The New Lifetime Reading Plan

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1886-1940) came from the Midwest and attended college at Princeton, the formative experience of his life. There he found social success and a clear literary vocation that led in the 1920s to three of his most successful and enduring works: This Side of Paradise (1920), Tender Is the Night (1924), and The Great Gatsby (1925)—the latter perhaps the quintessential American short novel. His flame burned brightly, but not for long; by the 1930s his life had begun to be ruined by alcoholism, feckless- ness, and a (realistic) sense that he would never again equal his early work.

Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939). Ford's greatest contribution to modern literature probably came from his tireless (and often unre- quited) championing of other modern writers. As editor of the short-lived Transatlantic Review in the mid-twenties, for example, he published work by Hemingway, Joyce, Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others of their rank. His own work has gone through a long period of disesteem but may be poised for a criticai re-evaluation. See for yourself. His best-known novel, and the best place to start reading his work, is The Good Soldier (1915).

William Gaddis (1922- ) is a controversial figure in American lit­erature, much admired by many other writers and perhaps the most influential little-known writer of our time. His works are long and knotty, filled with protracted sentences and a sometimes Joycean opacity of language (opacity, that is, that can become transparent upon repeated reading and reflection). He publishes infrequently; try his first two novйis, The Recognitions (1955) and J.R. (1975), both of which dissect the evils and banalities of modern America.

Federico Garcнa Lorca (1898-1936) was the foremost Spanish poet of the early twentieth century; his verse, obsessed with violence and death, has lost none of the emotional power and technical bril- liance that brought the poet fame during his own lifetime. An artist of formidable power and creative range, Garcнa Lorca was a drama­tist as well as a poet, and was intensely interested in Spanish music—many of his poems are in the form of songs. He himself came to a tragically violent end when he was murdered by Nationalist troops during the Spanish Civil War. Of his Collected Poems (1991), be sure to read some of his "Gypsy Ballads," and his masterpiece, the "Lament for Ignacio Sбnchez Mejнas," mourning the death of a bullfighter.

William Golding (1911-1993) wrote many novйis in the course of his career, most of them extended parables—often set in the past or in exotic situations—on the human condition. He is remembered above ali for his first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), a tale of a group of schoolboys marooned on a small tropical island who estab- lish, on their own, a bizarre and savage society. We recommend also The Spire (1964), a gripping psychological study of a medieval clergyman's obsessive determination to build a new spire on his cathedral.

Robert Graves (1895-1985) saw himself primarily as a poet and a classicist, though most readers probably remember him most vividly as the author of novйis set in classical antiquity. Of those, I Claudius (1934) is most famous, perhaps more from the extremely successful BBC television adaptation than from the book itself. But the book deserves to be read, whether youve seen the TV series or not; it is a wholly convincing first-person narrative that makes imperial Rome come alive again in one's imagination. To encounter Graves in a very different mood, read his grim and bitter memoir of World War I, Good-Bye to Ali That (1929).

Graham Greene (1904-1991) was an extremely prolific writer and a gifted storyteller. It would be easy to see him simply as the author of genre novйis (Greene called them "entertainments"); many of his works, such as Stamboul Train (1932), The Ministry ofFear (1943), and The Зuiet American (1955), can be read with pleasure purely as thrillers. But like John LeCarrй, whose work he greatly influenced, Greene invested his books with moral dilemmas that give them a seriousness lacking in most genre books. Greene was a convert to Catholicism, and his religious convictions—and doubts—emerge in his most serious fiction, such as The Heart of the Matter {1948).