James Baldwin (1924-1987) was torn between the legacy of a Harlem childhood of poverty, racial oppression, and religious inspi- ration, and the reality of an adult life as a gay Black intellectual living in Greenwich Village and France. His novel Giovanms Room (1956) addresses the issues of exile and conflicted homosexuality; in The Fire Next Time (1963) Baldwin produced a powerful meditation on Black identity, the Civil Rights Movement, and the temptation of Black separatism. Both the agony of his conflicted personality and the power of his commitment to racial justice continue to resonate in his work.
John Barth (1930- ) was born and raised in the Tidewater country of Maryland, and his native region is in effect the principal character of ali of his work. His very distinctive writing style is often quirkily humorous, erotically charged, and sardonic in tone. His best known work, The Sot-weed Factor (1960), is a burlesque "history" of the Chesapeake Bay region in colonial times; his beautifully realized short stories (Tidewater Tales, 1987, for example) tend to be more sober in tone.
Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) met Jean-Paul Sartre in 1929, and the two soon became lifelong companions. Perhaps influenced in part by her own struggle for independence and autonomy in the face of Sartre's powerful and autocratic personality, de Beauvoir became an articulate and influential feminist thinker. The Second Sex is by far the most famous of her many books; in it she calls for an end to the patriarchal systems—and the feminine accommodations to them—that have kept women in a secondary and subservient position since time immemorial.
Paul Bowles (1910- ) has expressed a wish to be remembered primarily as a composer, and his music is highly esteemed; still for the moment most people probably think of him first as a writer. Born in America, he spent much of his young adulthood in Europe and has lived mostly in Morocco for the past fifty years. He writes marvelously crafted travei essays and short stories; by far his best- known literary work is The Sheltering Sky (1948), a horrifying tale of an American couple traveling in Morocco who become caught in a web of fear and sexual obsession.
Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) was a leading member of the French Annales school of historians, the followers of which attempted to get beyond the mere events ("ephemera") of history to achieve an understanding of the "deep structure" of the past. BraudePs The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1945) perfectly exemplifies the Annales approach at its best, with the structure of history delineated through "thick description" of the past and through attention to such factors as geography, ecology, economics, and social and religious movements. The aims of these historians might sound ponderous, but in Braudel's hands the results are not; this is both an intellectually challenging and highly readable book.
Berthold Brecht (1898-1956) was a poet and playwright whose early work showed the influence of the German Expressionist move- ment of the 1920s. He became a Marxist and developed a theory of "epic theater," in which plays would be objectified by abandoning the illusion of realism (by such techniques as having the players directly address the audience). Of his many plays, try reading Mother C our age, The Good Woman of Szechuan, and The Caucasian Chalk
Circle; attend performances of, or listen to recordings of, his collabo- rations with composer Kurt Weill, The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fali of the City of Mahagonny.
Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), perhaps the greatest poet of post- war Rъssia, was scorned and persecuted in his native country. From his school years he never wanted to be anything but a poet; his refusal to contribute to socialist society in a more practical way led to his being considered a "social parasite," and to his being exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972. His poems have an apparently innate lyrical quality, and deal with transcendent issues of life and death with a graceful and undogmatic hand. Brodsky wrote little poetry in his mature years, concentrating instead on essays and criti- cism; he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987. So Forth (1995) is a good collection of his poems.
Pearl Buck (1892-1973) was born in America but spent much of her youth in China, where her parents were missionaries. Her novel The Good Earth (1931) made her famous; it distills her deep affec- tion and respect for the Chinese people, and was influential in win- ning American popular support for China in the face of imperialist domination and Japanese aggression. Though its language now seems rather stilted and its values reflect missionary hopes more than Chinese realities, it remains worth reading both for its well- wrought plot and as an important document of its time.
Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) wrote many books but is truly famous for one, The Master and Margarita (1930s). The book was correctly perceived by the Russian authorities as a satire on life under Stalin and therefore banned. (It was finally published in heav- ily censored form in 1966, and in an unexpurgated edition in 1973.) It depicts the bizarre and often very funny relations between the Master (a writer), his mistress Margarita, and the Devil; the plot is intercut with scenes from the Masters novel set in Jerusalem in the time of Christ. It is an odd but brilliant and compelling book.
Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) was a prolific and talented writer, but his reputation rests almost entirely on one novel, A Clockwork Orange (1962), and that in large part because of the impact of the powerful 1972 film version starring Malcolm McDowell. The mor- dant and darkly humorous dystopic world of Burgess's novel now looks, in retrospect, like a harbinger of the rebellious spirit of the Sixties; but the book retains its power both to shock and to please the reader.
Нtalo Calvino (1923-1985) is generally regarded as Italy's greatest modern writer of short stories and novйis. His work is richly imaginative, and blurs the line between reality and fantasy; he was deeply interested in folk tales, which in turn profoundly influenced his own work. Representative of the best of his mature fiction is If
on a Winters Night a Traveller (1979); it is confusing, nonlinear, nonsequential, often parodistic; a tale of a novel within the novel, interspersed with still other seemingly unrelated stories. It is not easy reading, but it is rewarding to read.
Truman Capote (1924-1984), novelist, short-story writer, social butterfly, a New Yorker who remained firmly rooted in his native South, was above ali a writer, and more seriously dedicated to his craft than he sometimes let on. He found fame early with Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), his semiautobiographical novel of a teenager in search of his identity, and enhanced his reputation with the novella Breakfast at Tijfany's (1958). His best book is In Cold Blood (1966) a "nonfiction novel" (a genre he claimed to have invented) about a brutal murder and the trial and execution of its perpetrators.