The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) grew up in an orthodox Jewish family and community in Poland, the scion of a long line of Hassidic rabbis, and spent much of his life preserving in Yiddish prose the memory of a community and way of life that was wiped out by the Holocaust. He was established as a writer even before emigrating to America in 1935, and thereafter assumed a role as a leading member of New York's Jewish literary intelligentsia. He continued to write in Yiddish (and took an active role in translating his work into English), finding that language a perfect vehicle for his wry, ironical attitude toward his own characters, and for conveying the air of Jewish folklore and occultism that pervades much of his work. He was a prolific writer; I suggest you start with Gimpel the Fool т- Other Stories (1957) and The Magician ofLublin (1960).

Wole Soyinka (1934- ) is one of the leading figures of modern African literature. Born in Nigйria and educated in England, for years he successfully negotiated the hazards of being an intellectual in modern Nigйria, where he held various editorial and academic posts before going into exile in 1994. A writer of extraordinary versa- tility, he has published poetry, criticism, essays, novйis, and plays; he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. His best novel is The Interpreters (1965), about a group of young intellectuals in newly independent Nigйria. Of his plays, I particularly recommend Death and the King's Horsemen.

Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) is deservedly regarded as the author of some of our finest literary accounts of the American West. His sense of the West as the eternally beckoning land of promise was captured in his novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), about a family's fitful search for a place to settle down. Of his later novйis, my favorite is Angle of Repose (1971). Stegner was a very prolific writer, well worth exploring in depth.

John Steinbeck (1902-1968) more than any other American writer captured the spirit of the Great Depression. His novйis, like those of Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair (though better), are marked by a strong social conscience; but instead of outrage, Steinbeck's dominant tone is one of sadness that proletarian nobility and toughness are not always sufficient to overcome obstacles. Many of his novйis are as powerful and moving to read now as they were when they were first published; I recommend starting with Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes ofWrath (1939).

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) is now recognized as one of the greatest American poets—not only of the twentieth century but of our entire national literature, but he worked in obscurity for most of his lifetime. Stevens published Harmonium, his first collection of verse, in 1923; it showed in full flower the verbal inventiveness that would be the hallmark of ali of his verse, but it was largely ignored by the literary community. Recognition came only when he was approaching old age, and his reputation has grown posthumously. Read widely in his Collected Poems (1954).

Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) was a leader of the Bloomsbury set of English writers and critics that included Virginia Woolf, Arthur Waley, E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, and other noted writers and intellectuals. Brilliant, irreverent, and gay, Strachey is remembered for his revisionist biographies. His Eminent Victorians (1918), which gives brief accounts of the lives of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Charles Gordon, and Queen Victoria (1921), an unsentimental biog- raphy of the late queen, are in large part responsible for the opin- ions most people still have of the manners, morais, and values of the Victorian era.

James Thurber (1894-1961) was a writer, essayist and cartoonist closely identified with The New Yorker under the editorship of Harold Ross. Both his stories and his drawings are characterized by whimsy, wit, and understated humor. Some of his best work is to be found in Is Sex Necessary? (1929, written with E.B. White), and his collected stories, My Life and Hard Times (1933). Thurbers sight failed when he was in his forties; he was totally blind in later life, but continued to write prolifically.