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Culture Of Brooklyn
Brooklyn has played a major role in various aspects of American culture including literature, cinema and theater as well as being home to the Brooklyn Academy of Music and to the second largest public art collection in the United States which is housed in the Brooklyn Museum. Literature Walt Whitman wrote of the Brooklyn waterfront in his classic poem ''Crossing Brooklyn Ferry''. Harlem Renaissance playwright Eulalie Spence taught at Eastern District High School in Brooklyn from 1927 to 1938, a time during which she wrote her critically acclaimed plays ''Fool's Errand'', and ''Her''. In 1930, poet Hart Crane published the epic poem '' The Bridge'', using the Brooklyn Bridge as central symbol and poetic starting point. The novels of Henry Miller include reflections on several of the ethnic German and Jewish neighborhoods of Brooklyn during the 1890s and early 20th century; his novels ''Tropic of Capricorn'' and '' The Rosy Crucifixion'' include long tracts describing his chil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (novel)
''A Tree Grows in Brooklyn'' is a 1943 semi-autobiographical novel written by Betty Smith. The manuscript started as a non-fiction piece titled ''They Lived in Brooklyn'', which Smith began submitting to publishers in 1940. After it was repeatedly rejected, she sent it in as an entry for a contest held by Harper & Brothers in 1942. At the editors' suggestion, Smith expanded and revised the piece, re-classified it as a novel, and changed the title. It proved so popular upon release that it went into a second printing even before the official publication date. The book was an immense success. It was also released in an Armed Services Edition, the size of a mass-market paperback, to fit in a uniform pocket. One Marine wrote to Smith, "I can't explain the emotional reaction that took place in this dead heart of mine... A surge of confidence has swept through me, and I feel that maybe a fellow has a fighting chance in this world after all." The main metaphor of the book is the ha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Motherless Brooklyn (novel)
''Motherless Brooklyn'' is a novel by Jonathan Lethem that was first published in 1999. Told in first person, the story follows Lionel Essrog, a private investigator who has Tourette's, a disorder marked by involuntary tics. Essrog works for Frank Minna, a small-time owner of a "seedy and makeshift" detective agency disguised as a transportation company. Together, Essrog and three other characters who are all orphans from Brooklyn—Tony, Danny, and Gilbert—call themselves "the Minna Men". The novel was adapted into a 2019 film. Critical reception The novel won the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and the 2000 Gold Dagger award for crime fiction. Albert Mobilio of ''The New York Times'' wrote: Under the guise of a detective novel, Lethem has written a more piercing tale of investigation, one revealing how the mind drives on its own "wheels within wheels." Unlike the stock detective novel it shadows, the thriller in which clarity emerges on the final p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Allen Lethem (; born February 19, 1964) is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His Debut novel, first novel, ''Gun, with Occasional Music'', a genre work that mixed elements of science fiction and detective fiction, was published in 1994. In 1999, Lethem published ''Motherless Brooklyn (novel), Motherless Brooklyn'', a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel that achieved mainstream success. In 2003, he published ''The Fortress of Solitude (novel), The Fortress of Solitude'', which became a New York Times Best Seller list, ''New York Times'' Best Seller. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. Since 2011, he has taught creative writing at Pomona College. Early life Lethem was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Judith Frank Lethem, a political activist, and Richard Brown Lethem, an avant-garde painter. He was the eldest of three children. His father was Protestant (with Scottish and English ancestry) and his mother was Jewish, from a family ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paule Marshall
Paule Marshall (April 9, 1929 – August 12, 2019) was an American writer, best known for her 1959 debut novel '' Brown Girl, Brownstones''. In 1992, at the age of 63, Marshall was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship grant. Life and career Marshall was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn, New York. to Adriana Viola Clement Burke and Sam Burke on April 9, 1929. Marshall's father had migrated from the Caribbean island of Barbados to New York in 1919 and, during her childhood, deserted the family to join a quasi-religious cult, leaving his wife to raise their children by herself. Marshall wrote about how her career was inspired by observing her mother's relationship to language: "It served as therapy, the cheapest kind available to my mother and her friends. It restored them to a sense of themselves and reaffirmed their self-worth. Through language they were able to overcome the humiliations of the work day. Confronted by a world they could not encompass, they took refuge in language." ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A View From The Bridge
''A View from the Bridge'' is a play by American playwright Arthur Miller. It was first staged on September 29, 1955, as a one-act verse drama with '' A Memory of Two Mondays'' at the Coronet Theatre on Broadway. The run was unsuccessful, and Miller subsequently revised and extended the play to contain two acts; this version is the one with which audiences are most familiar. The two-act version premiered in the New Watergate theatre club in London's West End under the direction of Peter Brook on October 11, 1956. The play is set in 1950s America, in an Italian-American neighborhood near the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. It employs a chorus and narrator in the character of Alfieri. Eddie, the tragic protagonist, has an improper love for, and almost an obsession with, Catherine, his wife Beatrice's orphaned niece, so he does not approve of her courtship of Beatrice's cousin Rodolpho. Miller's interest in writing about the world of the New York docks originated with an u ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur Miller
Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright, essayist and screenwriter in the 20th-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are '' All My Sons'' (1947), '' Death of a Salesman'' (1949), ''The Crucible'' (1953), and '' A View from the Bridge'' (1955). He wrote several screenplays, including '' The Misfits'' (1961). The drama ''Death of a Salesman'' is considered one of the best American plays of the 20th century. Miller was often in the public eye, particularly during the late 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, he received a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and married Marilyn Monroe. In 1980, he received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. He received the Praemium Imperiale prize in 2001, the Prince of Asturias Award in 2002, and the Jerusalem Prize in 2003, and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prospect Park (Brooklyn)
Prospect Park is a urban park in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. The park is situated between the neighborhoods of Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Flatbush, and Windsor Terrace, and is adjacent to the Brooklyn Museum, Grand Army Plaza, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. With an area of , Prospect Park is the second-largest public park in Brooklyn, behind Marine Park. Designated as a New York City scenic landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Prospect Park is operated by the Prospect Park Alliance and NYC Parks. First proposed in legislation passed in 1859, Prospect Park was laid out by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux for the then-independent city of Brooklyn. Prospect Park opened in 1867, though it was not substantially complete until 1873. The park subsequently underwent numerous modifications and expansions to its facilities. Several additions to the park were completed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Flatbush, Brooklyn
Flatbush is a neighborhood in the New York City Borough (New York City), borough of Brooklyn. The neighborhood consists of several subsections in central Brooklyn and is generally bounded by Prospect Park (Brooklyn), Prospect Park to the north, East Flatbush, Brooklyn, East Flatbush to the east, Midwood, Brooklyn, Midwood to the south, and Kensington, Brooklyn, Kensington and Parkville to the west. The modern neighborhood includes or borders several institutions of note, including Brooklyn College. The area was home to the Canarsee people before contact with Europeans; many of the tribe's paths would become important roads through the region. Flatbush was originally chartered as the Dutch Nieuw Nederland colony town of Midwout, also called Vlachte Bos. It was one of the six original European towns on Long Island. The town remained primarily Dutch and rural in character until the latter half of the 19th century, when increasing rail and road connectivity to other parts of New Y ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sophie's Choice (novel)
''Sophie's Choice'' is a 1979 novel by American author William Styron, the author's last novel. It concerns the relationships among three people sharing a boarding house in Brooklyn: Stingo, a young aspiring writer from the South; Jewish scientist Nathan Landau; and the latter's eponymous lover Sophie, a Polish-Catholic survivor of the German Nazi concentration camps, whom Stingo befriends. ''Sophie's Choice'' won the US National Book Award for Fiction in 1980. The novel was the basis of a 1982 film of the same name. It was controversial for the way in which it framed Styron's personal views regarding the Holocaust. Synopsis Stingo, a novelist who is recalling the summer when he began his first book, has been fired from his low-level reader's job at the publisher McGraw-Hill and has moved into a cheap boarding house in Brooklyn, where he hopes to devote some months to his writing. While working on his novel, he is drawn into the lives of the lovers Nathan Landau and Sophie Zaw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Chosen (Potok Novel)
''The Chosen'' is a novel written by Chaim Potok. It was first published in 1967. It follows the narrator, Reuven Malter, and his friend Daniel Saunders, as they grow up in the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1940s. A sequel featuring Reuven's young adult years, ''The Promise (Potok novel), The Promise'', was published in 1969. Plot In 1944 Brooklyn, fifteen-year-old Reuven Malter prepares to play a baseball game: his own Modern Orthodox Judaism, Modern Orthodox school against a team from a Hasidic Judaism, Hasidic yeshiva. It becomes apparent that Danny Saunders, the son of Rebbe Reb Saunders, is the only good player on the opposing team. The game becomes a war between the two teams, seemingly symbolic of their differing ideologies. In the last inning, with Reuven's team in the lead, Reuven is put in as a pitcher. When Danny gets up to the plate, he hits a line drive straight at Reuven's head, which breaks his glasses and drives a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rabbi
A rabbi (; ) is a spiritual leader or religious teacher in Judaism. One becomes a rabbi by being ordained by another rabbi—known as ''semikha''—following a course of study of Jewish history and texts such as the Talmud. The basic form of the rabbi developed in the Pharisees, Pharisaic (167 BCE–73 CE) and Talmudic (70–640 CE) eras, when learned teachers assembled to codify Judaism's written and oral laws. The title "rabbi" was first used in the first century CE. In more recent centuries, the duties of a rabbi became increasingly influenced by the duties of the Clergy, Protestant Christian minister, hence the title "pulpit rabbis." Further, in 19th-century Germany and the United States, rabbinic activities such as sermons, pastoral counseling, and representing the community to the outside all increased in importance. Within the various Jewish denominations, there are different requirements for rabbinic ordination and differences in opinion regarding who is recognized as a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
