The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Jaroslav Hasкk (1883-1923) served as a soldier in the Austro- Hungarian Army during World War I, was taken prisoner by the Russians, and outlived the end of the war by only four years. That was long enough for him to write four volumes (of a planned six) of The Good Soldier Schweik (1920-23), a landmark of modern Czech literature and one of the funniest antiwar novйis in any language. Hasкk's naive and hapless hero Schweik bumbles his way through the war, to the rage and despair of his pompous, mentally fossilized officers, but always manages to escape from his predicaments unscathed.

Joseph Heller (1923- ) served as a bombardier in American air force raids over Germany during World War II, an experience that inspired his 1961 novel, Catch-22_y which was both a popular success and an icon of the Sixties' antiwar movement. Like Hasкk, Heller portrays canny enlisted men and demented officers, but Hellers wartime world is a dark, grim place, where Yossarian, the novel's hero, must plot ceaselessly to stay alive. Heller gave us not only a fine novel but an enduring slang phrase. (Catch-22: If you keep fly- ing combat missions you're insane, but if you're sane enough to request to be relieved of combat duty on grounds of insanity you're not insane enough to be relieved; thus, any bad situation for which there is no solution that is not logically self-contradictory.)

John Hersey (1914-1993) was born in China of missionary par- ents; the milieu of his youth informed his semiautobiographical novel The Call (1985). His two best-known works are both fictional- ized treatments of actual events during the Second World War: A Bell for Adano (1944), set in Sicily, and, especially, Hiroshima (1946, first published as the sole editorial content of an entire issue of The New Yorker), a narrative of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima based on the testimony of survivors. It has, in my view, never been sur- passed as an account of that historically transformative event.

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) is the great poet of the Black experience in America, as influential a voice in this country as Leopold Sйdar Senghors has been in Бfrica. Self-taught as a poet, Hughes first came to public notice with his long free-verse poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers (1921). He traveled widely in Europe and Бfrica, and lived in several American cities, but came to be identified particularly with Harlem, the subject of his most famous short poem ("Harlem," in Montage of a Dream Deferred, 1951). He was considered a fiery political radical during his lifetime, but his work—angry yet never undisciplined—was characterized by a kind of classicism. Read widely in his Collected Poems (1995).

John Irving (1942- ) has written a number of novйis, but his repu- tation for the moment mostly rests on The World According to Garp (1978). Hailed as a breakthrough novel when it was published, Garp has become a sort of "cult classic" book since then, particularly among college-age readers. It presents a wry and gallows-humor funny look at the state of the world through the eyes of a novelist, T.S. Garp; it has the vivid writing and strong, idiosyncratic charac­ters that exemplify Irving's work at its best.

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) lived in Berlin during the decadent waning years of the Weimar Republic. His reputation rests primarily on the story "Good-Bye to Berlin" and other fictional treatments of his experiences that he published in the late 1930s, later collected in The Berlin Stories (1954). After World War II he lived in Califуrnia, writing mainly film scripts and pursuing an inter­est in Indian philosophy. He produced, late in life, another cele- brated book, the memoir Chistopher and His Kind (1977), a candid and graceful account of his homosexual life in the era before gay lib­eration.

James Jones (1921-1977) was on the whole a very minor modern novelist, except that he produced one spectacular book: From Here to Eternity (1951). Set in Pearl Harbor before and immediately after the Japanese attack that brought the United States into World War II, the book chronicles the life of a gifted and charismatic service- man in an army that (like ali armies) preferred that its soldiers be conventional, obedient, and interchangeable. Published when the patriotic fervor of the war had mostly disappeared, the book was perfectly in tune with its time; it has worn well, and it still has a powerful impact today.