Reading Rat

What to read, 1901-1925

\/ 1876-1900 | 1926 on /\

Annotations: to (rating) - (etexts) - (etexts) - (study guides) - (references) - (criticism) - (note) - (comment)

Early 20th Century

If you believe everything you read you are much worse off than if you were unable to read at all. --William Empson

Flannery O'CONNOR (1925-1964) Flannery O'Connor Collection post

Wise Blood (1952)
In Taulkinham, U.S.A., the city of Fiendish Evangelists, one is brought into a world not so much of accursed or victimized human beings as into the company of an ill-tempered and driven collection of one-dimensional creatures of sheer meanness and orneriness... --William Goyen

A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955)
...“The River,” one of her most sacramental stories, focused entirely on the collision course between the sacred and the secular, as shown in the exploration of baptism. --Arnold Weinstein

The Violent Bear It Away (1960)

Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965)
...“Judgment Day,” explores not only death but its aftermath, the final fate of body and soul, the final evaluation and revelation of who we are. --Arnold Weinstein

The Habit of Being (1978)
The beautiful letters of America's most profound writer this century. --The Intercollegiate Review

MISHIMA Yukio (Hiraoka Kimitake, 1925-1970)

The Sea of Fertility (1969-71)

John HAWKES (1925-1998)

The Cannibal (1949)

Second Skin (1964)

Jose Cardoso PIRES (1925-1998) O Delfim

Ballad of the Dogs' Beach (A Balada de Praia do Caes 1982)

T. CARMI (Carmi Charny 1925-1994) Zionist

At the Stone of Losses (1983)

Edward GOREY (1925-2000) Wikipedia entry
To describe the contents--plot is usually too grand a word--of Gorey's many illustrated novellettes is to make them sound utterly grim or kitsch, when they actually balance the elusive whimsy of children's nonsense (as in the works of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear) with the discreet charm of black comedy. --Michael Dirda

Amphigorey (1972)

Amphigorey Too (1975)

Amphigorey Also (1983)

Amphigorey Again (2006)

Russell HOBAN (1925-2011) Awl

Riddley Walker (1980)

Philippe JACCOTTET (b. 1925) portrait 123 | portrait 002

Selected Poems (1988)

Donald JUSTICE (1925-2004) Academy of American Poets

Selected Poems (1979)

Kenneth KOCH (1925-2002) Academy of American Poets

Seasons on Earth (1987)

PRAEMODYA Ananta Toer (1925-2006) Bardsley

Buru Quartet: This Earth of Mankind (1980); Child of All Nations (1980); Footsteps (1985); House of Glass (1988)

William STYRON (1925-2006) The New York Review of Books | Times Topics Feeney | Lehmann-Haupt

The Long March (1953)
describes the conflict between the liberal and the authoritarian through the image of a training march in which the liberal seeks to prove himself through self-destructive endurance. --Raphael and McLeish

Gore VIDAL (1925-2012) post

Myra Breckenridge (1968)
a comic novel with a transexual lead character; it poked fun at American hypocrisies, and was considered shocking at the time... --John S. Major

Burr (1974)

Lincoln (1984)

also

The Empire Lovers Strike Back The Nation (March 22, 1986)

Gerald DURRELL (1925-1995)

My Family and Other Animals (1965)
Winning combination of animals, insects, and the author's slapstick family (he is the brother of Lawrence Durrell), all set in Corfu between the wars. --Raphael and McLeish

ABE Kobo (Abe Kimifusa, 1924-1993) Keffer | Kato Koiti

The Woman in the Dunes (1962)

Truman CAPOTE (1924-1984) post
The only thing Truman Capote and I have in common was Howard Hunt beat us out for a Guggenheim [Fellowship]. --Gore Vidal

Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948)

Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958)

In Cold Blood (1966)
...and so it happens that one day a naive person with stronger dramatic instincts than most, and less sense of self-perception, comes to believe that sophisticated people believe life to be unbearable, and therefore it is not terrible to carry the belief to its logical conclusion and to deprive his fellow man of their lives. --Rebecca West
It presents the metaphysics of anti-realism through a total evocation of reality. Not the least of the book's merits is that it manages a major moral judgment without the author's appearance once on stage. --Conrad Knickerbocker

James BALDWIN (1924-1987) post

Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)
It does not produce its story as an accumulation of shocks (as most novels of Negro life do), or by puffing into a rigid metaphysical system (as most novels about religion do); it makes its utterance by tension and friction. --Donald Barr

Notes of a Native Son (1955) Sol Stein essay | Jonathan Yardley essay | Irving Howe essay

Giovanni's Room (1956)

The Fire Next Time (1963) F. W. Dupee review

The Price of the Ticket (1985)

Jose DONOSO (1924-1996)

The Obscene Bird of Night (El obsceno pajaro de la noche 1970)

Yehuda AMICHAI (1924-2000)

Selected Poetry Hebrew Literature | Poets

Travels (1986)

Edgar BOWERS (1924-2000)

Living Together: New and Selected Poems (1973)

William H. GASS (b. 1924) Wolcott

Omensetter's Luck (1966)

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968)

Zbigniew HERBERT (1924-1998) Simic

Selected Poems (1968)

Josef SKVORECKY (1924-2012)
The voice of his writing is usually sunny and joyful, the high spirits of Mozart or of Sidney Bechet. The matter of his stories, however, can be very dark indeed. --Neal Ascherson

The Cowards (1958)

The Bass Saxophone (1967)

Michel TOURNIER (b. 1924)

The Ogre (1972; Le Roi des aulnes 1970)

Friday and Robinson (1977; Vendredi ou la Vie sauvage)
By turning the shipwreck into a stroke of destiny, Tournier turns the contingent life of Crusoe into the necessary life. From the moment of his awakening on the beach, his every step is toward the 'real' Crusoe who has always been waiting inside. --Sven Birkerts

James SCHUYLER (1923-1991)

Collected Poems (1993)

James DICKEY (1923-1997) James Dickey Society Meyers

The Early Motion (1981)

The Central Motion (1983)

Walter M. MILLER, Jr. (1923-1996)

A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)
Awesome account of post-apocalypse world and the Second Coming, immaculately conceived in SF terms; postulates the Church as a repository of technological secrets from a past civilization now regarded as sacred writings. --Raphael and McLeish

Norman MAILER (1923-2007) Times Topics post

The Naked and the Dead (1948)
Tour de force of an enforced tour of duty by riflemen in the South Pacific in World War II; the sexual obsessiveness of frightened soldiers counterpoints the power-madness of their commanders. --Raphael and McLeish

Advertisements for Myself (1959)
includes the essay 'The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster' (1957)

The Armies of the Night (1968)
Fact or fiction? Not even Mailer knew for sure. --The Intercollegiate Review

The Executioner's Song (1979)
The very subject of The Executioner's Song is that vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience, a nihilism antithetical not only to literature but to most other forms of human endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human voices fade out, trail off, like skywriting. --Joan Didion

Ancient Evenings (1983)

Yves BONNEFOY (b. 1923)

Words in Stone (Pierre ecrite 1965)

Anthony HECHT (1923-2004) Wikipedia entry David Yezzi essay
Urbane, discursive, elegant... . He brings to American writing an essentially European temperament... .--Raphael and McLeish

Collected Earlier Poems (1990) Table of Poems
contains The Hard Hours, Millions of Strange Shadows, and The Venetian Vespers... --Poetry Foundation

Eugenio de ANDRADE (Jose Fontinhas, (1923-2005)

Selected Poems Levitin

Italo CALVINO (1923-1985) Jonathan Lethem essay

The Baron in the Trees (1959; Il barone rampante, 1957);

The Nonexistent Knight (1962; Il cavaliere inesistente, 1959)

t zero (1969, or Time and the Hunter, 1970; Ti con zero, 1967)

Invisible Cities (1974; Le citta invisibili, 1972)
nominally based on the Chinese voyages of Marco Polo; in reality (if such a word is appropriate here), Calvino suggests that cities--all cities, any city, and perhaps specifically Marco Polo’s home city of Venice--can never be known, no matter how many ways one tries to approach it. --Arnold Weinstein

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1981; Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, 1979)

Nadine GORDIMER (b. 1923) Times Topics | Nobel Prize

Selected Stories (1974)

Joseph HELLER (1923-1999)

Catch-22 (1961) Robert Brustein review
Title proverbial; book longer than witty, though very witty. Bravura passages of anti-war farce laced with blood; Yossarian a memorable protagonist, what one can remember of him. --Raphael and McLeish

Miroslav HOLUB (1923-1998) three poems

"The Fly" (1987)

Chairil ANWAR (1922-1949) Ward Petri Liukkonen biography

Complete Poetry and Prose

Jack KEROUAC (1922-1969) Wikipedia entry | U. Mass. Lowell

On the Road (1957) Phoebe Lou Adams review
For its depiction of an era and a life-style. --John Williams Collins III
Maddening 'bible' of the Beat generation. --Raphael and McLeish

Pier Paolo PASOLINI (1922-1975)

Poems

Philip LARKIN (1922-1985)

Collected Poems (Anthony Thwaite editor, 1989, 1993)
The Complete Poems (Archie Burnett editor, 2012)

Vasko POPA (1922-1991) eleven poems

Selected Poems

Kingsley AMIS (1922-1995) post

Lucky Jim (1961)
...Jim Dixon, English grammar school-educated academic, has had a thousand irreverent successors, none with quite his anarchic eye for the main chance. --Raphael and McLeish

Donald DAVIE (1922-1995)

Selected Poems

Thomas KUHN (1922-1996) post

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
called into question not just the determinateness of the Newtonian world-view and the inviolability and indestructibility of matter in the Newtonian world-view, but the objectivity of the scientific enterprise itself. --James Hall
science is not an entirely rational enterprise, and that its well-established theories (or paradigms) are overturned in a revolutionary, nonlogical process. --Steven L. Goodman
It pays tribute to scientific 'revolutionaries' who insist on seeing the world differently and reveals the crushing power of 'normal' science. But it reminds us that, in the end, even science is a social and political process. --Mark Moore

William GADDIS (1922-1998) Annotations

The Recognitions (1955)

J. R. (1975)

Kurt VONNEGUT, Jr. (1922-2007) Wikipedia entry | Official Website post

Cat's Cradle (1963)

Slaughterhouse Five (1969)
He wrote many fine and funny books, but the only story he really wanted to tell was about what had happened to Dresden on that night in February 1945. --Charles Van Doren

Gertrude HIMMELFARB (b. 1922) Wikipedia entry

The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (1985)

also

Gerald HOLTON (b. 1922) and Katherine SOPKA (1921-2009)

Great Books of Science in the Twentieth Century: Physics (The Great Ideas Today 1979, 1979)

Howard MOSS (1922-1987)

New Selected Poems (1985)

Grace PALEY (1922-2007)

The Little Disturbances of Man (1959)

Alain ROBBE-GRILLET (1922-2008)

The Erasers (Les Gommes, 1953)

The Voyeur (Le Voyeur, 1955)

Jealousy (La Jalousie, 1957)

In the Labyrinth (Dans le labyrinthe, 1959)

For a New Novel (Pour un Nouveau Roman, 1963)

Project for a Revolution in New York (1972; Projet pour une revolution a New York 1970)

Jose SARAMAGO (1922-2010)

Baltasar and Blimunda (1987; Memorial do Convento 1982)

Blindness (1997; Ensaio sobre a Cegueira 1995)

The Cave (2002; A Caverna 2001)

James JONES (1921-1977)

From Here to Eternity (1951)
...Jones's ponderous compendium of service life before and after Pearl Harbor is memorable for furious honesty, at least. --Raphael and McLeish

Leonardo SCIASCIA (1921-1989)

Day of the Owl (1984; Il giorno della civetta, 1961)

Equal Danger (1973; Il contesto, 1971)

The Wine-Dark Sea: Thirteen Stories (1985; (Il mare color del vino, 1973)

Friedrich DURRENMATT (1921-1990)

The Visit (Der Besuch der Alten Dame 1956)
An old lady with virtually unlimited wealth comes back to a small town to avenge herself on the man who dishonored her. --Philip Ward

The Physicists (Der Physiker 1962)
three men are found in a lunatic asylum, claiming to be Newton, Einstein and a spokesman for King Solomon. The philosophical seriousness of the theme of social scientists' social responsibilities is intentionally deflated by absurdist techniques. --Philip Ward

Stanislaw LEM (1921-2006)

The Investigation (1974; Sledztwo, 1959)

Solaris (1961; trans. 1970)
Story of a planet which is a sentient creature, capable of creating duplicates from the memories of the earth people who visit it... . --Raphael and McLeish

Betty FRIEDAN (1921-2006)

The Feminine Mystique (1963)
She pictured the average middle-class American woman (she more or less ignored black or working-class women) as leading a life in which she tried to conform to a false image, and thus suffered inevitable unhappiness. --Martin Seymour-Smith

Wilson HARRIS (b. 1921)

The Guyana Quartet: Palace of the Peacock (1960), The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962), The Secret Ladder (1963)

Gabriel OKARA (b. 1921)

The Fisherman's Invocation (1978)

Janos PILINSZKY (1921-1981)

Selected Poems (1976)

Crater (1978; Krater, 1975)

Andrea ZANZOTTO (1921-2011) Bedon

Selected Poetry (1975)

Richard WILBUR (b. 1921) Internet Poetry Archive Wikipedia entry | Academy of American Poets James Longenbach essay

New and Collected Poems (1988) David Mason review | Michael Dirda review | Adam Kirsch review
...'Love Calls Us to the Things of This World' ... 'Trolling for Blues'... . --Charles Van Doren

also

Psalm First Things (May 2009)

John McCABE (1920-2005)

Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy: An Affectionate Biography (1961)
a sumptuous picture book, with stills from every film. --Raphael and McLeish

Keith DOUGLAS (1920-1944)

The Complete Poems (1977)

Paul CELAN (Paul Ancel, 1920-1970) Wikipedia entry
Against Frost's warning that poetry cannot be exported out of its local idiom, the polyglot exile Celan cannot imagine poetry that is not itself already in motion, caught in a condition of wandering between borders and languages and historical epochs. --Mark M. Anderson

Poems: a Bilingual Edition (1968)
He attempted to forge a new poetic language which could not be mistaken for the German used and debased by the Nazis. --Philip Ward

Amy CLAMPITT (1920-1994)

Westward (1990)

Julian JAYNES (1920-1997)

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)

Joan PERUCHO (1920-2003)

Natural History (1988; Les histories naturals, 1960)

Amos TUTUOLA (1920-1997)

The Palm-Wine Drinkard, and his dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town (1952)

Richard ADAMS (b. 1920) Joan Bridgman essay

Watership Down (1972)
Long, allegorical novel about rabbits; occasional turgidities offset by strong story-line. --Raphael and McLeish

The Girl on a Swing (1980)

also

A Guide to Oriental Classics

(1st edition 1964) Wm. Theodore de Bary (b. 1919) and Ainslee Embree (b. 1921), Editors

(2nd edition 1975) Wm. Theodore de Bary and Ainslee Embree, Editors Table of Contents

(3rd edition 1989) Amy Vladeck Heinrich, Editor of this edition, Wm. Theodore de Bary and Ainslee Embree, Editors

Jorge de SENA (1919-1978)

Selected Poems

Primo LEVI (1919-1987) Wikipedia entry

The Periodic Table (Il sistema periodico 1975)
amalgamates chemical metaphor with personal reminiscence and historical documentation. --Sven Birkerts

If Not Now, When? (Se non ora, quando? 1984)
a novel, although it is based on stories Levi had heard from others about events in the fateful year of 1945. --Charles Van Doren

Collected Poems (Ad ora incerta, 1988)

May SWENSON (1919-1989)

New & Selected Things Taking Place (1978)

In Other Words (1987)

Robert PINGET (1919-1997)

Fable (1971; trans. 1980)

The Libera Me Domine (1978; Le Libera, Paris, 1968)

That Voice (1982; Cette Voix, Paris, 1975)

Sophia de MELLO BREYNER (1919-2004)

Selected Poems

Robert DUNCAN (1919-1988)

Bending the Bow (1968)

Frank KERMODE (1919-2010) Nothing for Ever and Ever Richard Poirier review

The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967; revised 2003)

Doris LESSING (b. 1919) Retrospective | Times Topics post
As for Mrs Lessing, social historians of the future will be grateful to her for her case-histories of the effect on the average man, who picks up his thought when and where he can, of ideas--such as psychoanalysis and Marxism--worked out by specialist scholars of intelligence much superior to his own, often in totally different environments, and, what is more, at a long time past. --Rebecca West
She has consistently gone underground into a woman's being, into the being of our species, tunneling through memory and myth, through Marxism and madness. --John Leonard

The Golden Notebook (1962)
solemn with determination to give a full account of Modern Woman at the end of her tether. --Raphael and McLeish

Iris MURDOCH (1919-1999) Brierley | Preece | Taylor | Eilenberg | Jacobs | Oates
Miss Murdoch often builds her stories round happenings the like of which can be found in Russian novels and which are known as 'scandals.' A group of people is shown in a state of rest, which is suddenly terminated by the setting up of an action, unexpected and probably of arguable legitimacy, by members of the group. Once the group is in a state of motion it suffers irreversible moral and intellectual changes so that when it settles into a state of rest again it is new in substance and it can be said that, by little or by much, the universe is not the same. --Rebecca West

A Severed Head (1961)
a sexual quadrille, 'wish fulfillment' bristling with wit and unnerving observation. --Raphael and McLeish

Bruno's Dream (1969)

Sandcastle (1978)

The Good Apprentice (1985)

J. D. SALINGER (Jerome David Salinger 1919-2010) Times Topics post
John Updike said, half in admiration, half in rebuke, that J. D. Salinger loved his characters even more than God did. --Ralph McInerney

The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
New, liberating tone made The Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield an American archetype--puzzled yet outspoken with a jargon ('big deal') still comic and current. --Raphael and McLeish

Nine Stories (1953)
'A Perfect Day for Bananafish' (1948), 'Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut' (1948), 'Just Before the War with the Eskimos' (1948), 'The Laughing Man' (1949), 'Down at the Dinghy' (1949), 'For Esmé with Love and Squalor' (1950), 'Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes' (1951), 'De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period' (1952), and 'Teddy' (1953) --ed.

Franny and Zooey (1961)
Buddy's letter to Zooey is the best and most enduring reminder I have had of the importance of discovering the things that really matter to you, and then doing them with zest because that's the way they deserve to be done. --Avis C. Vidal

Richard Phillips FEYNMAN (1918-1988) post

The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964, 1966; 1970; 2005)
Outside of art (or maybe not), physics is mankind's most beautiful achievement; these three volumes are probably the most beautiful ever written about physics. --David Gelernter

Q. E. D. (1985)

also

Personal Observations on the Reliability of the Shuttle NASA (June 1986)

Juan Jose ARREOLA (1918-2001 ) Obituary

Confabulatorio Total, 1941-1961 (1962)

Fred BODSWORTH (b. 1918)

Last of the Curlews (1955)

Alexander SOLZHENITSYN (1918-2008) post

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) Philip Rahv review
The Day of Ivan Denisovich, as the title reads in Russian, is the first work to break the taboo and to bring into the open the full truth about Russian concentration camps. --Marc Slonim

The First Circle (1968) Daniel J. Mahoney review

Cancer Ward (1968)
It becomes vital to have a theory, and world theories, global diagnoses of the body politic or the human state generally, take on, as though of necessity, an importance not usually accorded them by the healthy. --Mary McCarthy

The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1978)
Marked the absolute final turning point beyond which nobody could deny the evil of the Evil Empire. --Richard John Neuhaus

August 1914 (1984)

also

A World Split Apart (Harvard, June 8, 1978) First Principles

The New Generation (1993) The American Scholar

Miniatures, 1996-99 First Things (December 2006)

Johannes BOBROWSKI (1917-1965)

Shadow Lands (Schattenland Strome, 1962)

Carson McCULLERS (1917-1967) Yardley

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951)

Robert LOWELL (1917-1977) post

Collected Poems (2003)

also

Buenos Aires The New York Review of Books (February 1, 1963)

Heinrich BOLL (1917-1985)
the force of Boll's vision depends most often upon the reductions wrought by fear, confusion, and suffering. That is--to collapse three nouns into one--by war. --Sven Birkerts

Billiards at Half-Past Nine (Billard um halb zehn, 1959)

The Clown (1965; (Ansichten eines Clowns, 1963)

Anthony BURGESS (1917-1993) post

A Clockwork Orange (1962)

Nothing Like the Sun: A Story of Shakespeare's Love Life (1964)

Arthur C. CLARKE (1917-2008) post

Childhood's End (1953)
Clarke's vision of humanity becoming godlike reached its ultimate in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. But Childhood's End expresses this view with even more coherence; it is remarkable for its compassion. --Raphael and McLeish

Profiles of the Future (1963)
he forecasts events and discoveries of the next 200 to 300 years. --Raphael and McLeish

Louis AUCHINCLOSS (1917-2010) post

The Rector of Justin (1964)
He is an unduly deprecated author because, while a full-time practicing lawyer and responsible New York citizen, he has written a large number of novels dealing, as did much of Henry James and Edith Wharton, with the upper class, or at least the upper professional class, such as old Wall Street law firms. --David Riesman

Collected Stories (1994)

William H. McNEILL (b. 1917)

The Rise of the West (1963)

Walker PERCY (1916-1990) post

The Moviegoer (1961)
attempts to express modern philosophy through the literary form of the novel. --Thomas K. McCraw

Lost in the Cosmos (1983)
True therapy for the therapeutic age. --The Intercollegiate Review

Natalia GINZBURG (1916-1991)

Family Sayings (1967; Lessico famigliare, 1963)

Gavin EWART (1916-1995)

Selected Poems 1933-1993 (1996)

Giorgio BASSANI (1916-2000)

The Heron (1986)

Anne HEBERT (1916-2000)

Selected Poems (1987)

Judith WRIGHT (1915-2000) Koval

Selected Poems (1963)

Camilo Jose CELA (1916-2002) Wikipedia entry

Journey to the Alcarria (1948; Viaje a la Alcarria)
Cela called his book 'ancient' in the sense of the classical travel book--offering the truth, simplicity and straightforward description of the new and strange that one finds in the 'Travels of Marco Polo. --Philip Ward

The Hive (La Colmena 1951)

Orlando VILLAS Boas (1916-2002) and Claudio VILLAS Boas (1918-1998)

Xingu: the Indians, their Myths (1973)

Saul BELLOW (1915-2005) post
He was the Jewish Hogarth, excellent at capturing urban grotesques. --Joseph Epstein

The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
...a modern picaresque with scenes laid in Chicago, Mexico and Paris. --Clifton Fadiman

Seize the Day (1956)

Henderson the Rain King (1959)

Herzog (1964)
The position of the 43-year-old hero and title character of Saul Bellow's latest and best novel is absurd. Moses E. Herzog believes in reason, but is suffering from a protracted nervous crisis, following the collapse of his second marriage, that leads him to the brink of suicide. --Julian Moynahan
Moses Herzog is a forty-seven-year-old intellectual, a womanizer without being a libertine. He spends about a week in a crazy zigzag flight, searching for self-understanding, stability, comprehension of his country and his period. --Clifton Fadiman
Saul Bellow's novels lifted the veil that hides the dilemmas of modern man; the intellectual, the artist and the humanist. --Abraham Zaleznik

Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970)

Humboldt's Gift (1975)
The title derives from [protagonist Charlie] Citrine's friend Von Humboldt Fleischer whose sad life is said to be based on that of Delmore Schwartz, a remarkable poet and critic who died in sordid circumstances in 1966. --Clifton Fadiman

Arthur MILLER (1915-2005) Times Topics post

Death of a Salesman (1949)
The plays of Arthur Miller taught me about survival in a world that is for some tragic heroes a very unfriendly place. --Abraham Zaleznik

The Crucible (1953)
This play (on witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692) discusses freedom of conscience, and develops it so as to draw parallels with the 20th century (the play was produced shortly after the McCarthy scandal, in the early 1950s). --Raphael and McLeish

Dylan THOMAS (1914-1953) Ezard | Morris
He's exactly what I would have been if I had not become a Catholic. --Evelyn Waugh

Poems

Weldon KEES (1914-1955)

Collected Poems (1960)

Randall JARRELL (1914-1965) Wikipedia entry post

Poetry and the Age (1953)
The book for showing how 20th- century poets think, what their poetry does, and why it matters. --Christopher Caldwell

Pictures from an Institution: A Comedy (1954)

Complete Poems (1969)
an exceptionally warm-hearted poet, who occupies by temperament the ground between Whitman and Dickinson -- more like Whitman in form, but with Dickinson's sure touch in writing the perfectly natural line. --Raphael and McLeish

John BERRYMAN (1914-1972) Wikipedia entry Edward Hirsch review
Berryman is one of the giants of modern American poetry and--since his poetry is so personal--of the American soul. --Raphael and McLeish

Collected Poems 1937-1971 (1989)

also

Three Dream Songs The New York Review of Books (February 1, 1963)

Julio CORTAZAR (1914-1984)

Hopscotch (Rayuela, 1963)
could be said to represent the application of the principles of cubism to the novel. --Sven Birkerts

All Fires the Fire (Todos los fuegos el fuego, 1966)

Blow-up and Other Stories (1968)
Originally published as 'End of the Game and Other Stories' (1967)

Bernard MALAMUD (1914-1986) Wikipedia entry | Times Topics Daniel Stern interview | post

The Assistant (1957)
the petty criminal and drifter Frank Alpine, while doing penance behind the counter of a failing grocery store that he'd once helped to rob, has a 'terrifying insight' about himself: 'that all while he was acting like he wasn't, he was a man of stern morality'. --Philip Roth
The Jewish theme made over for inter-denominational consumption, is Malamud's specialty. --Raphael and McLeish

The Fixer (1966)

The Stories (1983)

John HERSEY (1914-1993)

A Bell for Adano (1944)

Hiroshima (1946)
Those who were talking about fighting and winning nuclear war clearly had not read Hersey. --Howard Hiatt

The Call (1985)

Ralph ELLISON (1914-1994) post

Invisible Man (1947) Chapter summary
...may be the the century's most translated, celebrated American novel. --Robert G. O'Meally
The reader who is familiar with the traumatic phase of the black man's rage in America will find something more in Mr. Ellison's report. He will find the long anguished step toward its mastery. The author sells no phony forgiveness. He asks for none himself. It is a resolutely honest, tormented, American book. --Wright Norris

Shadow and Act (1964)
Ellison stressed the the particularity of black experience but also the way it embodied the universality of mankind. --Archie C. Evers

Marguerite DURAS (1914-1996) post

The Lover (L'Amant, 1984)
It is not, as some reviewers have suggested, a straight-faced remake of Lolita. The bond between these lovers is more existential than erotic. Indeed, the obsessive intensity of their coupling hints, according to minimalist precepts of exclusion, at the pervasiveness of the despair. --Sven Birkerts

Four Novels (1994): The Square (1959; Le Square, 1955); Moderato Cantabile (1955, trans. 1977); 10:30 on a Summer Night (1961; Dix heures et demie du soir en ete, 1960); The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas (1964; L'apres-midi de M. Andesmas, 1960)

Octavio PAZ (1914-1998)
...[A]ccording to Paz, his entire creative career as a Latin literary giant grew out of the influences he underwent while living, at two different periods, in the United States. --Stephen Schwartz

The Labyrinth of Solitude (2nd ed., 1959)

Posdata (1970)

Configurations (1971)

The Collected Poems 1957-1987 (1987)

Patrick O'BRIAN (Richard Patrick Russ, 1914-2000) Wikipedia entry

Aubrey-Maturin series (Master and Commander, 1970-21 [U.S.] or The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey, 2004)
Jack and Stephen were--still are, of course--a wonderful pair. But so are many of the other persons in this great series of books. --Charles Van Doren

Albert CAMUS (1913-1960) Wikipedia entry | Paul M. Willenberg fan site post

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
It is the perfect book for a young, searching mind concerned with the problems of identity and the meaning of existence. --Orlando Patterson

The Stranger (L'Etranger 1942)
Because he does not pretend, he is a stranger whom no one understands, and he pays with his life for his affront to society. Since he refuses to play the game, he is isolated from his fellow-men to the point of incomprehensibility and isolated from himself to the point of becoming inarticulate. --Hannah Arendt
exemplifies the stoicism, bordering both existentialism and fatalism, which Camus advocated. An ordinary man commits a senseless murder, for which he is condemned. --Philip Ward
...Camus eliminated formal conditions of 'character' and, in Meursault, 'invented' a hero without heroic attributes or psychological coherence. --Raphael and McLeish

The Plague (La Peste 1947)
The Plague is parable and sermon, and should be considered as such. To criticize it by standards which apply to most fiction would be to risk condemning it for moralizing, which is exactly where it it strongest. --Stephen Spender
at one level describes a city infected with plague, but can also be read as an allegory of Europe under Hitler's occupation. --Philip Ward
...the apocalypse in Oran, foreshadowing the Algerian bloodbath. --Raphael and McLeish

The Rebel (L'Homme revolte 1951)

The Fall (La Chute 1956)
shows a marked ideological change. Beneath the irony and blasphemy, Camus is now pleading for recognition of our sinful nature and hope of Grace. --Philip Ward

Delmore SCHWARTZ (1913-1966)

Summer Knowledge: New and Selected Poems (1959)

Robert HAYDEN (1913-1980) Hirsch

Collected Poems (1984)

Barbara PYM (1913-1980)

Excellent Women (1952)

An Unsuitable Attachment (1982)

Salvador ESPRIU (1913-1985)

La Pell de Brau: Poems (1987)

Sandor WEORES (1913-1989)

Selected Poems (1970)

Robertson DAVIES (1913-1995) post

Deptford Trilogy: Fifth Business (1970); The Manticore (1972); World of Wonders (1975);

Cornish Trilogy: The Rebel Angels (1981); What's Bred in the Bone (1985); The Lyre of Orpheus (1988)

Aime CESAIRE (1913-2008) Wikipedia entry

Collected Poetry (1983)
Revolutionary Negro poetry of marvellous fineness and precision. --Raphael and McLeish

Claude SIMON (1913-2005)

The Wind (1959; Le Vent, 1957)

The Grass (1960; L'Herbe, 1958)

The Flanders Road (1961; La Route des Flandres, 1960)

R. S. THOMAS (Ronald Stuart Thomas 1913-2000)

Poems

Jean GARRIGUE (1912-1972)

Selected Poems (1992)

John CHEEVER (1912-1982) post

Bullet Park (1969)

Collected Stories (1978)
Evocative stories about quietly desperate New York commuters: wives meeting the train with a double Martini in the hand; children, all-knowing, concocting fiendish plots. --Raphael and McLeish

Nigel DENNIS (1912-1989)

Cards of Identity (1955)

Mary McCARTHY (1912-1989) Hilton Kramer review

The Groves of Academe (1952)

The Group (1963)
The a clef elements lend piquancy to the paying off of old scores among New York Trotskyites, intellectuals and climbers.--Raphael and McLeish

Lawrence DURRELL (1912-1990) International Lawrence Durrell Society post

Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953)

The Alexandria Quartet: Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), Clea (1960)
Gradiose composition, supposedly Einsteinian in its literary 'relativity' gaudy, often splendid style. --Raphael and McLeish

Patrick WHITE (1912-1990) Complete Review

Voss (1957)
The Australian novelist, with Voss--an account of a doomed explorer crossing the continent in the 1880s--his masterwork... . --Raphael and McLeish

Riders in the Chariot (1961)
...'Rider in the Chariot' -->attempts grandiloquently and majestically to grapple with anti-Semitism. --Raphael and McLeish

A Fringe of Leaves (1976)

Northrop FRYE (1912-1991) Northrop Frye Centre Marchand

Fables of Identity (1963)

Edmond JABES (1912-1991)

The Book of Questions (1976)

If There Were Anywhere But Desert (selected poems, 1988)

Eugene IONESCO (1912-1994) post
Surreal parody of drama itself; hilarious surface masks bleak philosophy... . --Raphael and McLeish

The Bald Soprano (La Cantatrice chauve, 1948)

The Chairs (Les Chaises, 1952)

The Lesson (La Lecon, 1951)

Victims of Duty (Victimes du devoir, 1953)

Amedee, or How to Get Rid of It (Amedee ou comment s'en debarrasser, 1954)

Rhinoceros (1959)

F. T. PRINCE (1912-2003)

Collected Poems 1935-1992 (1993)

Najib MAHFUZ (1912-2006) post

Midaq Alley (1947)

Miramar (1967)

Fountain and Tomb (1988)

Tillie OLSEN (1912-2007) Modern American Poetry

Tell Me a Riddle (1956-1960)

Flann O'BRIEN (Brian O'Nolan, 1911-1966)

The Dalkey Archive (1964)

The Third Policeman (1968)

Mervyn PEAKE (1911-1968)

The Gormenghast Trilogy: Titus Groan (1946); Gormenghast (1950); Titus Alone (1959)

Alves REDOL (1911-1969) Wikipedia entry

The Man with Seven Names (L. L. Barrett translation 1964, A barca dos sete lemes, 1959)
A neo-realist Portuguese novel of great length and detail, in which a poor man, Alcides, is changed by circumstances into a murderer. --Philip Ward

Elizabeth BISHOP (1911-1979) Dana Gioia essay
Bishop would have been distressed to see herself included in anthologies of women poets, let alone lesbian ones. Like any poet of real talent, she wanted her work to stand on its own merits. --Cynthia Haven

The Fish (1946)

Faustina: or Rock Roses (The Nation, Feb. 22, 1947)

Sestina (1956)

The Complete Poems (1983)
Throughtout her career Bishop aimed to bring morality and invention together in a single thought. --David Bromwich

One Art: Letters (1994) Elizabeth Spires review

Tennessee WILLIAMS (Thomas Lanier Williams, 1911-1983) post

The Glass Menagerie (1945)

A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
Set in the French quarter of New Orleans, with characters and dialogue as lush and exuberant as the place itself. --Raphael and McLeish

Summer and Smoke (1948)

Max FRISCH (1911-1991)

I'm Not Stiller (Stiller 1954)
Anatol Stiller could insist, against all evidence, that he was not the Stiller who had abandoned his wife. In the absence of a deeper contact with the self, a man is just what he tells and what he makes others believe. --Sven Birkerts

Andorra (1961)
attacks anti-Semitism, prejudice and complacency in society. --Philip Ward

Man in the Holocene (1979)
An old man is alone in his house in the mountains during a storm; he takes a foolhardy walk; he suffers bouts of memory loss. As he tacks up bits of information from the encyclopedia, we are given--once again in collage form--all manner of facts about the age of the earth, fossils, climate, evolution, geologic transformation. --Sven Birkerts

William GOLDING (1911-1993) Wikipedia entry | Official web site

Lord of the Flies (1954)
a devilish Coral Island: British prep school boys marooned on a desert island, a classic of malign vision by a Catholic apologist. --Raphael and McLeish
Golding pointed to a darkness of the soul buried within us... --Roderick MacFarquhar

Pincher Martin (1956)
a tour de force about a drowning sailor: melodramatic notions redeemed by fastidious imagination. --Raphael and McLeish

The Spire (1964)

Emile M. CIORAN (1911-1995) post

A Short History of Decay (1949)

The Temptation to Exist (1956)

The Fall into Time (1964)

The New Gods (1969)

Odysseas ELYTIS (1911-1996)

What I Love: Selected Poems (1986)

Faiz Ahmed FAIZ (1911-1984)

Poems

Czeslaw MILOSZ (1911-2004) Internet Poetry Archive Wikipedia entry Jeremy Driscoll essay | Hilton Kramer obituary | Leon Wieseltier obituary | Raymond H. Anderson obituary | Modris Eksteins review

The Captive Mind (Jane Zielonko translation; Zniewolony umysl 1953)
It's subject is the 'vulnerability', as Milosz called it, of the twentieth-century mind to seduction by sociopolitical doctrines and its readiness to accept totalitarian terror for the sake of a hypothetical future. --Charles Van Doren

Selected Poems: 1931-2004 (2006)

also

Distance First Things (November 2004)

Anatoli RYBAKOV (1911-1998)

Children of the Arbat (1987)

Virginia Woolf famously remarked that the world changed in or around 1910. --Michael Dirda

Wilfred THESIGER (1910-2003)

The Marsh Arabs (1964)

Miguel HERNANDEZ (1910-1942) Poetry in Translation | U Chicago Press

Selected Poems (2001)

Margaret Wise BROWN (1910-1952) Wikipedia entry | Amy Gary fan site

Goodnight Moon (1947)
It is the perfect 'bedtime story', although it is not a story at all. ... One by one the bunny says goodnight to all the things in his room, in his world. --Charles Van Doren

Charles OLSON (1910-1970) Electronic Poetry Center

The Maximus Poems (1983)

Collected Poems (1987)

Jose LEZAMA Lima (1910-1976)

Paradiso (1966)

Jacques MONOD (1910-1976)

Chance and Necessity (1971)

Jean GENET (1910-1986)

Our Lady of the Flowers (Notre Dame des Fleurs 1944)

The Thief's Journal (Journal du voleur 1949)

The Balcony (Le Balcon 1957)

Jean ANOUILH (1910-1987) Petri Liukkonen biography

Antigone (1944)

Eurydice (1942)

The Rehearsal (1961; La repetition ou l'amour puni 1950)

Becket, or The Honour of God (1960; Becket, ou l'honneur de Dieu 1959)

Subrahmanyan CHANDRASEKHAR (1910-1995)

An Introduction to the Study of Stellar Structure (1939)

Paul BOWLES (1910-1999)

The Sheltering Sky (1948)

Robert FITZGERALD (1910-1985)

Spring Shade: Poems 1931-1970 (1971)

Chaim GRADE (1910-1982)

The Yeshiva (1976-1977)

Wright MORRIS (1910-1998)

Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960)

Malcolm LOWRY (1909-1937)

Under the Volcano (1947)
It is perhaps the most single-mindedly intense novel ever written. ... The themes--if we imagine we are writing a book report--are themes of doom (private and collective), death, salvation versus damnation, Sin (capitalized), expulsion from Eden, and, in the last analysis, the wonder and mystery of all the above. --Sven Birkerts

Miklos RADNOTI (1909-1944)

Subway Stops (1978)

Forced March (1979)

James AGEE (1909-1955) I Hear America Singing | Perspectives in American Literature post

Permit Me Voyage (1934)

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941, with photographs by Walker EVANS)
Its descriptive power (three tenant families in Alabama, 1936) is unsurpassed in exhibiting 'the cruel radiance of what is'. --Richard R. Niebuhr

Merce RODOREDA (1909-1983)

The Time of the Doves (La placa del diamant 1962)

Yannis RITSOS (1909-1990) Wikipedia

Exile and Return: Selected Poems 1967-1974 (1985)

Wallace STEGNER (1909-1993) Times Topics

The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943)

Angle of Repose (1971)

Ernst Hans GOMBRICH (1909-2001) post

The Story of Art (1950)
[H]e made it a mission to put the study of art on a scientific footing. --The Economist
It is a work of deceptive simplicity, discussing artistic change not in terms of style but of the practical problems that artists faced and of the means that they adopted to solve them, and it is written with extreme clarity. --Charles Hope
a faultless exposition of the essentials of (mainly Western) art history by a Viennese whose grasp of psychology and music, classical scholarship and modern experimentation, is surely unrivalled. --Philip Ward

Art and Illusion (1961)
laid to rest the claim of Ruskin and later criticism that the best painters of nature had learned to look with an 'innocent eye', uncontaminated by concepts or knowledge. --James Ackerman

Eudora WELTY (1909-2001) Jay Tolson essay

The Robber Bridegroom (1942)

Delta Wedding (1946)
Decorous, scintillating portrayal of Mississippi aristocratic family in the 1920s. --Raphael and McLeish

The Ponder Heart (1954)

Thirteen Stories (1965)
These perfect gems evoke a particular Southern rural culture--the 'sense of place' that Welty has said is so important to her work--at the same time they reveal mythic, universal human themes and longings. --Elizabeth McKinsey

also

Peter F. DRUCKER (1909-2005) Harvard Business Review The Drucker Exchange weblog at The Drucker Institute post

The Concept of the Corporation (1945)

The Age of Discontinuity (1969)
Lucid discussion of the wider issues at the heart of the new economy: micro technology, industrial pluralism, mass leisure, the multinational economic state. --Raphael and McLeish

Rene DAUMAL (1908-1944)

Mount Analogue (Le mont analogue 1952)

Cesare PAVESE (1908-1950)

Hard Labor: Poems (Lavorare stanca 1936, 1943)

Dialogues with Lueco (Dialoghi con Leuco 1947)

Richard WRIGHT (1908-1960) Modern American Poetry post

Native Son (1940)
Mr. Wright's Bigger Thomas is far beyond and outside of helpful social agencies. He represents an impasse rather than a complex, and his tragedy is to be born into a black and immutable minority race, literally, in his own words, 'whipped before you born.' --Peter Monro Jack

Black Boy (1945)

Elio VITTORINI (1908-1966)

Women of Messina (Le donne de Messina 1949)

Joao GUIMARAES Rosa (1908-1967)

Sagarana (1946)

The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (1956)

Tommaso LANDOLFI (1908-1979)

Gogol's Wife and Other Stories (1963)

Theodore ROETHKE (1908-1983)

Collected Poems (1961)

Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1943-63 (1972)

Simone de BEAUVOIR (1908-1986)

The Second Sex (1953)
The main themes are introduced at once. Women throughout history have been a disadvantaged group like the proletariat. --Clyde Kluckhorn

Rene CHAR (1908-1988) Wikipedia

Selected Poems (1992)

Joseph MITCHELL (1908-1996) Emily d’Aulaire review

Up in the Old Hotel (1992) Christopher Carduff review

Leo ROSTEN (1908-1997) Wikipedia entry

The Education of Hyman Kaplan, by Leonard Q. Ross (1931)
Mr. Kaplan is in a class taught by a professor of English for students wishing to learn the language. He signs all his papers with the asterisks because, he says, the teacher will notice him better. He has no problem being noticed because he drives the teacher crazy with his sly comprehension of more than the teacher realizes. --Charles Van Doren

The Joys of Yiddish (1988)
it is one of the most expressive languages in the world and includes many typical gestures. --Charles Van Doren

Claude LEVI-STRAUSS (1908-2009) Times Topics post

A World on the Wane (John Russell translation 1961; Tristes Tropiques 1955)

Structural Anthropology (1963; Anthropologie structurale 1958)

The Savage Mind (1966; La Pensee sauvage 1962)

The Raw and the Cooked (1969; Le Cru et le cuit 1964; from Mythologiques I–IV)
His explanation of the 'reality' behind the mythology of primitive cultures, especially those of South America, created a revolution in the study of myths. --Raphael and McLeish

Jacques BARZUN (1907-2012) The Online Books Page Wikipedia entry Edward Rothstein obituary

Clio and the doctors: psycho-history, quanto-history, & history (1974)

Teacher in America (1945) Maxine McClintock essay

also

Berlioz and the Romantic Century (1950)
An important critic of 19th-century art in all its forms here concentrates on one of the great enigmatic composers of the last century. --Raphael and McLeish

Rachel CARSON (1907-1964)

The Sea Around Us (1951)

Silent Spring (1962)
For all the excesses of the environmental movement, the realization that human technology can permanently damage the earth's environment marked a great advance in civilization. --Michael Lind

Louis MACNEICE (1907-1963)

Collected Poems (1966)

Gunnar EKELOF (1907-1968)

Dikter (1965)

Diwan over Fursten av Emgion (1965; "Diwan on the King of Emgion")

Sagan om Fatumeh (1966; "The Tale of Fatumeh")

Guide to the Underworld (Vagvisare till underforden 1967)

Gunter EICH (1907-1972)

Pigeons and Moles: Selected Writings (1991)

W. H. AUDEN (Wystan Hugh Auden 1907-1973) The Academy of American Poets The W. H. Auden Society post

Musee des Beaux Arts (1938)

In Memory of W. B. Yeats (1939)

The Shield of Achilles (1955)
The shield of Achilles in Homer has emblazoned upon it the triumphs of the future. Auden, looking into the shield, sees the horrors of the modern state. --Karl Shapiro

The Dyer's Hand (1962)
his literary essays bring his expertise intelligently and practically to bear on other poets, from Shakespeare to Cavafy, and allows his unschematic wit to play ingeniously and informatively among the great and the fugitive. --Raphael and McLeish

Collected Poems (1991)
Into his intricate metaphysical verse he cunningly introduces the vernacular and creates the unique Auden poetic sentence. Thus his work is full of linguistic surprises, often turning on near-rhymes or odd alliterations. --Clifton Fadiman

Robert A. HEINLEIN (1907-1988) post

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966)

Alberto MORAVIA (1907-1990)

1934 (1982)

Maurice BLANCHOT (1907-2003) Norman Mararasz obituary

Thomas the Obscure (Thomas l'Obscur 1941)

T. H. WHITE (Terence Hanbury White, 1906-1964) Moulder and Schaefer fan site

The Once and Future King (1958)
Compendious (700-page) fantasy on the life of King Arthur. White's combination of slapstick and erudition is unique--as if Laurel and Hardy were set down in a Middle Ages exact to the last detail. --Raphael and McLeish

Michael INNES (J. I. M. Stewart 1906-1994)

Operation Pax also known as The Paper Thunderbolt (1951)

Dino BUZZATI (1906-1972)

The Tartar Steppe (1952; Il deserto dei Tratari 1945)
Giovanni Drogo is sent to the Bastiani Fortress, on the edge of the Tartar steppe, and he waits for the Tartar to attack. --Philip Ward

also

Dwight MACDONALD (1906-1982) The New York Review of Books Geoffrey Wheatcroft essay

Masscult and Midcult (Partisan Review, Spring 1960) American Studies at the University of Virginia [pdf] Scott McLemee review | Franklin Foer review | Jennifer Szalai review
also

By Cozzens Possessed: A Review of Reviews (Commentary, January 1958) John Derbyshire [pdf] Joseph Epstein review

William EMPSON (1906-1984) Wikipedia entry

Some Versions of Pastoral (1935)
Witty, difficult poems, full of dead-pan jokes and intellectual fireworks. --Raphael and McLeish

Milton's God (1961)

Collected Poems (1984)

Samuel BECKETT (1906-1989) The Samuel Beckett End Page Tim Parks review essay | post
with his effort to be an artist working ultimately with a silent mankind, because the 'silent God' has been used up... --Philip Rieff
He's telling us life is meaningless again. --Peter Mullen

Murphy (1938)

Molloy (1947)
The novel reduced to literature; the skeleton as flesh; the flesh made words; words in a state of decomposition. --Raphael and McLeish

Malone Dies (Malone meurt 1953)

The Unnamable (L'innommable 1953)

Watt (1953)

Waiting for Godot (1953; En attendant Godot 1948-1949)
Two tramps (play originally conceived for Laurel and Hardy in old age) wait by the roadside for Godot, whoever he may be. Their crosstalk, with interruption, is like a sketch from an existentialist, esoteric revue. --Raphael and McLeish

Endgame (1957; Fin de partie 1955-1957)

Krapp's Last Tape (1959)

How It Is (1961)

Henry ROTH (1906-1995) post

Call It Sleep (1934)
does tell, dramatically for all its mass of detail, the true story if not the real one, of a newborn personality struggling desperately to salvage a place for itself and its dream out of the welter and squalor of the 'melting pot'. --H. W. Boynton

R. K. NARAYAN (1906-2001) post

The English Teacher (1945)

The Guide (1958)

The Vendor of Sweets (1967)

Leopold Sedar SENGHOR (1906-2001)

Selected Poems (1977)

Jozsef ATTILA (1905-1937) Fan site

Works (1973)

Selected Poems and Texts (1973)

Perched on Nothing's Branch (1987)

John O'HARA (1905-1970) James Wolcott review

Appointment at Samarra (1934)
O'Hara's Middle-America became an imaginary province stocked with closely observed and remembered figures, a heartland lovingly overdrawn. --Raphael and McLeish

Butterfield 8 (1935)

Collected Stories (1985)
O'Hara's stories are legion, and despite the flaws and cheapness, provide a panoramic view of East Coast American society which is proving more and more truthful as the lid comes off the USA. --Raphael and McLeish

Henry GREEN (Henry Vincent Yorke 1905-1974) Brooke Allen review
Henry Green worked as a factory manager but was also an upper-class contemporary of the slightly envious Waugh; he wrote unpatronizingly tender, comic and economical studies of British life. --Raphael and McLeish

Party Going (1939)

Loving (1945)

Nothing (1950)

Jean-Paul SARTRE (1905-1980) The Online Books Page Wikipedia entry post
The Sartrian consciousness is solitary, self-translucid, and alienated in matter, and as a result of scarcity, each man becomes the enemy of every other. --Irving Louis Horowitz

Nausea (La Nausee, 1938) Sterf [pdf]
the semi-autobiographical hero Antoine Roquentin finds himself trapped in the viscosity of existence. The recognition of his own existence is a point of crisis in a man's life to which he must relate. --Philip Ward

Being and Nothingness (1943)
Dense terminological thickets alternate with vivid insights and penetrating descriptions of human folly and foibles. Impassioned, atheistic existentialism. --Raphael and McLeish
According to Sartre, all attempts to incorporate the other into my world as another subject, i.e. to apprehend him at once as an object for me and as a subject for whom I am an object, are unstable and doomed to collapse into one or the other of the two aspects. --Thomas Nagel

No Exit (Huis Clos, 1945) Evergreen Keefer workshop

Existentialism (L'Existentialisme est un humanisme 1946, translated by Bernard Frechtman)

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)
Existentialist biography of the criminal and playwright Jean Genet. Though long and analytico-rhetorical, it presents an interesting alternative to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of empirical biography. --Raphael and McLeish

Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960)
As with the 'Phenomenology' [of Hegel], everything is here, but now after we know we can know nothing in the way Marx and Freud wanted to know everything. --Duncan Kennedy

The Words (Les Mots, 1964)

The Family Idiot (L'Idiot de la famille, 1971–1972)

also

Existentialism and Human Emotions (Bernard Frechtman translation, 1957) Sterf [pdf] David Banach lecture

also

Kenneth REXROTH (1905-1982) Kenneth Rexroth Archive Morgan Gibson poem [pdf]

Classics Revisited (1968) Selections Table of Contents

More Classics Revisited (1989) Selections Table of Contents

Robert Penn WARREN (1905-1989) post

Understanding Poetry (1938, with Cleanth BROOKS)
textbook by two of the brightest lights of the most important literary group in America this century-the Vanderbilt agrarians --The Intercollegiate Review

All the King's Men (1946)
It's a novel principally concerned with individuals and their pasts; and it too reveals how history defines (and often burdens) us in dealing with the present. But it's also a novel about politics, and few works of literature convey as clearly the elemental forces that politics can at times unleash. --Alan Brinkley

World Enough and Time (1950)

Selected Poems

Anthony POWELL (1905-2000) Benjamin Schwarz review | Brooke Allen review
According to his memoirs, Powell rhymes with pole (not towel). --Wikipedia

A Dance to the Music of Time (12 vol., 1951-1975): A Question of Upbringing (1951)
Suggests that a life of reflection and observation is to be prized as much as a life of action and that life's meaning is to be found in the accumulation of small events and triumphs (often only dimly perceived) rather than in high moments of bombast and tangible riches. --James Hodgson

Pierre KLOSSOWSKI (1905-2001)

The Laws of Hospitality: The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1959); Roberte, ce soir (1954); Le Souffler (1960)

The Baphomet (1965)

Vladimir HOLAN (1905-1980)

Selected Poems (1971)

Ondra LYSOHORSKY (1905-1989)

Selected Poems (1971)
His native language is Lachian, and he has also written in German, but he has always been under considerable political pressure to write in Czech or Slovak, and it was as recently as 1958 that the first part of his collected poems appeared in Lachian, no further parts being allowed to appear, in the erroneous belief that Lysohorsky's aim was Lachian separatism. --Philip Ward

Eric Walter WHITE (1905-1985)

Stravinsky: The Composer and His Works (1966; revised 1985)
Admirable clarity; exhausting thoroughness; elegant, clear style. --Raphael and McLeish

Nancy MITFORD (1904-1973)

Madame de Pompadour (1954)

Pablo NERUDA (1904-1973) Wikipedia entry Lisa Gorton review | Tishani Doshi review | Stephen Schwartz review

Canto General (1950)
a more universal figure than either [Cervantes or Garcia Marquez] in his radical view of the task of Latin American artists and intellectuals. --Philip Ward

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1969; 20 Poemas de amor y Cancion desperada 1924)

Selected Poems (1994)

Fully Empowered (2001)

Residence on Earth/Residencia en la Tierra (2004)

Alejo CARPENTIER (1904-1980)

The Lost Steps (1953)

The Kingdom of This World (1957; El Reino de este Mundo 1949)

Explosion in a Cathedral (El siglo de las luces 1962)

Reasons of State (El Recurso del metodo 1974)

Isaac Bashevis SINGER (1904-1980) Wikipedia entry post
As someone in the business, I have more than once been asked who writing over the past fifty or so years is likely to be read a hundred years from now. The only name I can feel any confidence in putting forward is that of Isaac Bashevis Singer. --Joseph Epstein

Satan in Goray (1935)

The Family Moskat (1950)
deals, with Tolstoyan range and certainty, with a ghetto family and its slow disintegration and advance into (1939) modernity... . --Raphael and McLeish

Gimpel the Fool & Other Stories (1957)
Marvellous, timeless blend of medieval and modern imagination: the human condition defined and described by a master story-teller, delighted by the teeming detail which makes up a moment. --Raphael and McLeish

The Magician of Lublin (1960)
The Magician of Lublin and The Slave are less 'modern' in tone [than The Family Moskat], but are both specific in their Eastern European setting and 'mythic' in timeless morality. --Raphael and McLeish

In My Father's Court (1966)
A memoir of the author's childhood days in the home where his father, as rabbi, heard disputes and struggled for resolutions amid the daily lives of his community in Warsaw. The disputes become windows into the virtues and vices of individuals, the traumas solved by arbitrary rules, and the traumas created by them. --Martha Minow

The Manor (1967)

The Estate (1969)

A Crown of Feathers, and Other Stories (1974)

Collected Stories (1982)
He tells us that it is natural to be good, and unholy to go astray. It is the inhuman, the antihuman, forces that are to blame for harms and sorrows. --Cynthia Ozick

Christopher ISHERWOOD (1904-1986)

The Berlin Stories (1954)
Herr Issyvoo in his best 'I am a camera' phase; decay of a civilization (Germany under the Nazis) in the form of seemingly casual sketches of Berlin life. --Raphael and McLeish
The real human background of 'The Berlin Stories' is always Isherwood's own alienation from the England of the '20s and '30s, that slumbering pit in which Baldwin's pigs grunted in self-satisfaction and over which Chamberlain's umbrella rose like a forlorn tear. --Alfred Kazin

Christopher and His Kind (1977)

Salvador DALI (1904-1989) post

The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (3rd Ed., 1970)

B. F. SKINNER (1904-1990)

Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971)
Swallowing whole the superstitions of modern scientism, this psychologist was convinced that the human psyche was nothing but a superstition. --The Intercollegiate Review

Roy FULLER (1904-1991)

Collected Poems: 1936-1961 (1962)

New and Collected Poems: 1934-1984 (1985)

Graham GREENE (1904-1991) post

Brighton Rock (1938)

The Power and the Glory (1940)
a schematic masterpiece of a whisky priest in Mexico. --Raphael and McLeish

The Heart of the Matter (1948)

also

Clifton FADIMAN (1904-1999)

The Lifetime Reading Plan (1st edition 1960)

The Lifetime Reading Plan (New Revised [2nd] Edition 1978)
A hundred classics introduced in the informal and informative style that has been Fadiman's trademark as one of America's most respected bookpeople. --Steven Gilbar

The Lifetime Reading Plan (3rd edition 1988) Table of Contents

The New Lifetime Reading Plan (4th edition 1997, with John S. MAJOR) Table of Contents

Richard EBERHART (1904-2005) Sonia Scherr obituary

Collected Poems: 1930-1976 (1976)

Ernst MAYR (1904-2005) Steve Bradt obituary

Systematics and the Origin of Species from the Viewpoint of a Zoologist (1942)
By defining the biological species in strong, vital language and connecting the process of species formation to genetics, Mayr opened a large part of natural history to a more scientific form of analysis. --Edward O. Wilson

The Growth of Biological Thought (1982)
Mayr notes that biology, unlike physics, deals more often with qualitative categories, rather than coninua. Thus, biology is a unique science that is not easily reduced to physical concepts. --Jerome Kagan

Raymond RADIGUET (1903-1923)

Count d'Orgel's Ball (1924)

Nathanael WEST (1903-1940)

Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)
lampoons the bogus sympathy of newspapers for readers' agonies... . --Raphael and McLeish

A Cool Million (1934)

The Day of the Locust (1939)
...'The Day of the Locusts' depicts Hollywood as a sumptuous hell. --Raphael and McLeish

George ORWELL (Eric Blair 1903-1950) Wikipedia entry | The Orwell Prize | Rob Pengelly fan site | O. Dag fan site post
Impossible to think of contemporary England producing a figure anything like George Orwell, whose authority came from his moral earnestness, and not from the pose of superior with-it-try. --Joseph Epstein

Burmese Days (1934)

Animal Farm (1945) Literature Network
denounced by pro-Soviets in 1944, rejected by publisher Gollancz, is a Swiftian fable of the Russian Revolution and its perversions. --Raphael and McLeish
The animals on a farm revolt and take over a farm; they will now run it for their own good and according to their own lights, not those of the farmer. ... Subtle changes occur, and heartless cruelties masked by sententious rhetoric from the pigs ... --Charles Van Doren
He is questioning the whole notion of the ordered state, perhaps questioning the value of any revolution that sets the ordered state as its goal. --Clifton Fadiman

Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) Literature Network
...democracy and freedom could disappear from the world, to be replaced by a subtly all-pervasive tyranny in which Big Brother watches everyone all the time ... --Charles Van Doren
To Huxley's vision of a dehumanized future Orwell adds new dimensions of terror and torture; and of course terror and torture are now prominent features of our world's political landscape. --Clifton Fadiman
a vision of a totalitarian hell, created in this century by people who spoke publicly of their commitment to the improvement of human life. --D. Quinn Mills

Homage to Catalonia (1952)
The savagely incisive song of a great writer's disillusionment with the bloody inhumanity of the Left. --The Intercollegiate Review

Collected Essays (1968-1970) University of Adelaide Wikipedia
Orwell has always been more valued by people in the know for his essays than for his immensely popular Cold War books, but the question is, will there be a big enough contingent of people in the know to continue to value him at his best. --Joseph Epstein
Every conservative's favorite liberal and every liberal's favorite conservative. This book has no enemies. --Florence King

Sadegh HEDAYAT (1903-1951) The Online Books Page Wikipedia entry | Farzin Yazdanfar fan site

The Blind Owl (1937)
naturalized existentialism into Iran. --Philip Ward

Johann VON NEUMANN (1903-1957) History of Ecomonic Thought | Introduction to Buddhism

Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik 1932)

The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944, with O. MORGENSTERN, 1902-1976)
The first really profound mathematical treatise written about a subject at the crossroads of economics, sociology and psychology. --Howard Raiffa

Frank O'CONNOR (1903-1966)

Collected Stories (1981)

Evelyn WAUGH (1903-1966) post

Vile Bodies (1930)
Wodehouse's irrepressibly cheerful Noel Coward fox-trot had turned into Havel's 'La Valse' under Waugh's manic baton. --William Alfred

A Handful of Dust (1934)
Waugh's pre-war novels are ruthless romps... . --Raphael and McLeish

Scoop (1938)

Put Out More Flags (1942)

Brideshead Revisited (1945)
What he is saying in effect is that faith is a saving answer to anyone who has it or has had it, which could scarcely be called propaganda, though he will surely be charged with propaganda. --John K. Hutchens

The Loved One (1948)

Jean FOLLAIN (1903-1977)

Transparencies of the World: Poems (1969)

Marguerite YOURCENAR (1903-1987) Petri Liukkonen biography

Coup de Grace (Le coup de grace 1939)

Memoirs of Hadrian (Memoires d'Hadrien 1951)
the narrative, at once intimate and austere, reconstitutes with its burnished images the empire of second-century Rome. --Sven Birkerts

Alan PATON (1903-1988)

Cry, the Beloved Country (1948)

Steven RUNCIMAN (1903-2000)

A History of the Crusades (3 vol. 1951-1954)
One of the best, most thrilling historical books of the 20th century, engrossing for specialists, accessible for all. --Raphael and McLeish

Witold GOMBROWICZ (1904-1969)

Ferdydurke (1937)

Cosmos (Kosmos 1965)

Pornografia (1966)

also

Robert B. DOWNS (1903-1991) New York Times obituary

Famous Books Since 1492 or Molders of the Modern Mind (1961)

Famous Books, Ancient and Medieval (1964)

Luis CERNUDA (1902-1963)

Selected Poems (1977)

Nazim HIKMET (1902-1963)

Secilmis Siirler (1954) ["Selected Poems"]

Langston HUGHES (1902-1967) Gary Younge essay

The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921)

The Big Sea (1940)

"Harlem" in Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)

I Wonder as I Wander (1958)

Selected Poems (1995)

John STEINBECK (1902-1968) Anne Haas essay | Christopher Flannery review

Of Mice and Men (1937)

The Grapes of Wrath (1939) Keith Windschuttle review
It is a very long novel, the longest Steinbeck has written, and yet it reads as if it had been composed in a flash, ripped off the typewriter and delivered to the public as an ultimatum. --Peter Monro Jack

Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962)

Stevie SMITH (1902-1971)

Collected Poems (1975)

Gyula ILLYES (1902-1983) A Sentence About Tyranny eNotes Internet Movie Data Base

A Tribute to Byula Illyes (1968)

Christina STEAD (1902-1983) Brooke Allen review

The Man Who Loved Children (1940)

G. G. SIMPSON (George Gaylord Simpson 1902-1984) Lefalophodon

Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944)

Fernand BRAUDEL (1902-1985)

The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (La Mediterranee et le Monde Mediterraneen a l'epoque de Philippe II 1949) (rev'd ed., 1959)
defines a region ecologically (from the southern limits of the date palm to the northern limits of the olive tree) and culturally (from the Arab east and south to the Catholic north and west), demonstrating in intricate detail the complex and fragile interaction of physical environment and human effort in one moment of time past. --John R. Stilgoe

Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Centuries (1979, Civilisation materielle, economie et capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe siecle 1967, 1979)
...Braudel uses paintings, literature and other surprising sources in a remarkable evocation of day-to-day life in the formative period of modern society. --Jeffrey Sachs

On History (1980, Ecrits sur l'Histoire 1969)

Carlos DRUMMOND de Andrade (1902-1987)

Traveling in the Family (1986)

Nicolas GUILLEN (Nicolas Cristobal Guillen Batista 1902-1987)

Man-Making Words: Selected Poems (1972)

Kay BOYLE (1902-1992)

Three Short Novels (1958): The Crazy Hunter; The Bridegroom's Body; Decision

Karl POPPER (1902-1994) post

The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959; Logik der Forschung 1935)
The translation contained new material, including numerous footnote references to work that had appeared in the intervening years, and though these were carefully asterisked, it still required no small amount of labor to separate out the old from the new. --Bruce Caldwell, Recovering Popper For the Left, Critical Review, Vol. 17 Nos. 1-2, p. 50
Pseudosciences are confirmed by almost everything and proved false by almost nothing. Genuine sciences, on the other hand, court refutation. So the mark of a genuinely scientific theory is what Popper calls falsifiability. --Jeffrey L. Kasser

also

The Open Society and its Enemies (1950)
An open society is characterized for Popper not just by the freedom of individuals to voice criticisms of government policies, but by the effectiveness of such criticism. A society is open if those in power welcome criticism and respond to it (though, of course, they're not obligated to respond exactly as the critics would like.) --Jeffrey L. Kasser
The best work on political philosophy in the 20th century. Exposes totalitarianism's roots in Plato, Hegel, and Marx. --Arthur Herman

Eugen WIGNER (1902-1995) Biographical Memoir

Group Theory and Its Application to the Quantum Mechanics of Atomic Spectra (Gruppentheorie und ihre Andendung auf die Quantenmechanik der Atomspektren 1931)

Rafael ALBERTI (1902-2000)

The Owl's Insomnia: Poems (1982)

Mortimer J. ADLER (1902-2001) Western Theism Wikipedia entry | Center for the Study of The Great Ideas | The Mortimer J. Adler Archive | David Levine caricature | Time cover post
The main controversial issue, the English-speaking philosophical environment being what it is, is Adler's insistence that philosophy cannot be simply a second-order, critical or analytic activity... . It must be a first-order discipline with a subject matter of its own. --Anthony Quinton

Scholasticism and Politics (with Jacques Maritain 1940)

Syntopicon to Great Books of the Western World (1952; 2nd ed. 1990)
would in not be possible, asked Adler, to read all these books and identify their individual discussions of shared notions or ideas? The result would be a kind of index of thought, a map of the great ideas that Western men and women have been thinking and arguing about for three millenia. --Charles Van Doren

also

How to Read a Book: The art of getting a liberal education (1940)

How to Read a Book (Revised and Updated Edition 1972, with Charles Van Doren) Video Appendix A: A recommended reading list
it remedies, as well as it can, a defect in the earlier version, an inability to suggest rules for reading imaginative literature comparable to those given for philosopy and the sciences. --Clifton Fadiman

The Conditions of Philosophy (1965)
holds ... that most 'modern'philosophy (i.e. post-Cartesian) is of little worth. ... it redresses the bias toward relentless modernity in other authors and critics. --Raphael and McLeish

Great Treasury of Western Thought (1977 editor, with Charles Van Doren) Contents
Massive collection of classic quotations from leading authors and thinkers of the Western tradition. --Raphael and McLeish

Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind (1988)

A. D. HOPE (1902-2000)

Collected Poems: 1930-1970 (1972)

Whittaker CHAMBERS (1901-1961) Wikipedia entry Robert G. Whalen article

Witness (1952)

also

Big Sister Is Watching You National Review (December 28, 1957)

Salvatore QUASIMODO (1901-1968) Petri Liukkonen biography

Selected Writings (1960)

Nemeth LASZLO (1901-1975)

Guilt (1966)

Werner HEISENBERG (1901-1976) post
The Uncertainty Principle, the bedrock of quantum theory, implies that even if one had all the information there is to be had about a physical system, its future behavior cannot be predicted exactly, only probabilistically. --Stephen M. Barr
Is the world strictly determinant at the micro level as well as at the macro level? Heisenberg is saying no. --James Hall

The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory (1930)
highly valued in its own time as a presentation of the current state of quantum theory by one of the great architects of its latest, most successful version. --Gerald Holton and Katherine Sopka

Philosophical Problems of Nuclear Science (1952)

Physics and Philosophy (1962)

Physics and Beyond (1971)
Thoughtful, penetrating, revealing of the man, also important for its insights into the history of physics in the 20th century. --Raphael and McLeish

Andre MALRAUX (1901-1976) John Sturrock review

The Conquerors (1928; Les Conquérants 1928)

The Royal Way or The Way of the Kings (1930; La Voie royale 1930)

Man's Fate (1934; La Condition humaine 1933)
Like all writers, he gilded the occasion; but the collapse of the Chinese Empire, the triumph of the Kuomintang and the savage repression of Communist allies in Shanghai in 1927 are all marvelously realized, sentimental callousness notwithstanding. --Raphael and McLeish

Man's Hope (1938; L'Espoir 1937)

The Voices of Silence (1953; Les Voix du silence 1951)

Margaret MEAD (1901-1978) Centennial

Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)
The not-so-hidden agenda of Coming of Age in Samoa is less sexual liberation per se than a broader ideal that Mead calls 'education for choice.' --Christopher Shannon
So amusing did the natives find the white woman's prurient questions that they told her the wildest tales-and she believed them! --The Intercollegiate Review

Jaroslav SEIFERT (1901-1986) Nobel Prize

The Plague Column (1979)

An Umbrella from Piccadilly (1981)

Selected Poetry (1986)

Francis PONGE (1901-1989) Francois Almaleh essay

Things: Selected Writings (1986; Things 1971)

C. L. R. JAMES (1901-1989) The C.L.R. James Institute

The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938)

The Future in the Present (1979)

Michel LEIRIS (1901-1990) Kicking Giants biography

Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility (1992)

African Art (1966, with Jacqueline DELANGE 1923-1991) National Gallery of Canada biography

Linus PAULING (1901-1994) Linus Pauling Institute post

Introduction to Quantum Mechanics: with Application to Chemistry (1935, with E. Bright WILSON (1908-1992)

The Nature of the Chemical Bond, and the Structure of Molecules and Crystals: An Introduction to Modern Structural Chemistry (1939)

also

Carl BARKS (1901-2000) Wikipedia | Fan Club The Ultimate Barks Collector

Duck Stories (1942-1990) Beru's Disney Comics Fan Page

The theme of twentieth-century philosophy was human limits, with the limits posed by language as the biggest of all. --Boris Maizel

W. H. Auden remarked that one could not expect to be a major poet if one were born after the 1890s (he was himself born in 1907), and he may have been right. --Joseph Epstein

\/ 1876-1900 | 1926 on /\

Revised January 20, 2013.

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