daisy. Gatsby's fanatic attempt to reach his dreams is contrasted to the disillusioned life of the cynical members of upper society who do not know what to do. Satire in the portrayal of the empty pleasures of the rich is combined with lyrical atmosphere enveloping Gatsby's romantic dream.

8. ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1898-1961)

Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois. His family took him, as a boy, on frequent hunting and fishing trips and so acquainted him early with courage and endurance, which were later reflected in his fiction. After high school, he worked as a newspaper reporter and then went overseas to take part in World War I.

Ernest started 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.

After the war he lived for several years in Paris, where he became part of a group of Americans who felt alienated from their country. They considered themselves a lost generation. It was not long before he began publishing remarkable and completely individual short stories. The year he left Paris he published the powerful novel "The Sun Also Rises". His subjects were often war and its effects on people, or contests, such as hunting or bullfighting, which demand stamina and courage.

Hemingway brilliantly described the war years in his antiwar novel "A Farewell to Arms" showing an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter.

During the National-Revolutionary War in Spain (1936—1939), Hemingway actively helped the republicans in their struggle against the fascist reaction. He used his experience as a reporter 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. Hemingway, himself a great sportsman, liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters. He showed primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society Numerous short stories of Hemingway, " Green Hills of Africa ", " The Snows of Kilimanjaro " and other stories attract attention of many readers. His novels are classics of the 20^th century. In 1954 Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

9. JEROME SALINGER (1919 - 2010)

Jerome David Salinger was born in 1919 in New York into a prosperous family. His father was an importer of ham and cheeses. The boy had a sister eight years older than he. Salinger did not study well at school, that's why his parents enrolled him in the Valley Forge Academy in Pennsylvania. It was a military academy. He began writing his first short stories there. When Salinger graduated from the Valley Forge Academy he told his parents that he wanted to become a writer. But his father did not think that it was a suitable career for his son and sent him to Poland to learn the ham business. For some time he slaughtered pigs. Then he returned to America. In 1940 he published his first story the Young Men.

During World War II Salinger spent four years in the army. In 1943, when he was in France, the American magazine Saturday Evening Post published his story The Varioni Brothers. In 1944 Salinger met Ernest Hemingway, who was a war-correspondent in France then. Hemingway had read Salinger's stories and said that the young writer was talented. In 1946 Salinger wrote some stories which brought him fame as a writer. They were published in the New Yorker, a very respectable literary magazine.