STORY 7: "THE HAPPY PRINCE" BY OSCAR WILDE

Oscar Wilde was an Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, poet, and critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest playwrights of the Victorian Era. 

In his lifetime he wrote nine plays, one novel, and numerous poems, short stories, and essays. 

Wilde was a proponent of the Aesthetic movement, which emphasized aesthetic values more than moral or social themes. This doctrine is most clearly summarized in the phrase 'art for art's sake'. 

Besides literary accomplishments, he is also famous, or perhaps infamous, for his wit, flamboyance, and affairs with men. He was tried and imprisoned for his homosexual relationship (then considered a crime) with the son of an aristocrat. 

http://www.wilde-online.info/oscar-wilde-biography.htm

The story “The Happy Prince” has at least three themes. The first theme of the story is that outward beauty is nothing. It is just a show. The real beauties are love and sacrifices. The second theme is that love and sacrifice are two saving forces. The third theme is that there is great gap between the rich and the poor, the rulers and the masses.

http://englishnotesforba.blogspot.com.es/2010/10/happy-prince-by-oscar-wilde.html

STORY 6: "THE BULLY" BY ROGER DEAN KISER

Click HERE to read information about this author and "The Bully", based on his own experience as an orphan,

STORY 5: "MAN OVERBOARD" BY WINSTON CHURCHILL

Born to an aristocratic family in 1874, Winston Churchill served in the British military and worked as a writer before going into politics. After becoming prime minister in 1940, he helped lead a successful Allied strategy with the U.S. and Russia during WWII to defeat the Axis powers and craft post-war peace. Elected prime minister again in 1951, he introduced key domestic reforms. Churchill died at age 90 in 1965.

For more information and a short documentary about him click HERE. 

http://skullsinthestars.com/2010/02/02/which-winston-churchill-wrote-man-overboard/

“Man Overboard!” appeared in The Harmsworth Magazine at a turning point of Churchill’s career.  He had been in the military since 1895; he resigned in 1899 and had his first run for political office that same year. 

The story is marvelously short, just as it is marvelously uncanny. Despite its brevity, it presents amazingly complex questions concerning the character of nature, the problem of evil, and the nature of God. Although one opinion concerning the story’s tone and the narrator’s final observation may seem more likely than others, each remains a possibility, and God may not be the sadist he at first appears to be. Death by shark would be horrible, to be certain, but would drowning be any quicker, more merciful, or dignified? On the other hand, if God exists, maybe he is as capricious and even as sadistic as the story can be interpreted to imply. For that matter, why did the man fall overboard?

To universalize the question, we might ask, instead, Why did humanity, in the Garden of Eden, take a similar fall? Is there a grace behind both “falls,” discernable only to the eye of faith, as Job suggests? Is the fall overboard a test of one’s trust in God, even when one faces his own mortality? Is the story a repudiation of the very idea of a merciful and loving God? Is he, instead, merely just and inscrutable? Does he exist at all?

http://skullsinthestars.com/2010/02/02/which-winston-churchill-wrote-man-overboard/
http://writinghorrorfiction.blogspot.com.es/2009/04/man-overboard-questioning-nature-and.html