Lau Shaw [Lao She] (1899-1966), like Lu Hsьn a writer of Chinas May Fourth generation, made his early reputation as a writer of humorous action novйis. His one masterpiece is a more serious book, the Chinese title of which could be translated as Hsiang [Xiangl the Camel (1936), telling the grim life story of a young rickshaw puller in Beijing. Try to find Jean James's accurate translation, Rickshaw (1979); the unauthorized translation by Evan King, titled Rickshaw Boy, became a bestseller in the United States in 1945 but is a bowdlerized travesty with a tacked-on happy ending. The novel that Lau Shaw actually wrote is a far tougher and more gripping book than that.
Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was one of postwar Britain's best poets, and the one whose reputation seems to me most likely to continue to grow after his death. Larkin himself lived a crabbed, often rather unhappy life as a provincial university librarian, a situation that seemed to fit the unsparing scorn that he poured into his verse for a wide range of targets: upper-class boorishness, middle-class complacency, working-class sloth, among others. His great talent was to channel this misanthropic jaundice into superbly inventive
language and beautifully disciplined verse; unlike some poets, his work can be enjoyed even in very large helpings. Try his Collected Poems (1993).
John LeCarrй (1931- ). It would be easy to dismiss LeCarrй (real name: David J.M. Cornwall) as simply a "genre writer," but few writers get to re-invent their genre. In The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963) and its sequeis (and sowing in the fertile ground plowed by Graham Greene), he transformed the spy novel from a simple entertainment of white hats vs. black hats to a dark and morally ambiguous tale of the pretty bad holding out against the truly awful; he became something like a poet of the Cold War.
Claude Lйvi-Strauss (1908- ) is the founder of the system of cultural analysis called structuralism. Lйvi-Strauss originally applied the method to the analysis of mythology in the service of anthropology; he sought to learn how people in different cultures use myths to mediate not only their systems of religious and social beliefs but their practical responses to actual situations. His methods were then adapted by literary scholars and other academic researchers in the humanities. Lйvi-Strauss wrote both for specialists and for general audiences; his more popular books are highly readable and even entertaining, as well as erudite. He presented some of his early field- work in South America in Tristes Tropiques (1955), and developed his methodology more systematically in Structural Anthropology (1958) and The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology (1964).
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951). Not many people get to add a word to our language, but Lewis did just that with "Babbittry," shorthand for mindless middle-class conformity and timidity. The word comes, of course, from his 1922 novel Babbitt, one of a string of bestsellers in the 1920s that at least for that decade made him perhaps Amйricas most popular and successful author. His work bears the strong stamp of both his literary style and his personality; the novйis and short stories have memorable characters, compelling plots, and a strong element of social criticism. In addition to Babbitt, try Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and Dodsworth (1929).
David Lodge (1935), an English novelist and critic, is much loved by a smallish circle of readers in America; he deserves to be far bet- ter known. His work is distinguished equally by penetrating psycho- logical insight and superb literary craftsmanship. His novйis Changing Places (1975) and Small World (1984) rank with, and perhaps surpass, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim as the funniest satires of academic life in modern times.
Norman Mailer (1923- ) has spent much of his unruly life trying to live up to the machismo of his prose. He is sometimes dismissed as a braggart, and is much excoriated by feminist critics for his
aggressive masculinity both in real life and on the printed page. Nevertheless, his finest books—both of fiction and of nonfiction, such as The Naked and the Dead (1948), The Armies of the Night (1968), and The Executioners Song (1979)—are beautifully crafted works noteworthy for their almost tenderly sympathetic (though not sentimental) point of view. Like Hemingway, he is a master of con- veying the plight of men operating under extreme circumstances.
Andrй Malraux (1901-1976) during his lifetime enjoyed a larger- than-life reputation as a writer, archaeologist, art historian, Republican volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, and Resistance fighter; he was for ten years Minister of Culture under Charles DeGaulle. Posthumous revelations suggest that his reputation was based in part on self-promoting exaggerations; but his written work endures. Maris Fate (1933), his finest novel, is a grim and dark-hued exploration of conflict between Chinese Communists and Nationalists in Shanghai in the late 1920s; more than half a century later it still brings chills to one's spine.
Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) was a novelist, memoirist, and critic whose work employed irony, satire and humor to comment on the position of women in American society, and whose biting, sometimes scathingly unkind (and often untrue) portraits of lightly fic- tionalized real people made her feared by her friends and enemies alike. Her best-known novel, The Group (1963), follows eight women of the Vassar class of 1933 for several years after their grad- uation, while they gradually shed their collegiate hopes, idealism, and naivetй.
Carson McCullers (1917-1967) was one of a number of twenti- eth-century American writers whose work is an argument for the reality of a distinctive Southern sensibility. Her books tend to be peopled with lonely, misunderstood people trapped in a society haunted by the past and ill-adapted to the present; the surprising thing is that she was able to pursue such themes while being neither maudlin nor melodramatic. Her best-known book is The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), about the intertwined lives of five people in a small town in Geуrgia.