The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951). Not many people get to add a word to our language, but Lewis did just that with "Babbittry," shorthand for mindless middle-class conformity and timidity. The word comes, of course, from his 1922 novel Babbitt, one of a string of bestsellers in the 1920s that at least for that decade made him perhaps Amйricas most popular and successful author. His work bears the strong stamp of both his literary style and his personality; the novйis and short stories have memorable characters, compelling plots, and a strong element of social criticism. In addition to Babbitt, try Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and Dodsworth (1929).

David Lodge (1935), an English novelist and critic, is much loved by a smallish circle of readers in America; he deserves to be far bet- ter known. His work is distinguished equally by penetrating psycho- logical insight and superb literary craftsmanship. His novйis Changing Places (1975) and Small World (1984) rank with, and per­haps surpass, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim as the funniest satires of academic life in modern times.

Norman Mailer (1923- ) has spent much of his unruly life trying to live up to the machismo of his prose. He is sometimes dismissed as a braggart, and is much excoriated by feminist critics for his

aggressive masculinity both in real life and on the printed page. Nevertheless, his finest books—both of fiction and of nonfiction, such as The Naked and the Dead (1948), The Armies of the Night (1968), and The Executioners Song (1979)—are beautifully crafted works noteworthy for their almost tenderly sympathetic (though not sentimental) point of view. Like Hemingway, he is a master of con- veying the plight of men operating under extreme circumstances.

Andrй Malraux (1901-1976) during his lifetime enjoyed a larger- than-life reputation as a writer, archaeologist, art historian, Republican volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, and Resistance fighter; he was for ten years Minister of Culture under Charles DeGaulle. Posthumous revelations suggest that his reputation was based in part on self-promoting exaggerations; but his written work endures. Maris Fate (1933), his finest novel, is a grim and dark-hued exploration of conflict between Chinese Communists and Nationalists in Shanghai in the late 1920s; more than half a century later it still brings chills to one's spine.

Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) was a novelist, memoirist, and critic whose work employed irony, satire and humor to comment on the position of women in American society, and whose biting, some­times scathingly unkind (and often untrue) portraits of lightly fic- tionalized real people made her feared by her friends and enemies alike. Her best-known novel, The Group (1963), follows eight women of the Vassar class of 1933 for several years after their grad- uation, while they gradually shed their collegiate hopes, idealism, and naivetй.

Carson McCullers (1917-1967) was one of a number of twenti- eth-century American writers whose work is an argument for the reality of a distinctive Southern sensibility. Her books tend to be peopled with lonely, misunderstood people trapped in a society haunted by the past and ill-adapted to the present; the surprising thing is that she was able to pursue such themes while being neither maudlin nor melodramatic. Her best-known book is The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), about the intertwined lives of five people in a small town in Geуrgia.

Margaret Mead (1901-1978) achieved instant celebrity as a young anthropologist when she returned from her first field research expedition and published Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), in which she suggested that Samoan young women, unlike American adolescents, enjoyed guilt-free casual sex and grew up to be well- adjusted adults as a result. Mead later pursued fieldwork in New Guinea, Bali, and elsewhere, and became a sort of grand old wise- woman of American anthropology. Although her early methodology has been criticized and her conclusions called into question, her books remain worth reading as emblems of a twentieth-century rev- olution in attitudes toward non-Western peoples, and toward adoles- cence, gender, and sex in our own society.