The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Margaret Atwood (1939- ) shares with Robertson Davies the reputation of being modern Canadas foremost writer. An articulate and persuasive feminist, she is a prolific and versatile writer, the author of poetry, short stories, and essays as well as novйis. Start by reading The Handmaid's Tale, her best-known work; you will find yourself wanting to devour the rest of her books as well.

Louis Auchincloss (1917- ), like Edith Wharton a descendant of the old New York WASP aristocracy, portrays the manners, customs, and moral conflicts of his tribe with a deft pen and an insiders eye. He is a lawyer, and the leading characters of many of his novйis inhabit the upper reaches of the legal and corporate worlds. Most people regard The Rector of Justin (1964) as his finest novel; try also his wonderfully focused short stories (Collected Stories, 1994).

James Baldwin (1924-1987) was torn between the legacy of a Harlem childhood of poverty, racial oppression, and religious inspi- ration, and the reality of an adult life as a gay Black intellectual liv­ing in Greenwich Village and France. His novel Giovanms Room (1956) addresses the issues of exile and conflicted homosexuality; in The Fire Next Time (1963) Baldwin produced a powerful meditation on Black identity, the Civil Rights Movement, and the temptation of Black separatism. Both the agony of his conflicted personality and the power of his commitment to racial justice continue to resonate in his work.

John Barth (1930- ) was born and raised in the Tidewater country of Maryland, and his native region is in effect the principal character of ali of his work. His very distinctive writing style is often quirkily humorous, erotically charged, and sardonic in tone. His best known work, The Sot-weed Factor (1960), is a burlesque "history" of the Chesapeake Bay region in colonial times; his beautifully realized short stories (Tidewater Tales, 1987, for example) tend to be more sober in tone.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) met Jean-Paul Sartre in 1929, and the two soon became lifelong companions. Perhaps influenced in part by her own struggle for independence and autonomy in the face of Sartre's powerful and autocratic personality, de Beauvoir became an articulate and influential feminist thinker. The Second Sex is by far the most famous of her many books; in it she calls for an end to the patriarchal systems—and the feminine accommodations to them—that have kept women in a secondary and subservient position since time immemorial.

Paul Bowles (1910- ) has expressed a wish to be remembered primarily as a composer, and his music is highly esteemed; still for the moment most people probably think of him first as a writer. Born in America, he spent much of his young adulthood in Europe and has lived mostly in Morocco for the past fifty years. He writes marvelously crafted travei essays and short stories; by far his best- known literary work is The Sheltering Sky (1948), a horrifying tale of an American couple traveling in Morocco who become caught in a web of fear and sexual obsession.

Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) was a leading member of the French Annales school of historians, the followers of which attempted to get beyond the mere events ("ephemera") of history to achieve an understanding of the "deep structure" of the past. BraudePs The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1945) perfectly exemplifies the Annales approach at its best, with the structure of history delineated through "thick description" of the past and through attention to such factors as geography, ecology, economics, and social and religious movements. The aims of these historians might sound ponderous, but in Braudel's hands the results are not; this is both an intellectually challenging and highly readable book.

Berthold Brecht (1898-1956) was a poet and playwright whose early work showed the influence of the German Expressionist move- ment of the 1920s. He became a Marxist and developed a theory of "epic theater," in which plays would be objectified by abandoning the illusion of realism (by such techniques as having the players directly address the audience). Of his many plays, try reading Mother C our age, The Good Woman of Szechuan, and The Caucasian Chalk

Circle; attend performances of, or listen to recordings of, his collabo- rations with composer Kurt Weill, The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fali of the City of Mahagonny.