Arthur Miller (1915- ) has lived long enough to have seen his reputation as a playwright evolve from angry young radical to revered elder statesmen. His great talent has been to combine in his plays an intense dramatic focus on the travails of individual characters with an overarching social conscience expressed in the trajec- tory of the play as a whole. Read both of Millers most famous plays:
Toni Morrison (1931- ), the 1993 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is the most famous of a group of Black women writers whose work has enriched the literature of late twentieth-century America. Her novйis are noteworthy for the poetic lyricism of their language, their sensitive but by no means uncritical analysis of the dynamics of Black culture, particularly with regard to the position of women, and for her ability to draw on the rich wellsprings of Black folklore and oral literature to illuminate contemporary themes. I recommend particularly
Iris Murdoch (1919- ) combined a career as a lecturer in philoso- phy at Oxford University with a second career as a prolific and popular novelist. Her novйis, of which I recommend that you read at least
Robert Musil (1880-1942) was educated in Berlin and served in the Austrian army during World War I. He supported himself as a journalist while pouring his entire literary energy into his master- piece,
Flannery 0'Connor (1925-1964), like Carson McCullers a writer whose work reflects a distinctive Southern sensibility, was a modern master of the short-story form. Her stories typically are set in the rural South, and most often deal with characters deeply involved with, or trying to escape from the grasp of, the powerful and sometimes corrosive evangelical religious life of that milieu. She
was a prolific, though tragically short-lived, writer; you will want to read widely in her posthumously collected
John 0'Hara (1905-1970) was esteemed during his lifetime as the equal of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but his reputation virtually col- lapsed after his death. His novйis and short stories, regarded in recent years as mere potboilers and period pieces, are ripe for redis- covery. Try
(1985).
Josй Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) was a philosopher and humanist whose social criticism was highly admired in his native Spain and beyond. His most influential work,