Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir was a novelist, feminist and a writer. She thought the human struggle to be free. Women are not women by birth but society later makes a female a woman. She did not consider herself a philosopher but she had a significant role in feminism and existentialism. 

        Her The Second Sex is a book , in which Beauvoir  discusses the treatment of women throughout history. Like many of her associates, she believed that socialist development and class struggle were needed to solve society's problems, not a women's movement. 

         De Beauvoir's prominent open relationships overshadowed her substantial academic reputation. Beginning in 1929, de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were partners and remained so for fifty-one years, until his death in 1980. De Beauvoir chose never to marry or set up a joint household and she never had children. This gave her the time to advance her education and engage in political causes, to write and teach, and to have lovers. 

       In 1944 de Beauvoir wrote her first philosophical essay, Pyrrhus et Cinéas, a discussion of an existentialist ethics. She continued her exploration of existentialism through her second essay The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947); it is perhaps the most accessible entry into French existentialism 

        The Second Sex, first published in 1949 in French , turns the existentialist mantra that existence precedes essence into a feminist one."One is not born but becomes a woman" With this famous phrase, Beauvoir first articulated what has come to be known as the sex-gender distinction, that is, the distinction between biological sex and the social and historical construction of gender and its attendant stereotypes. Beauvoir argues that "the fundamental source of women's oppression is its historical and social construction as the quintessential" Other. 

        De Beauvoir wrote popular travel diaries about time spent in the United States and China and published essays and fiction throughout the 1950s and 1960s. She published several volumes of short stories, including The Woman Destroyed, which, like some of her other later work, deals with aging  .In the later stages of her career, De Beauvoir devoted a good deal of her thinking to the investigation of aging and death. Her 1964 work A Very Easy Death details her mother’s passing,similarly  Old Age (1970) analyzes the significance and meaning of the elderly in society .A Farewell to Sartre (1981), published a year after his death, recalls the last years of her partner’s life. wikipediya/Simone de Beauvoir

George Ade

     George Ade was an American writer, syndicated newspaper columnist, and playwright who, gained national notoriety at the turn of the twentieth century with his "Stories of the Streets and of the Town," a column that used street language and slang to describe daily life in Chicago, and a column of his fables in slang, which were humorous stories that featured vernacular speech and the liberal use of capitalization in his characters' dialog. Ade's fables in slang gained him wealth and fame as an American humorist, as well as earning him the nickname of the "Aesop of Indiana."  

      Born in February 9 1866 in Indiana as the a second youngest child of Adaline and John Ade. George was the second youngest of the family's seven children. George's father served as the Newton County, Indiana, recorder, and was also a banker in Kentland; his mother was a homemaker. George enjoyed reading from an early age, but he disliked manual labor and was not interested in becoming a farmer. Although he graduated from Kentland High School in 1881, his mother did not think he was ready for college. As a result, Ade remained in high school for another year before enrolling at Purdue University in 1883 on scholarship. 

          By the early 1900s, after twelve years in Chicago, Ade's writing had brought him financial success and he retired to a leisurely life in the country. Ade invested his earnings in Newton County, Indiana, farmland, eventually owning about 2,400 acres. In 1902, George's brother, William Ade, purchased on his behalf a 417-acre site of wooded land along the Iroquois River near the town of Brook in Newton County, Indiana. George initially intended to build a summer cottage. Instead, Chicago architect Billie Mann, a Sigma Chi fraternity brother, designed for Ade a two-story, fourteen-room country manor, which was constructed at an estimated cost of US$25,000. Ade named the property Hazelden, after his English grandparents' home, and moved from Chicago into the newly built residence in 1904. In addition to the Tudor Revival-style home, the property eventually included landscaped grounds, a swimming pool, greenhouse, barn, and caretaker's cottage, among other outbuildings. Ade also added an adjacent golf course and country club in 1910. 

         The best known of his plays that were produced on Broadway are The County Chairman and The College Widow, which were also adapted into motion pictures. While the presentations of his plays and musical comedies increased his wealth and international renown, Ade's legacy includes numerous newspaper columns, magazine articles, essays, and books that describe his perspective on American life in the late nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century .wikipedia/George Ade

Langston Hughes

       Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. He moved to New York City as a young man, where he made his career .

         Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays. He sought to honestly portray the joys and hardships of working-class black lives, avoiding both sentimental idealization and negative stereotypes. As he wrote in his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.” In fact, the title Fine Clothes to the Jew, which was misunderstood and disliked by many people, was derived from the Harlemites Hughes saw pawning their own clothing; most of the pawn shops and other stores in Harlem at that time were owned by Jewish people.

  In the eye of critics,he was the  most abused poet in America,serious white critics ignored him, less serious ones compared his poetry to Cassius Clay doggerel, and most black critics only grudgingly admired him. Some, like James Baldwin, were downright malicious about his poetic achievement. But long after Baldwin and the rest of us are gone, I suspect Hughes’ poetry will be blatantly around growing in stature until it is recognized for its genius. Hughes … was unashamedly black at a time when blackness was out of fashion. He had the wit and intelligence to explore the black human condition in a variety of depths, but his tastes and selectivity were not always accurate, and pressures to survive as a black writer in a white society extracted an enormous creative toll. 

 Nevertheless, Hughes, more than any other black poet or writer, recorded faithfully the variance of black life and its frustrations. 

       In Hughes’s own words, his poetry is about "workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago—people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July." 

  

          Hoyt W. Fuller commented that Hughes "chose to identify with plain black people … precisely because he saw more truth and profound significance in doing so. Perhaps in this he was inversely influenced by his father—who, frustrated by being the object of scorn in his native land, rejected his own people. Perhaps the poet’s reaction to his father’s flight from the American racial reality drove him to embrace it with extra fervor.”  

           The Block and The Sweet and Sour Animal Book are posthumously published collections of Hughes’s poetry for children that position his words against a backdrop of visual art. The Block pairs Hughes’s poems with a series of six collages by Romare Bearden that bear the book’s title. The Sweet and Sour Animal Book contains previously unpublished and repeatedly rejected poetry of Hughes from the 1930s. Here, the editors have combined it with the artwork of elementary school children at the Harlem School of the Arts. The results, noted Veronica Chambers in the New York Times Book Review, “reflect Hughes’s childlike wonder as well as his sense of humor.” Chambers also commented on the rhythms of Hughes’s words, noting that “children love a good rhyme” and that Hughes gave them “just a simple but seductive taste of the blues.” Hughes’s poems have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Russian, Yiddish, and Czech; many of them have been set to music. 

         On May 22, 1967, Hughes died in the Stuyvesant Polyclinic in New York City at the age of 65 from complications after abdominal surgery related to prostate cancer. 

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was an America novelist, essayist, book editor and college professor, won Pulitzer prize in 1988.she was born and raised in Ohio .She was the second of four children in a working class African American family. Her mother was from Alabama and her father was from Georgia. 

            As mention in wikipediya/Morrison Her first novel The Bluest Eye was published in 1970 and she won National Book critics Awards with “song of Solomon "which was published in 1977 that brought her in the national level writer .She was widely known after her “Beloved” published ,she won a Pulitzer prize for that. 

               Morrison was graduated from Howard University. she later taught English in the same university. She became the first black female editor in fiction in New York City .She had two children with his spouse Harold Morison . 

            Morrison was baldly shocked when she knew the two black business man were lynched near the his (her father) home, he had no courage to tell anybody though he had seen the crime. When Morrison was about two years old, her family's landlord set fire to the house in which they lived, while they were at home, because her parents could not pay the rent. 

She experienced many racial events in her life. she encounters a racially segregated restaurant and buses in Howard. She taught English in Texas Southern University for two years and then Howard University for seven years. she married with Harold Morrison in 1958 and and divorced after six years of marriage life in 1964 at that time she was pregnant with their second son. 

               Among other books Morrison developed and edited is The Black Book (1974), an anthology of photographs, illustrations, essays, and other documents of black life in the United States from the time of slavery to the 1920s. Random House had been uncertain about the project, but it received good reviews 

In 1987, Morrison published her most celebrated novel, Beloved. It was inspired by the true story of an enslaved African-American woman, Margaret Garner, whose story Morrison had discovered when compiling The Black Book. Garner had escaped slavery but was pursued by slave hunters. Facing a return to slavery, Garner killed her two-year-old daughter but was captured before she could kill herself. Morrison's novel imagines the dead baby returning as a ghost, Beloved, to haunt her mother and family. 

               Morrison was not afraid to comment on American politics and race relations., in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, After the 2016 election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, Morrison wrote an essay, "Mourning for Whiteness," published in the November 21, 2016 issue of The New Yorker. 

            The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, includes writing by Morrison. Visitors can see her quote after they have walked through the section commemorating individual victims of lynching  

             Morrison died at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, New York City, on August 5, 2019, from complications of pneumonia. She was 88 years old. Upon her death, Morrison had a net worth of 20 million dollars. 

George Bernard Shaw

          George Bernard Shaw an Irish playwright, critics, polemicist and political activist was born in 26 July 1856and was died in 2 November 1950.he wrote more than 6o play including “Man and Superman”, “Pygmalion”,and “Sanint joan”.His influence on western culture ,politics and Theatre started from the 1880s to death and later. He was born in Dublin and moved to London in 1876 

          Shaw was born in a lower middle-class family as a youngest child and only one son of George Carr Shaw and Lucinda Elizabeth. His father George Carr Shaw was only an unsuccessful member in hi family all other cousins were highly successful member in  Ireland .Shaw married Bassie Gurly in 1852 . She came to despise her ineffectual and often drunken husband, with whom she shared what their son later described as a life of "shabby-genteel poverty". 

        By the time of Shaw’s birth his mother was in affair with George John Lee, his biological father.  Young Shaw suffered no harness from his mother, but he later recalled that her indifference lad lack of affection hurt him deeply. He explained that school was like a prison where the parent sends their children just to be relief or to prevent disturbing.  

         The year 1880 was the turning point for the Shaw ‘s life both from personally and professionally. he began his career as a critic. he had affair with a widow Jenney, she became the part of his success. Shaw’s sex life was always a debate subject among his co-workers 

He kept on writing play although they were successful at that time. His first play which helped him financially was Arms and The Man    

But the press found the play overlong and accused him a mediocrity, sneering at heroism and patriotism and blamed him copying W. S Gilberts style. He had already earned his followers so he earned $341 royalties. 

During the first decade of twentieth century, Shaw secured a film reputation as a playwright. 

            Shaw later wrote that William Butler Yeats, who had requested the play, "got rather more than he bargained for ... It was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland." 

           After the First World War began in August 1914, Shaw furnish his territory  Common Sense About the War, which argued that the warring nations were equally culpable. Such a view was anathema in an atmosphere of fervent patriotism, and offended many of Shaw's friends; Ervine records that "is appearance at any public function caused the instant departure of many of those present." 

         The substance of Shaw's political legacy is uncertain. In 1921 Shaw's former collaborator William Archer, in a letter to the playwright, wrote: "I doubt if there is any case of a man so widely read, heard, seen, and known as yourself, who has produced so little effect on his generation." Margaret Cole, who considered Shaw the greatest writer of his age, declared never to have understood him. She thought he worked "immensely hard" at politics, but essentially, she surmises, it was for fun—"the fun of a brilliant artist". After Shaw's death, Pearson wrote: "No one since the time of Tom Paine has had so definite an influence on the social and political life of his time and country as Bernard Shaw."