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 Helixy 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).
Rebecca West (1892-1983) wrote a number of novйis but is remembered primarily as one of the most astute and energetic jour- nalists of our time, a tireless chronicler of history in the making. Her most ambitious and impressive work is Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942), a massive, two-volume study of the history, politics and culture of the Balkan region; it comes brilliantly to life again for a reader in our own time for its enduring insights into the problems of Bosnia and other countries that once belonged to the much-bat- tered land of Yugoslavia.
Patrick White (1912-1990) was the greatest novelist of modern Australia. His work captures well the vast size of that country, and its potential as a backdrop for the clash of powerful emotions and interests; his novйis tend to be expansive in scope and to carry heavy thematic freight. Of his many books, I recommend Voss (1957) and Riders in the Chariot (1961).
Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) is probably most widely known for his play Our Town (1938), a portrait of small-town New England life that was considered innovative in its time but which has been thoroughly ruined for most people by too many dreadful high school drama productions. Readers coming to Wilder for the first time would be better off with his landmark novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), set in eighteenth-century Peru, in which a priest tries to find the hand of God in the deaths of five people in the collapse of a bridge.
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) may or may not be judged by history to have been the greatest American playwright of the twenti- eth century (a status of which he himself had no doubt), but he surely will be ranked as one of the greatest. Southern and gay, he focused in most of his plays on the hothouse atmosphere of Southern family life, but his best work transcends any taint of mere regionalism. Read, and if possible see stage productions of, at least The Glass Menagerie (1945) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947).
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) spent his worlang life as a doctor in suburban New Jersey while simultaneously writing the spare, lyrical, beautifully controlled verse that brought him recogni- tion as one of the finest poets of our time. His poems focus exquis- itely on ordinary things and experiences observed with such clarity of vision and such invention of imagery as to be transformed in the readers mind's eye. See his Collected Poems (two volumes, 1991).
Richard Wright (1908-1960) grew up in poverty in the rural South; as a young man he moved to Chicago, then to New York, and became part of various leftist literary groups. He briefly joined the Communist Party, but then broke with it and moved to Paris after
the end of World War II, and lived there as an expatriate for the rest of his life. He is remembered less for his later essays and polemicai pieces than for two early novйis, Native Son (1940), which intro- duced one of the most vivid characters in American fiction, Bigger Thomas, a Black man imprisoned for murder; and the autobiograph- ical Black Boy (1945).