The New Lifetime Reading Plan

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) was a professor of Anglo-Saxon and Old English at Oxford, and a distinguished scholar of early British poetry such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Medieval themes permeate his fiction, beginning with The Hobbit (i937)> a fantasy for children about an Englandlike country men- aced by sorcery and evil. Tolkien's vision matured with the writing of The Lord of the Rings (1954-56), a trilogy building on themes from The Hobbit but with an added allegorical urgency that seemed to reflect England's narrow escape from fascist conquest in World War II.

William Trevor (1928- ) is both a novelist and a short-story writer; he is a fine writer in either genre, but his true mйtier, I think, is the story. He lives and works in Ireland, and ali of his work is set there; typically his stories view with irony tempered by com- passion the foibles of people who for one reason or another cannot fit comfortably into the cozy but rigid expectations of Irish family and village life. He continues to write prolifically; for the moment, see his Collected Stories (1992).

John Updike (1932- ) is one of America's most visible men of let- ters because of his phenomenal productivity as a novelist, poet, essayist, and critic. His work is too diverse to pin down easily, but his most characteristic novйis deal with suburban ambitions and somewhat kinky sex in villages or towns somewhere in the

Northeast. Updike is best known for his quartet following the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, his best fictional character: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990).

Gore Vidal (1925- ), patrician, cosmopolitan, gay, intellectually combative, has made a career of trying to outrage criticai opinion, sometimes succeeding. His first great success was Myra Breckenridge (1968), a comic novel with a transsexual lead character; it poked fun at American hypocrisies, and was considered shocking at the time, but now is simply fun to read. For much of his career Vidal has devoted himself to fictional explorations of American history; a good example is Burr (1974).

Derek Walcott (1930- ) shares with the francophone poet Aimй Cйsaire the status of being the greatest literary figure of the Caribbean region. Walcott is known in this country primarily as a poet; when he won the Nobel Prize in 1992, special mention was made of his novel-length poem Omeros (1990), in which he adroitly weaves themes from Homer into a Caribbean setting. But he is also a prolific playwright; in addition to Omeros and his Collected Poems (1986), try reading his play, Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1958).

James D. Watson (1928- ) electrified the field of biology with the announcement in 1955 that he and Francis Crick had discovered the double-helix molecular structure of DNA. Their discovery made possible unprecedented advances in molecular genetics, leading to the applied science of genetic engineering. Watson tells the story of how he and Crick worked out DNA's distinctive structure in The Double Helix_y a fascinating and highly readable, even entertaining (if somewhat immodest and self-serving) insiders account of modern science in action.

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) served in the British army in World War I and then worked briefly as a teacher before devoting himself to full-time writing. Waugh was known for his finely observed and often extremely funny travei memoirs; he later reworked themes from his traveis into his humorous novйis of the 1930s, such as Scoop (1938). Waugh in this period is noteworthy for his satirical wit, his scathing humor, and his total lack of what today would be called "political correctness." A convert to Catholicism, Waugh turned to more serious themes of faith and introspection in Brideshead Revisited (1945), now probably his most famous novel. American readers will also enjoy The Loved One (1948), a very funny spoof of the funeral industry.

Eudora Welty (1909- ) has devoted her life to capturing, in sto­ries and in photographs, the texture of life in the small towns of her native Mississippi Delta. Her work tends to focus on the complexi- ties of intertwined lives, viewed with compassion and the promise of

redemption. She is a gentle writer, but not a sentimental one. Try her Collected Stories (1980).