名人背景资料：英文长篇合辑

paisleyUID: 64183

Keller, Helen (Adams)  1880 -- 1968  

转载自http://www.biography.com/
  
Writer, lecturer, advocate for the deaf and blind. Born June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, to parents Arthur, an editor, and Kate (n閑 Adams). At the age of 19 months, Keller was struck with a fever that left her blind and deaf. A devoted tutor, Anne Sullivan Macy taught Keller to read, write, and speak; and Keller spent the remainder of her life leading humanitarian efforts to vastly improve the quality of living for the disabled.
An undisciplined and rebellious child, Keller frequently had explosive tantrums, which she later attributed to a sense of frustration at her inability to communicate like others. In The Story of My Life (1903), she writes, 揝ometimes I stood between two persons who were conversing and touched their lips. I could not understand, and was vexed. I moved my lips and gesticulated frantically without result. This made me so angry at times that I kicked and screamed until I was exhausted.?There were few options for her education. Out of desperation, her father traveled with his daughter to Washington D.C., where Dr. Alexander Graham Bell梬hose invention of a system of writing for the blind had made him a pioneer in the field梕xamined Keller. Dr. Bell referred her to the venerable Perkins Institution for the Blind, located in Boston, Massachusetts, which recommended the tutelage of recent top-honors Perkins graduate, Anne Sullivan.

The relationship between Keller and Sullivan that began in 1887, when Keller was only six years old, lasted until Sullivan抯 death in 1936. Using a manual alphabet in which she would slowly spell out the words of objects in the palm of Keller抯 hand, Sullivan gave Keller her first fundamental lesson that things had names. In 1888, Keller began learning to read Braille at the Perkins Institution, accompanied by Sullivan. Keller proved to be a bright and creative student, and she attended the Horace Mann School for the Deaf from 1890-94, where she began learning to speak. At the age of 14, she enrolled in the Wright-Humason School in New York City, followed by the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, which she began attending in 1896. In 1900, she enrolled at Radcliffe College, where she studied with the painstaking help of Sullivan梬ho transcribed reading assignments to Keller for hours each day. During this time, in addition to penning her first autobiography, The Story of My Life (1903), Keller also served as an advocate for people with visual and hearing disabilities on the Massachusetts state commission for the welfare of the blind. In 1904, Keller graduated from Radcliffe with honors.

In 1905, Anne Sullivan married John Albert Macy, a professor at Harvard University, who had collaborated with Keller on her first book. Sullivan抯 marriage to Macy did nothing to alter her friendship with Keller. Directly after graduating from college, Keller began her attack on public indifference of the blind and deaf. She began publishing articles on preventing blindness in newborns, a topic that had previously been taboo because of its relation to sexually transmitted disease. Her work appeared in such newspapers and magazines as the Ladies' Home Journal and the Kansas City Star.

In 1913, at the same time that Sullivan and Macy separated, Keller began lecturing in the United States. In 1914, she made her first trip abroad with Sullivan as her assistant. Throughout the rest of her life, Keller and Sullivan traveled to countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa where Keller gained international renown as the foremost advocate for people with disabilities. She made it her tireless mission to create social reform; among her successes, she helped to eliminate the practice of institutionalizing the disabled.

In 1930, she founded the Helen Keller Endowment Fund for the American Foundation for the Blind. Keller received numerous national and international awards for her humanitarian efforts, including the Theodore Roosevelt Distinguished Service Medal (1936), the distinguished service medal from the American Association of Workers for the Blind (1951), the French Legion of Honor (1952), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964).

She was the author of numerous works of poetry, journals, and political essays related to blindness, as well as two additional autobiographies: Midstream: My Later Life (1929), and Helen Keller in Scotland (1933).

A play based on the inspirational story of Sullivan抯 influence on Keller, The Miracle Worker, by William Gibson, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960. Two years later, the play was made into an Academy Award winning film starring Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke.

Keller died on June 1, 1968, in Westport, Connecticut and was buried at St. Joseph's Chapel in Washington Cathedral, Washington, D.C.


?2001 A&E Television Networks. All rights reserved.

paisleyUID: 64183

HELEN KELLER的名篇《假如给我三天光明》three days to see
请见本日的英语俱乐部http://www.gter.net/bbs/showthre ... d=171507#post171507

angeikimUID: 4857

Homer (, Greek Homemaros DT1a c.)  c. 850BC --  
  
Homer, the major figure in ancient Greek literature, has been universally acclaimed as the greatest poet of classical antiquity. The Iliad and the Odyssey, two long epic poems surviving in a surprisingly large number of manuscripts, are ascribed to him.
It is not possible to supply for Homer a biography in the accepted sense of a life history, since there is no authentic record of who he was, when and where he was born, how long he lived, or even if one and the same oral poet was responsible for the two long epic poems universally associated with his name. To be sure, a number of "lives" of Homer are extant from Greek times, but their authority is subject to such grave suspicion that they have been rejected as unfounded fabrications. In both the Iliad and the Odyssey the personality of the poet remains wholly concealed, since he does not speak in the first person or otherwise refer to himself as the plot develops or the narrative proceeds.

Portrait of Homer

It is arguable that in one incident of the Odyssey the poet may be giving a glimpse of himself in the guise of a bard whom he calls Demodokos and whom he introduces to the court of the Phaeacian king, where the shipwrecked Odysseus is being generously entertained. This Demodokos (whose name may be rendered "favored of the people") is described as a "divine singer to whom the god gave delight of singing whatever his soul prompted him." He is introduced by a herald to the gathering of young and old and is called an "honored minstrel whom the Muse befriends--yet she gave him both good and bad, in that she conferred on him sweet song but deprived him of his eyesight." (In antiquity there was a persistent belief that Homer was blind.) Then the herald "placed for him a silver-studded chair in the midst of the feasters, propping it against a tall column. And from a hook above his head he hung the clear-toned lyre [phorminx] that he might reach it with his hand; and beside him he set a fair table and a basket of food and a cup of wine, that he might drink withal." And after the company had "partaken of food and put aside their desire of meat and drink," then "the Muse stirred the bard to sing of the deeds of men, whose fame has reached wide heaven, to wit, the quarrel between Odysseus and Pelead Achilles, how they wrangled with violent words at a sacred banquet." When Demodokos finishes his heroic tale, Odysseus is made to remark how singers such as he "are held in honor and respect by all mankind; for the Muse herself has taught them." And again, addressing Demodokos, he says, "I praise thee beyond all mortals: either the Muse, God's daughter, has taught thee, or Apollo; for thou singest most fitly and aright the destiny of the Greeks, the deeds that they wrought and suffered, and the hardships they endured. Either thou thyself must have been present or heard it all from another."

This is the nearest and clearest approach to a picture of Homer in the act of reciting his poetry of heroic happenings. This passage from the Odyssey seems to have been responsible for the widespread modern idea that in the Homeric Age there were bards attached to the courts of local kings, who declaimed to the accompaniment of the lyre in great baronial halls--a complete misestimate of the poverty-stricken social conditions of the period.

Evidence from the Epics

This lack of any contemporary historical record of Homer's life leaves only what can be deduced from the poems themselves. On this task much ingenuity has been expended by modern scholars, often without acceptable result. The setting of the Iliad is the plain of Troy and its immediate environment. Topographic details are set forth with such precision that it is not feasible to suppose that their reciter created them out of his imagination without personal acquaintance with the locality.

That the author of the Iliad was not the same as the compiler of these fantastic tales in the Odyssey is arguable on several scores. The two epics belong to different literary types; the Iliad is essentially dramatic in its confrontation of opposing warriors who converse like the actors in Attic tragedy, while the Odyssey is cast as a novel narrated in more everyday human speech. In their physical structure, also, the two epics display an equally pronounced difference. The Odyssey is composed in six distinct cantos of four chapters ("books") each, whereas the Iliad moves unbrokenly forward with only one irrelevant episode in its tightly woven plot. Readers who examine psychological nuances see in the two works some distinctly different human responses and behavioral attitudes. For example, the Iliad voices admiration for the beauty and speed of horses, while the Odyssey shows no interest in these animals. The Iliad dismisses dogs as mere scavengers, while the poet of the Odyssey reveals a modern sentimental sympathy for Odysseus's faithful old hound, Argos.

But the most cogent argument for separating the two poems by assigning them to different authors is the archeological criterion of implied chronology. In the Iliad the Phoenicians are praised as skilled craftsmen working in metal and weavers of elaborate, much-prized garments. The shield which the metalworking god Hephaistos forges for Achilles in the Iliad seems inspired by the metal bowls with inlaid figures in action made by the Phoenicians and introduced by them into Greek and Etruscan commerce in the 8th century B.C. In contrast, in the Odyssey Greek sentiment toward the Phoenicians has undergone a drastic change. Although they are still regarded as clever craftsmen, in place of the Iliad's laudatory polydaidaloi ("of manifold skills") the epithet is parodied into polypaipaloi ("of manifold scurvy tricksters"), reflecting the competitive penetration into Greek commerce by traders from Phoenician Carthage in the 7th century B.C. Other internal evidence indicates that the Odyssey was composed later than the Iliad.

Oral Composition

It is certain, however, that both epics were created without recourse to writing. Between the decline of Mycenaean and the emergence of classical Greek civilization--which is to say, from the late 12th to the mid-8th century B.C.--the inhabitants of the Greek lands had lost all knowledge of the syllabic script of their Mycenaean forebears and had not yet acquired from the easternmost shore of the Mediterranean that familiarity with Phoenician alphabetic writing from which classical Greek literacy (and in turn, Etruscan, Roman, and modern European literacy) derived. The same conclusion of illiterate composition may be reached from a critical inspection of the poems themselves. Among many races and in many different periods there has existed (and still exists sporadically) a form of purely oral and unwritten poetic speech, distinguishable from normal and printed literature by special traits that are readily recognizable and specifically distinctive. To this class the Homeric epics conform. Hence it would seem an inevitable inference that they must have been created either before the end of the 8th century B.C. or so shortly after that date that the use of alphabetic writing had not yet been developed sufficiently to record lengthy compositions. It is this illiterate environment that explains the absence of all contemporary historical record of the authors of the two great epics.

It is probable that Homer's name was applied to two distinct individuals differing in temperament and artistic accomplishment, born perhaps as much as a century apart, but practicing the same traditional craft of oral composition and recitation. Although each became known as "Homer," it may be (as one ancient source asserts) that homros was a dialectical lonic word for a blind man and so came to be used generically of the old and often sightless wandering reciters of heroic legends in the traditional meter of unrhymed dactylic hexameters. Thus there could have been many Homers. The two epics ascribed to Homer, however, have been as highly prized in modern as in ancient times for their marvelous vividness of expression, their keenness of personal characterization, their unflagging interest, whether in narration of action or in animated dramatic dialogue.

Other Works

Later Greek times credited Homer with the composition of a group of comparatively short "hymns" addressed to various gods, of which 23 have survived. On internal evidence, however, only one or two of these at most can be the work of the poet of the two great epics. The burlesque epic The Battle of the Frogs and Mice has been preserved but adds nothing to Homer's reputation. Several other epic poems of considerable length--the Cypria, the Little Iliad, the Phocais, the Thebais, the Capture of Oichalia--were widely ascribed to Homer in classical times. None of these has survived except in stray quoted verses. But even if they were preserved in full, it is highly doubtful whether modern scholarship would accept them as all by the same author.

The simple truth seems to be that the name Homer was not so much that of a single individual as a personification for an entire school of poets flourishing on the west coast of Asia Minor during the period before the art of writing had been sufficiently developed by the Greeks to permit historical records to be compiled or literary compositions to be written down.

gteryyUID: 114434

亲一下，可爱的斑竹！

paisleyUID: 64183

补充：就我个人而言，我觉得她的老师SULLIVEN更伟大！

paisleyUID: 64183

Franklin, Benjamin  1706 -- 1790  
  
Printer, writer, scientist, statesman. Born January 17, 1706, in Boston, Massachusetts. The 15th child in his family, Franklin went to work at age 10 in his father's chandlery, then in a brother's printing house. Ambitious and intent on self-improvement, he became a skilled printer while reading widely and developing a writing style. In 1723, at age 17, Franklin left for Philadelphia. Starting with no capital, he advanced rapidly and, after a brief stint as a printer in London, had by 1730 become sole owner of a business that included the Pennsylvania Gazette.
In 1732, Franklin began compiling and publishing the annual Poor Richard's Almanac. With its pithy sayings espousing industry, frugality, and other homely virtues, it attracted a large readership and made Franklin's name a household word. Active in the community, Franklin founded a discussion group called the Junta (1727) that evolved into the American Philosophical Association and helped establish the first U.S. lending library (1731), as well as an academy (1751) that evolved into the University of Pennsylvania.

Appointed in 1736 as a clerk in the Pennsylvania Assembly, Franklin held a seat there from 1751 to 1764. He served as a city deputy postmaster (1737--53); subsequently, as joint deputy postmaster for the colonies (1753--74), he improved postal efficiency and made the postal service solvent.

In 1748, his business having expanded and flourished, Franklin retired, turning it over to his foreman in return for a regular stipend, thus gaining more time for scientific pursuits. In the early 1740s, he had developed the fuel-efficient Franklin open stove. Later he conducted a series of experiments, described in his Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751--53), which brought him international recognition as a scientist. In 1752, Franklin conducted his famous kite experiment, demonstrating that lightning is an electrical discharge; he also announced his invention of the lightning rod. A later invention for which Franklin is well-known was the bifocal lens (1760).

Returning to statesmanship, Franklin represented Pennsylvania at the Albany Congress in 1754, called in response to the French and Indian Wars. From 1757 to 1762 and from 1764 to 1775, he pursued diplomatic activities in England, obtaining permission for Pennsylvania to tax the estates of its proprietors, securing repeal of the Stamp Act, and representing the interests of several colonies. He associated with eminent Britons and wrote political satires and pamphlets on public affairs. In 1776, Franklin went to France to help negotiate treaties of commerce and alliance, signed in 1778. Lionized there, he remained as plenipotentiary, won financial aid for the American Revolution, and then helped negotiate a peace treaty with Great Britain, signed in Paris in 1783.

Returning to the U.S. in 1785, Franklin served as a conciliating presence at the Constitutional Convention (1787). In his last years he corresponded widely, received many visitors, and invented a device for lifting books from high shelves. His posthumously published Autobiography, written for his son William Franklin, became a classic.

paisleyUID: 64183

后续：名人生平


转载自 满分网
glassheart


ARTHUR ASHE
Arthur Ashe was one of the world’s first African American tennis stars. He was a great athlete, and he won many titles, he became rich and famous, but these things never changed his good character. He never behaved badly. Ashe was fair, honest, and kind both in his life and on the tennis court. He also worked for many charities and always tried to help people.

Arthur Ashe was born in 1943 in Richmond, Virginia. In that part of the United States at that time, African American people and white people didn’t live, play, go to school, or even eat together. Arthur’s father was in charge of the city’s largest park for African American. Arthur played there every day. He was not good at most sports. But what he was seven years old, he played tennis for the first time. He liked it and played very well. His mother had died the year before, and Arthur played every day for hours to forget his sadness.

One day, a teacher at the park noticed Arthur’s ability in tennis, he took Arthur to see a tennis teacher. Arthur learned a lot from him. Arthur became an excellent amateur tennis player. He won several titles. After high school, Arthur went to St. Louis, Missouri, to train with another coach. At the age of 19, he was one of the best young players in the United States. Arthur won a scholarship to UCLA, the University of California in Los Angeles. He studied hard and graduated four years later. He also won many tennis tournament s and became the first African American man to play on the U.S. national team.

In 1969, Arthur Ashe became a professional. Six years later, he won the World Champion Tennis singles title and the Wimbledon and the first to be number one in the world. His success opened the way for African American players in tennis.

Ashe’s great success did not come easily. Many times over the years he suffered because of racism. Sometimes, he was not allowed to play in tournaments. Other times then he played, people were unkind to him. But Ashe was always calm and well mannered. He hated bad behavior on the court. He got angry only once, when his opponent said band things about him because of his race. Still, Arthur didn’t say anything. He just walked off the tennis court and did not finish the game.

Ashe met a photographer at a charity event to raise money for African American schools. Later they married and had a daughter. They named her Camera. Ashe was a devoted and loving father. He also taught his daughter to be a good and kind person. Every Christmas, he took her to give toys to children from poor families. Camera gave them some of her own toys too. Ashe had a lot of money, but he never liked to show off. At the end of his life, he owned only five suits and five pairs of shoes.

Ashe was also very successful off the tennis court. He is the author of several books, including a complete history of African American athletes in the United States. In 1973, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of America’s highest honors.

In 1979, Ashe had a heart attack. The following year, he retired from tennis. After that, he spent a lot of time helping young athletes and working for equal rights for all people. In 1983, he had heart surgery. Unfortunately, he got the incurable disease AIDS from blood he received in the hospital. Ashe continued to help people, even when he was very sick. Shortly before he died in 1993, he started an organization to help find a cure for AIDS.
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amorzUID: 1

发信人: xxlf (天杀戟，直捣黄龙，任尔驰骋), 信区: EnglishTest
标  题: Michael Jordon
发信站: BBS 水木清华站 (Sat Mar  8 01:09:48 2003), 转信
  
Michael Jordon
  
看看吧，也许用的着
It's not easy imagining a volume capable of capturing the grace, the joy,
the flamboyance, and the wizardry of Michael Jordan, but this hybrid--melding
autobiography, celebration, spectacular photography, and cutting-edge
graphics--comes awfully close. Like Jordan driving the lane, it's a thing of
beauty; harder to analyze than it is to admire, accept,gaze at, and enjoy.
  
As befits the ultimate star in a game that has marketed itself with perfect
razzle-dazzle, For the Love of the Game is as visually brash as it is glitzy.
In page after stunning page, Jordan traces his ascension from college star to
object of worldwide adoration. While most of the focus is, of course, on the
NBA, there are significant side trips into baseball,the 1992 Olympic Dream
Team, his advertising omnipresence, his family, and even his privacy. On the
surface, the pictures--and their presentation--are more than enough to
preserve and praise the Jordan legend, but For the Love of the Game has
something more. It has Michael Jordan.Jordan's text is everything the flashy
images are not; it is straight, thoughtful, and revealing. At times,
the relationship of word and image is breathtaking, especially on a
particular pair of two-page layouts. In the first, Jordan
asks, "When does jumping become flying?" His answer, framed by photos that w
ould turn Superman green with envy, indicates that Jordan is genuinely amazed
by his own talents. The second is his reflection on "The Shot," his
buzzer-beater over Cleveland's Craig Ehlo to win game 5 in the 1989 playoffs.
The story is told in 24 pictures taken over the final three seconds. Below
that is a chart of 25 of Jordan's game-winning shots. But it's this Jordan
observation that pulls the image and text together: "I never considered the
negative consequence of missing the last shot in a game." It's an attitude
that defines the man, and For the Love of the Game reflects it with a stylish
combination of elegance, power, and beauty.
(Want more Jordan? Check out an image from his book. ?1998 by Rare Air, Ltd.
Text copyright ?1998 by Michael Jordan.
Photo credit: Walter Iooss, Jr) --Jeff Silverman