The New Lifetime Reading Plan

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: Death of a Salesman (1949), in which Millers finest character, the salesman Willie Loman, uses a tenuous hold on personal pride and self-esteem to forestall realization of the deep inconsequentiality of his life, and The Crucible (1953), a dramatization of the witch trials of seventeenth-century Salem, but inevitably also an allegory for the political witch hunts of our own mid-century.

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 Song of Solomon (1977) and Jazz (1992).

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 A Severed Head (1961) and Sandcastle (1978), are distin- guished, not surprisingly, by a highly literate style and a general air of erudition; at the same time they are strongly plotted and highly entertaining to read.

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, The Man Without Qualities (unfinished in three volumes, 1933-43; ^see ^e new translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike, 1995). A wide-ranging, psychologically astute panorama of life in the fin-de-siиcle Austro-Hungarian Empire, even in its unfinished state it is regarded as one of the landmarks of modern European lit­erature.

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 Complete Stories (1971).

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 Appointment at Samarra (1934), the story of the decline and fali of a small-town leading citizen, and Butterfield 8 (1935), a sensitive and subtle portrait of a woman who uses sex to get what she wants (it was considered very scandalous when it was first pub­lished). And don't overlook 0'Hara's excellent Collected Stories

(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, The Revolt of the Masses (1929), is now no longer very widely read, but deserves not to be forgotten altogether. In it, Ortega denounced the post-WWI society that had emerged in Europe in the 1920s for its shallowness and vacuity; the economic collapse of that society in the Great Depression and the emergence of fascism made Ortega s critique look, in retrospect, powerfully prophetic.