User:Joanna Sekowska

My draft article
Please don't delete any of this. I'm translating a Wikipedia article into Polish as an Academic assignment and this User Space contains my draft work.

David Karp (born July 6, 1986) is an American web developer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of the short-form blogging platform Tumblr. According to Forbes, Karp's net worth exceeds $200 million, and Tumblr has been valued at $800 million. On May 20, 2013, it was announced that Yahoo! and Tumblr had reached an agreement for Yahoo! to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Karp would remain as CEO of the company.

Karp began his career as an intern under Fred Seibert at animation company Frederator Studios, where he built the studio's first blogging platform and conceived, wrote and edited their first internet video network, Channel Frederator. Karp went on to work for online parenting forum UrbanBaby until it was sold to CNET in 2006. Karp then started his own software consulting company, Davidville, where he worked with computer engineer Marco Arment on projects for clients. During a gap between contracts in 2006, the two began work on a microblogging website, which was launched as Tumblr in February 2007. As of September 28, 2013, Tumblr hosts over 139 million blogs. In August 2009, Karp was named Best Young Tech Entrepreneur 2009 by BusinessWeek and in 2010, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

Early life
Born in New York City, Karp grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. His parents are Barbara Ackerman, a teacher from San Anselmo, California, and Michael D. Karp, a film and television composer. He has a younger brother named Kevin. His parents separated when he was 17. Karp attended the Calhoun School from age 3 through 8th grade, where his mother teaches science. At 11, he began learning HTML and was soon designing websites for local businesses. Karp went on to attend Bronx Science for one year before dropping out at the age of 15 and started homeschooling. At the time, Karp had aspirations of getting into a college in New York or MIT and saw homeschooling and doing other projects on the side as a way to impress the colleges. Karp never returned to high school or earned his high school diploma.

Career
Karp began interning at age 14 for animation producer Fred Seibert, founder of Frederator Studios. Karp's mother had taught Seibert's children at the Calhoun School and was friends with his wife. Karp was fascinated with the work of Frederator's computer engineers and his visits became regular. After he started homeschooling, Karp also began taking Japanese classes at the Japan Society and saw a math tutor, with whom he worked on writing software for winning at blackjack and poker. When entrepreneur John Maloney sought technical help with UrbanBaby, an online parenting forum, a Frederator employee recommended Karp for the job. Karp completed the project, which had to be done in a couple of days, within four hours. Maloney made him UrbanBaby's head of product and gave him a small amount of equity. At age 17, while still working for UrbanBaby, Karp moved alone to Tokyo for five months. It was a full three months after Karp had moved to Tokyo that UrbanBaby found out he wasn't in New York.

Karp left UrbanBaby after it was sold to CNET in 2006. Using money from the sale of his shares, Karp started his own software consultancy company, Davidville, envisioning a mix of client work and his own products. Marco Arment joined the company as an engineer after replying to Karp's Craigslist ad. Karp had been interested in tumblelogs (short-form blogs) for some time and was waiting for one of the established blogging platforms to introduce their own tumblelogging platform. As no one had done so after a year of waiting, Karp and Arment began working on their own tumblelogging platform during a two-week gap between contracts in 2006. Tumblr was launched in February 2007 and within two weeks, the service had gained 75,000 users.

In October 2007, Karp shut down his consultancy business as his work with Tumblr was interfering with his client work. Davidville was renamed Tumblr, Inc. and 25 percent of the company was sold to a small group of investors. As of September 28, 2013, Tumblr hosts over 139 million blogs.

On May 20, 2013, it was announced that Yahoo! and Tumblr had reached an agreement for Yahoo! to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Karp would remain as CEO.

Personal life
As of September 2011, Karp's partner is Rachel Eakley.

Biography
David Lodge was born into a Roman Catholic family in Brockley in south east London. His father was a saxophonist in a dance band, and later became a TV extra. Lodge's first published novel The Picturegoers (1960) draws on his early experiences in 'Brickley' (based on Brockley), and he revisits them again in a later novel, Therapy. World War II forced Lodge and his mother to evacuate to Surrey and Cornwall. He attended school at the Catholic St Joseph's Academy, Blackheath.

University studies
In 1952, he entered the University of London (University College), and obtained a Bachelor of Arts (BA) with first-class honours in 1955. He met his future wife, Mary Frances Jacob, at University College when they were both 18; she was also a student there. After graduating, he spent two years in the Royal Armoured Corps as his military service. This experience became the basis for his novel Ginger, You're Barmy. He then returned to London University where he earned a Master of Arts (MA) in 1959 with a thesis on "The Catholic Novel from the Oxford Movement to the Present Day". During this period, he wrote a first (unpublished) novel at the age of 18 (1953), "The Devil, the World and the Flesh".

Family and early career (1959–67)
In 1959, when they were both 24, Lodge and Mary married. Lodge later said of his marriage, "It seems extraordinary now. I had no prospects, no job, little money but it never bothered me. We didn't really want children at the point they came along, but we got on with it". They had two children in the years 1960 to 1963, a son and a daughter; a third son, Christopher, was born in 1966 with Down Syndrome.

In 1959-1960, Lodge worked in London as an English teacher for the British Council. In 1960, he obtained a job as a lecturer at the University of Birmingham, where he was preparing his PhD thesis on the Oxford Movement. At Birmingham, Lodge met the novelist Malcolm Bradbury, who was to become his "closest writer friend"; the example of Bradbury's comic writing was, according to Lodge, a major influence in the development of this aspect of his own work. In 1963, he collaborated with Malcolm Bradbury and another student, James Duckett, in the development of a satirical revue for the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, entitled Between These Four Walls and performed in the autumn of 1963. The cast included Julie Christie. It was during the performance of a certain skit that involved a radio being played on stage that Lodge (and the audience) heard the news of the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy: "some members of the audience had caught the words and tittered uneasily, taking it as a joke in poor taste. In the interval everybody discovered the awful truth, and the second half of the show fell very flat."

In August 1964 Lodge and his family went to the U.S. He had received a scholarship from the Harkness Commonwealth Fellowship, which compels the recipient to travel at least 3 months out of 12 in the U.S. with a car provided by the company. The family first lived in Providence, Rhode Island, where David Lodge followed the American literature course at Brown University. During this period, free of teaching obligations, Lodge was able to complete his third novel, The British Museum Is Falling Down. Lodge's original title for this novel was The British Museum Has Lost Its Charm, a line from a George and Ira Gershwin song, but he was refused permission to use it by the Gershwin Publishing Corporation. In March 1965 the family then went on a trip to San Francisco.

In 1966, Lodge published his first book of academic criticism, Language of Fiction, and in 1967 he successfully defended his doctoral thesis.

Later career (1967–present)
From 1967 to 1987 he continued his academic career at the University of Birmingham, becoming Professor of English Literature in 1976, while writing many more novels and essays. In 1969, he was an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, a second American experience important for the development of his work, both theoretical and fictional.

Lodge retired from his post at Birmingham in 1987 to become a full-time writer. He says of his retirement, "It was the right time to leave. All my former colleagues say: 'You are well out of it.' There's a weary disillusion to university life now and that's a shame because, when I was there, there was excitement, a joie de vivre. Now it has become like a machine, servicing large numbers of students, and much less attractive and interesting." He retains the title of Honorary Professor of Modern English Literature at the University and continues to live in Birmingham. His papers are housed in the University of Birmingham Library's Special Collections.

In 1997 David Lodge was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture, and in the 1998 New Years Honours list, he was appointed CBE for his services to literature.

Overview
Lodge's first published novels evoke the atmosphere of post-war England (for example, The Picturegoers (1960)). This theme recurs in other later novels through the childhood memories of certain characters ( Paradise News, 1992; Therapy, 1995). The war itself is covered in Out of the Shelter (1970), while Ginger, You're Barmy (1962) draws on Lodge's experience of military service in the 1950s. The Guardian review of the 2011 reissue of Ginger, You're Barmy called the novel "an impressively humane and feelingly political indictment of a tawdry postwar compromise", and "a moving glimpse of a world on the cusp of change".

Lodge was brought up as a Catholic and has described himself as an "agnostic Catholic". Many of his characters are Catholic and their Catholicism, and particularly the relationship between Catholicism and sexuality, is a major theme. The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965) and How Far Can You Go? (1980; published in the U.S. as Souls and Bodies) both examine the difficulties faced by orthodox Catholics due to the Church's prohibition on artificial contraception. Other novels in which Catholicism plays an important part include Small World (in respect to the character of Persse), Paradise News (1991), and Therapy (1995). In the last, the protagonist, Laurence Passmore, known as Tubby, suffers a breakdown after the failure of his marriage. He reminisces about his adolescent courtship with his first girlfriend at a Catholic youth club, and subsequently seeks her out on her pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Lodge has said that, if read chronologically, his novels give a picture of an orthodox Roman Catholic becoming "less and less so as time went on".

Several of Lodge's novels are satirical depictions of the world of academia. The so-called "Campus Trilogy" (Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work) are all set at a fictional university in the English Midlands town of "Rummidge", modelled after Birmingham in the UK. These novels share recurring characters; notably, Rummidge's English literature lecturer, Philip Swallow, and his American counterpart, professor Morris Zapp, who aspires to be "the highest paid teacher of Humanities in the world", and teaches at Euphoria State University. Euphoria is located in the city of "Plotinus", which is located between the states of "North California" and "South California" and is a thinly disguised version of Berkeley, California. Swallow and Zapp first cross paths in Changing Places, where they swap jobs for an exchange scheme (and later, swap wives). Lodge has said that the plot of the novel "was a narrative transformation of the thematic material and the socio-cultural similarities and differences I had perceived between Birmingham and Berkeley" (during his time as visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley).

Other fictional universities appear in Lodge's novels. Persse McGarrigle in Small World is a doctoral student at the fictional University College Limerick, the book having been written before the foundation of the real-life University of Limerick. Likewise, another campus novel, Thinks..., was set at the fictional University of Gloucester before the foundation of a real-life University of Gloucestershire.

Lodge's novels also cover a range of other topics: for example, the world of business in Nice Work, the world of television in Therapy, and deafness and Alzheimer's disease in Deaf Sentence. The latter draws on Lodge's own experiences of hearing problems; Lodge has said, "I hate my deafness; it's a comic infirmity as opposed to blindness which is a tragic infirmity". Lodge has said of his own work, "each of my novels corresponds to a particular phase or aspect of my own life [but] this does not mean they are autobiographical in any simple, straightforward sense".

Two of Lodge's recent novels are based on the lives of authors: Author, Author (2004), about Henry James, and A Man Of Parts (2011), about H. G. Wells. Author, Author suffered from comparisons to Colm Tóibín's novel about Henry James, The Master, which was published six months earlier and went on to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize; most reviews of Lodge's novel focused on his unfortunate timing. Lodge wrote about the experience in The Year of Henry James (2006).

Influences and allusions
Lodge's major influences include other English Catholic novelists (the subject of his MA dissertation), notably Graham Greene.

Amongst his contemporaries, he has most often been compared to his friend Malcolm Bradbury, also an exponent of the campus novel. Lodge has acknowledged his debt to Bradbury: "The British Museum Is Falling Down was the first of my novels that could be described as in any way experimental. Comedy, it seemed, offered a way of reconciling a contradiction, of which I had long been aware, between my critical admiration for the great modernist writers, and my creative practice, formed by the neo-realist, antimodernist writing of the 1950s. My association with Malcolm Bradbury, and the example of his own work in comedy, was therefore a crucial factor in this development in my writing." Lodge says he "was once rung up by a man to settle a bet by declaring whether I was the same person as Malcolm Bradbury".

As an academic, Lodge was one of the earliest proponents in the UK of the work of Mikhail Bakhtin.

Lodge also makes frequent allusions to other literary works in his novels.

The British Museum Is Falling Down is influenced by both Mrs Dalloway and Ulysses in that all of the action takes place in one day. The novel is mostly from the point of view of Adam Appleby, but the last chapter contains a long stream-of-consciousness section from the point of view of Adam's wife Barbara, modelled on Molly Bloom's famous soliloquy at the end of Ulysses. The novel contains a number of other passages which parody well-known writers (a fact not recognised by most reviewers on the novel's first publication).

Small World makes constant reference to Arthurian legend, both in terms of plot and character names, but also in allusions made by the characters (all academics) themselves. Lodge says of the novel's genesis, "It gradually grew on me that there was an analogy between my story and the Arthurian story, particularly the Grail quest in which a group of knights wander around the world, having adventures, pursuing ladies, love, and glory, jousting with each other, meeting rather coincidentally or unexpectedly, facing constant challenges and crises, and so on [...] This all corresponded to the modern world with its Round Table of professors: the elite group who get invited to conferences, who go around the world in pursuit of glory. Sometimes they take the opportunity to indulge in amorous intrigue, or to joust with each other in debate, pursuing glory in the sense of wanting to be at the top of their profession."

Dissemination and reception
Lodge's work first came to wider notice in Britain in 1975, when he won the Hawthornden prize for Changing Places. He went on to win the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1980 for How Far Can You Go? and Sunday Express Book of the Year in 1988 for Nice Work. Two of his early novels were reissued during this period (Ginger, You're Barmy, 1962/1982, and The British Museum is Falling Down, 1965/1981). His novels were published in paperback in the 1960s by Pan and Panther Books, by Penguin Books from 1980, and by Vintage Publishing (Random House Group) since 2011. Vintage has reissued most of his earlier work.

Lodge has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice (for Small World and Nice Work) and in 1989 Lodge was himself chairman of the Booker Prize judges. His 1970 novel Out of the Shelter was longlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010.

Anthony Burgess called Lodge "one of the best novelists of his generation".

International publication
Lodge's work first received recognition in France in the early 1990s, after the publication by Rivages of two of his novels, Nice Work and Changing Places. These were followed in 1991 by Small World and The British Museum Is Falling Down. Since then almost all his works of fiction have been translated, and his new works are translated fairly quickly. His work is now published in France by Payot et Rivages. The publication of his theoretical works in France began later, beginning in 2003 with Consciousness and the Novel. The earlier works of this area remained unpublished in France, except The Art of Fiction.

His books are routinely translated into a number of other languages including German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Czech, Polish, Turkish.

Narrative techniques
In The Art of Fiction (1992), David Lodge studied, through examination of extracts from novels, various stylistic devices (repetition, variation in levels of language, etc.) and narrative techniques (varying viewpoints, defamiliarization, etc.). Lodge self-consciously uses many of these techniques in his own novels: for example, in Paradise News (1991), the narration is mostly third-person point of view, but there are also first-person narratives (diary and autobiography, letters, postcards, emails), and various other documents,such as theoretical writings on tourism. In Therapy (1995), the bulk of the novel is told through the protagonist's diary, but there are other texts, presented as written by minor characters about the main character. It is eventually revealed that these were all written by the main character, as part of a therapy exercise.

Television
Two of Lodge's novels have been adapted into television serials: Small World (1988), and Nice Work (1989). Nice Work was adapted by Lodge himself, and was filmed at the University of Birmingham, where Lodge was Professor of English. He also adapted his play The Writing Game for television broadcast (1995).

In 1994 Lodge adapted Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit for a BBC series.

Theatre
Lodge has written three plays: The Writing Game, Home Truths (which he later turned into a novella), and Secret Thoughts (based on his novel Thinks...).

The Writing Game is about the staff, teachers and students at a residential course for writers. The action of the play is interspersed with readings by the characters of their own works-in-progress. According to Lodge, the play "originated in the experience of teaching such a course myself- not because its plot bears any resemblance to what happened on that course, but because it struck me that the bare situation possessed the classic dramatic unities of time, place and action. Indeed it would be true to say that I invented the plot of my play to fulfil the dramatic possibilities inherent in the situation." The play opened at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre on 13 May 1990, and ran for three weeks. An American production was staged at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts in March 1991. Lodge subsequently adapted the play for television. It was broadcast on Channel 4 on Sunday 18 February 1996, attracting 1.2 million viewers.

Home Truths was performed at the Birmingham Rep in 1998. The story mainly focuses on Adrian Ludlow, a half-retired writer, interviewed by Fanny Tarrant, a journalist famous for sarcastic portrait of her interviewees. Lodge later rewrote it as a novella of the same name.

Lodge adapted his novel Thinks... into a two-character play, Secret Thoughts, which premiered at the Octagon Theatre, Bolton on 12 May 2011. The Stage called it "an intriguing, intensely witty, brainy play [...] one of the most compelling two-handers imaginable". The Guardian review said that "Lodge's novel boils down neatly into an intellectually and erotically charged dialogue on the nature of the mind", yet felt that "Lodge cannot quite eradicate the sense that some of the cerebral jousting has a more natural home in a novel than on stage". Secret Thoughts won Best New Play at the Manchester Theatre Awards, being hailed as a "bracing and ambitious production that wowed everyone who saw it".

Awards and recognition

 * Winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize for Changing Places
 * Whitbread Book of the Year (1980) for How Far Can You Go?
 * Shortlisted for the Booker Prize (1984) for Small World
 * Shortlisted for the Booker Prize (1988) for Nice Work
 * Winner of the Sunday Express Book of the Year award (1988) for Nice Work
 * Regional winner and finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (1996) for Therapy
 * Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
 * The television serialization of Nice Work (which he adapted himself) won the Royal Television Society's Award for best Drama serial in the year 1989 and a Silver Nymph at the International Television Festival (Monte Carlo; 1990).
 * Secret Thoughts, his own adaptation of his novel Thinks..., won the Best New Play award in the Manchester Theatre Awards at the Octagon Theatre, Bolton.

Fiction

 * The Picturegoers — 1960
 * Ginger You're Barmy — 1962
 * The British Museum Is Falling Down — 1965
 * Out of the Shelter — 1970
 * Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses — 1975
 * How Far Can You Go? (US edition: Souls and Bodies) — 1980
 * Small World: An Academic Romance — 1984
 * Nice Work — 1988
 * Paradise News — 1991
 * A David Lodge Trilogy — 1993 - single volume comprising Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work
 * Therapy — 1995
 * The Man Who Wouldn't Get Up: And Other Stories — 1998
 * Home Truths — 1999 (novella — written from original play)
 * Thinks ... — 2001
 * Author, Author — 2004
 * Deaf Sentence — 2008
 * A Man of Parts (H.G. Wells) — 2011

Non-fiction

 * Language of Fiction — 1966
 * The Novelist at the Crossroads — 1971
 * The Modes of Modern Writing — 1977
 * Working with Structualism — 1981
 * Write On — 1986
 * After Bakhtin — 1990
 * The Art of Fiction (book) — 1992
 * Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader — 1992
 * The Practice of Writing — 1997
 * Consciousness and the Novel — 2003
 * The Year of Henry James: The Story of a Novel — 2006

Theatre

 * The Writing Game — 1990
 * Home Truths — 1999
 * Secret Thoughts (based on Thinks...) — 2011

Adaptations for television

 * Small World — 1988
 * Nice Work — 1989
 * Martin Chuzzlewit — 1994
 * The Writing Game — 1995