Margaret Mead (1901-1978) achieved instant celebrity as a young anthropologist when she returned from her first field research expedition and published Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), in which she suggested that Samoan young women, unlike American adolescents, enjoyed guilt-free casual sex and grew up to be well- adjusted adults as a result. Mead later pursued fieldwork in New Guinea, Bali, and elsewhere, and became a sort of grand old wise- woman of American anthropology. Although her early methodology has been criticized and her conclusions called into question, her books remain worth reading as emblems of a twentieth-century rev- olution in attitudes toward non-Western peoples, and toward adoles- cence, gender, and sex in our own society.
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.
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960). In the context of modern Russian literature Pasternak's greatest contribution was in the field of poetry, where his avant-garde and sometimes abstruse verse was unpopular with Soviet authorities but had a great influence on younger poets. His popular fame, however, rests on his novel Doctor Zhivago (1957-58); written with the scope of a Dostoyevsky or a Tolstoy, the noveFs elegiac account of lives disrupted by the Russian Revolution was banned in the USSR and circulated only clandes- tinely. When Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, he was denounced as a traitor and a cultural saboteur; only with the end of the Soviet system was he given, posthumously, the public honors that his work had earned.
Georges Perec (1936-1982) was one of the most innovative and inventive prose writers of recent times. In the late 1960s he became one of the leading lights of the Workshop for Potential Literature, a French writers' group dedicated to developing experimental new lit- erary forms. Perec is known in the English-speaking world primarily for his 1978 novel, Life, A Users Manual, which uses a montage technique to describe a large apartment building in Paris and tell the life stories of ali of its inhabitants; it is a fascinating window into the contemporary French literary sensibility.
Harold Pinter (1930- ) has employed his spare, uncompromising dramatic vision and his talent for writing vivid, taut dialogue to transform the character of postwar British theater. Discarding the old ideal of the "well-made play," clear in its dramatic focus, self- contained, and unambiguous, Pinter created a theater where ambi- guity, menace, humor, and open-endedness combine to leave audi- ences with a feeling of unease as well as gratification. Despite the dark and sometimes difficult nature of his work, Pinter has become a significant figure in commercial theater on both sides of the Atlantic. Of his many plays I would recommend particularly The Caretaker (1960), in which a stranger insinuates himself into, and disrupts, the secure and stable relationship of a pair of bachelor brothers.
Robert Pirsig (1928- ) captured perfectly the mood of the Sixties' counterculture movement with his book-length essay Zen and the Art ofMotorcycle Maintenance (1974). Drawing upon and updating the themes of the road trip and Zen consciousness that had been explored by Jack Kerouac in the 1950s, Pirsig used the image of a cultivated harmony of man and machine to illustrate the importance of "quality" as a transcendent goal of the human experience. Whether the book will seem like more than a period-piece curiу fifty years from now is unclear; this may be the paradigm of a "tem- porary classic." For the moment it's well worth reading.
Ezra Pound (1885-1972) is notable both as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century and as an editor who had a profound influence on Eliot and Joyce. Pound was deeply learned in classical and East Asian poetry and was a fine and creative translator; his own verse showed both classical grounding and stunning innovation. His best and most influential collection of poetry is Personae (1926). Pound was justly criticized for the odious opinions he expressed late in life; his verse outlives his personality.