5 GREAT AMERICAN SHORT STORIES Retold by Nick Bullard
© 2018 – StandFor Editorial Director Antonio Rios Editorial Manager Cayube Galas Editorial Coordinator Ana Carolina Costa Lopes, Renata Lara de Moraes Series Editor Nick Bullard Editorial Assistant Nathalia Thomaz Contributor Fernanda Valezini Ferreira Production Manager Mariana Milani Production Coordinator Marcelo Henrique Ferreira Fontes Proofreader Hannah Fish Art Manager Ricardo Borges Art Coordinator Daniela Di Creddo Máximo Design Yan Comunicação Cover Design Yan Comunicação Art Supervisor Patrícia De Michelis Art Editors/Layout Anderson Sunakozawa, Lidiani Minoda Illustrations Coordinator Márcia Berne Illustrations Davi Calil Operations Director and Reginaldo Soares Damasceno Print Production Manager Dados Internacionais de Catalogação na Publicação (CIP) (Câmara Brasileira do Livro, SP, Brasil) Great american short stories : standfor graded readers : level 5 / retold by Nick Bullard ; illustrated by Davi Calil. -- 1. ed. -São Paulo : FTD, 2018.
ISBN 978-85-96-01501-1 (aluno) ISBN 978-85-96-01502-8 (professor) 1. Literatura infantojuvenil em inglês I. Bullard, Nick. II. Calil, Davi. 18-13667 CDD-028.5
Índices para catálogo sistemático: 1. Literatura infantil em inglês 028.5 2. Literatura infantojuvenil em inglês 028.5 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of StandFor. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Rua Rui Barbosa, 156 – Bela Vista – São Paulo-SP – Brasil – CEP 01326-010 Phone 0800 772 2300 – Caixa Postal 65149 – CEP 01390-970 – www.standfor.com.br 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Produção gráfica
Avenida Antônio Bardella, 300 - 07220-020 GUARULHOS (SP) Fone: (11) 3545-8600 e Fax: (11) 2412-5375
www.twosides.org.br
GREAT AMERICAN SHORT STORIES CONTENTS The Cat ............................................................................... 7 Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky ................................. 13 Stephen Crane
The Luck of Roaring Camp ......................................... 23 Bret Harte
My Financial Career ...................................................... 30 Stephen Leacock
The Passing of Grandison ............................................ 34 Charles W. Chesnutt
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County ... 47 Mark Twain
To Build a Fire ................................................................... 54 Jack London
A Broken Promise ............................................................. 62 Damon Runyon 3
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman was born in Randolph, Massachusetts, in 1852. Her family were not rich (and the family business failed in 1873), and she began writing short stories and poetry when she was a teenager. After the death of her father in 1883, she had to live from her writing. “The Cat” was first published in 1901. She married in 1902, but had no children, and she and her husband later separated. She died in Meluchen, New Jersey, in 1930. Stephen Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1871, the youngest of fourteen children. His father was a minister in the church, and he died when Stephen was eight. From 1888, Crane worked in a news office, and from 1891, he was writing full-time, publishing newspaper articles and short stories. He moved to New York City in 1892, and his first novel Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, was published in 1893. “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” was first published in 1898. Crane suffered from poor health all his life, and died in Germany, in 1900. Bret Harte was born in Albany, New York, in 1836. He moved to California in 1853, and worked as a miner, teacher, and journalist. “The Luck of Roaring Camp” was first published in 1868, and helped to make Bret Harte famous. Roaring Camp is a real place in northern California, and Harte knew the region well. In 1871, he moved back to the East to work for The Atlantic Monthly, and moved to Europe in 1878. He died in England in 1902. Stephen Leacock was born in England in 1869, and moved to Canada when he was six years old. The family had a farm in Ontario, and Stephen went to a boarding school in Toronto. He studied economics at the University of Chicago, and later became professor of Political Economy at McGill University in Montreal. He started writing in 1894 to make extra money, but his short, humorous pieces became very popular, and he was soon famous across North America and in Britain. “My Financial Career” was first published in 1910. Stephen Leacock died in Toronto, in 1944.
4
Charles W. Chesnutt was born in 1858, in Cleveland, Ohio. His parents, both African Americans, were from Fayetteville, North Carolina, and the family moved back there in 1867. Schools for black students were opening across the South, and, at the age of fourteen, Chesnutt became a pupil teacher. At the age of twenty, he married and moved to New York, and then back to Cleveland where he became a lawyer. He started writing short stories, and “The Passing of Grandison” was published in 1899. He died in Cleveland, in 1932. Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He was born in Missouri, in 1835, and raised in the town of Hannibal – which is the setting for his two great novels – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As a young man, Twain worked for a local newspaper, and then as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River. He worked as a miner in Nevada, but then returned to newspapers. “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was first published in 1865. Mark Twain died in Connecticut, in 1910. Jack London was born in San Francisco in 1876. He traveled to Dawson City in the Yukon, in Northern Canada, at the age of 21, to look for gold and when he returned to California he decided to write for a living. He used his experience in the Yukon in many of his stories, which he sold to magazines. “To Build a Fire” was first published in an early version in 1902, but London then revised it and republished it in 1908. London’s health was not good, partly because of the hard life he had had in the Yukon, and he died in California, in 1916. Damon Runyon was born in Kansas in 1880, and grew up in Pueblo, Colorado. In 1898, he joined the army to fight in the Spanish-American war, and on his return in 1900, he started working for newspapers in and around Pueblo. Runyon moved to New York in 1911, and worked as a sports journalist. “A Broken Promise” was published with the title “Breach of Promise” in 1937. Damon Runyon died in New York, in 1946.
5
The Cat Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
The snow was falling, and the Cat’s coat was covered, but he didn’t move. He sat, ready to jump, as he had sat for hours. It was night, but time didn’t matter to the Cat when he was waiting for food. He didn’t need to think about humans, for he was alone this winter. Nobody was calling him; no food was waiting for him by a fire. He was free. But he was very hungry. It had been freezing for days, and all the animals he usually ate were safe underground. He waited patiently because he knew that a rabbit had gone into this hole under a tree. So the Cat sat down and watched. It grew darker and darker. The mountains were hidden, and the wind was blowing the snow over the rocks. Still the Cat sat. Then the Cat saw two bright eyes, and then a small nose, and two pointed ears. He didn’t move. Suddenly the rabbit was out of the hole, there was a short fight, and the Cat had it. The Cat went home, pulling the rabbit behind him. 7