文章背景介绍

1. Author

Arthur Asher Miller, the son of a women's clothing company owner, was born in 1915 in New York City. His father lost his business in the Depression and the family was forced to move to a smaller home in Brooklyn.

After graduating from high school, Miller worked jobs ranging from radio singer to truck driver to clerk in an automobile-parts warehouse.

Miller began writing plays as a student at the University of Michigan, joining the Federal Theater Project in New York City after he received his degree.

His first Broadway play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, opened in 1944 and his next play, All My Sons, received the Drama Critics' Circle Award. His 1949 Death of a Salesman won the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1956 and 1957, Miller was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee and was convicted of contempt of Congress for his refusal to identify writers believed to hold Communist sympathies. The following year, the United States Court of Appeals overturned the conviction.

In 1959 the National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded him the Gold Medal for Drama.

Miller has been married three times: to Mary Grace Slattery in 1940, Marilyn Monroe in 1956, and photographer Inge Morath in 1962, with whom he lives in Connecticut. He and Inge have a daughter, Rebecca.

Among his works are A View from the Bridge, The Misfits, After the Fall, Incident at Vichy, The Price, The American Clock, Broken Glass, Mr. Peters' Connections, and Timebends, his autobiography. Miller's writing has earned him a lifetime of honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, seven Tony Awards, two Drama Critics Circle Awards, an Obie, an Olivier, the John F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish prize. He holds honorary doctorate degrees from Oxford University and Harvard University.

Throughout his life and work, Miller has remained socially engaged and has written with conscience, clarity, and compassion. As Chris Keller says to his mother in All My Sons, "Once and for all you must know that there's a universe of people outside, and you're responsible to it." Miller's work is infused with his sense of responsibility to humanity and to his audience. "The playwright is nothing without his audience," he writes. "He is one of the audience who happens to know how to speak."

2. Adam a Gardener

Adam was the first man on earth, and for a short time he lived alone. God chose Adam to name the animals, making him the first zoologist. He was also the first landscaper and horticulturist, responsible to work the garden and care for the plants. He was the first man, the father of humankind. He was the only man without a mother and a father. Perhaps Adam's loneliness moved God to quickly present him with a companion, Eve. Before God created Eve, he had given Adam the Garden of Eden. It was his to enjoy, but he also had the full responsibility of taking care of it.

Adam knew that one tree was off-limits, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Even though she knew it was forbidden to eat the fruit from the tree in the middle of the garden, when Satan tempted her, Eve was deceived. When she offered the fruit to Adam, the fate of the world was on his shoulders. As they ate the fruit in that one act of rebellion, man's independence and disobedience separated him from God, as a result Adam and Even were expelled from Eden.

Adam is "our" beginning, who avoided his God-given responsibility. He blamed Eve and made excuses for himself when he committed a sin. He hid from God in shame, rather than facing his error and admitting the truth. As Adam’s descendents, we must accept our personal responsibility.

3. Gardening

Gardening is the practice of growing and cultivating plants as part of horticulture.

A vegetable garden (also known as a vegetable patch or vegetable plot) is used to grow vegetables and other plants useful for human consumption, in contrast to a flower garden that exists for aesthetic purposes.

A vegetable garden typically includes a compost heap, and several plots or divided areas of land, intended to grow one or two types of plant in each plot. Plots may also be divided into rows with an assortment of vegetables grown in the different rows.

With worsening economic conditions and increased interest in organic and sustainable living, many people are turning to vegetable gardening as a supplement to their family's diet. Food grown in the back yard consumes little if any fuel for shipping or maintenance, and the grower can be sure of what exactly was used to grow it. Organic horticulture, or organic gardening, has become increasingly popular for the modern home gardener.