Fifty Famous Stories Retold

Fifty Famous Stories Retold

by James Baldwin
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date: 16/03/2017

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There are numerous time-honored stories which have become so incorporated into the literature and thought of our race that a knowledge of them is an indispensable part of one's education. These stories are of several different classes. To one class belong the popular fairy tales which have delighted untold generations of children, and will continue to delight them to the end of time. To another class belong the limited number of fables that have come down to us through many channels from hoar antiquity. To a third belong the charming stories of olden times that are derived from the literatures of ancient peoples, such as the Greeks and the Hebrews. A fourth class includes the half-legendary tales of a distinctly later origin, which have for their subjects certain romantic episodes in the lives of well-known heroes and famous men, or in the history of a people. It is to this last class that most of the fifty stories contained in the present volume belong. As a matter of course, some of these stories are better known, and therefore more famous, than others. Some have a slight historical value; some are useful as giving point to certain great moral truths; others are products solely of the fancy, and are intended only to amuse. Some are derived from very ancient sources, and are current in the literature of many lands; some have come to us through the ballads and folk tales of the English people; a few are of quite recent origin; nearly all are the subjects of frequent allusions in poetry and prose and in the conversation of educated people. Care has been taken to exclude everything that is not strictly within the limits of probability; hence there is here no trespassing upon the domain of the fairy tale, the fable, or the myth.

ISBN:
9788826039312
9788826039312
Category:
Fiction
Format:
Epub (Kobo), Epub (Adobe)
Publication Date:
16-03-2017
Language:
English
Publisher:
Pubme
James Baldwin

James Baldwin was born and educated in New York. Go Tell It on the Mountain, his first novel, was published in 1953. Evoking brilliantly his experiences as a boy preacher in Harlem, it was an immediate success and was followed by Giovanni's Room, which explores the theme of homosexual love in a sensitive and compelling way.

Another Country (1963) created something of a literary explosion and was followed in 1964 by two non-fiction books, Nobody Knows My Name and Notes of a Native Son, which contain several of the stories and essays that brought him fame in America. Nobody Knows My Name was selected by the American Library Association as one of the outstanding books of its year. Going to Meet the Man was James Baldwin's first collection of stories.

He also published several collections of essays, including The Fire Next Time (1963), Nothing Personal (1964), No Name in the Street (1971), The Devil Finds Work (1976) and Evidence of Things Not Seen (1983), and he wrote two plays, The Amen Corner (1955) and Blues for Mr Charlie (1965). His later novels include If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), Little Man, Little Man (1975) and Just Above My Head (1979). Many of his books are published in Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics.

James Baldwin won a number of literary fellowships: a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation Grant-in-Aid. He was made a Commander of the Legion of Honour in 1986. He died in 1987.

The Times obituary declared, 'The best of his work ... stands comparison with any of its period to come out of the United States,' while Newsweek described him as 'an angry writer, yet his intelligence was so provoking and his sentences so elegant that he quickly became the black writer that white liberals liked to fear'.

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