Literature Reference: American Literature, English Literature, Classics & Modern Fiction
(Soviet, 1890–1960) Born in Moscow into a cultured Jewish-Russian family, Pasternak studied philosophy before becoming a highly regarded lyric poet. His epic novel Dr Zhivago (1957) was banned in Russia for its implicit criticism of the Revolution, but published to huge acclaim in the West. A vast, teeming novel set against the background of the First World War and Russian Revolution, Dr Zh…
(South African, 1903–88) Paton began his career teaching at Diepkloof reformatory for young black offenders before joining the South African Liberal Party of which he subsequently became chairman. Even after the party was disbanded in 1968 he dedicated his life to the principles of liberal politics. He is primarily known through his best-selling novel Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), publis…
(British, 1961– ) Patterson was born and brought up in Belfast, and taken together his novels present a fascinating and detailed picture of life there over the past forty years. Begin with Fat Lad (1992), which follows the life of a Belfast man returning to work there after ten years in England, moving between glimpses of his parents’ and grandparents’ lives, to his own matter…
(British, 1911–68) Peake was born in China to missionary parents. A brilliant artist and illustrator, he was among those who liberated Belsen, the concentration camp. What he saw there never left him, and he died in London after struggling with mental disturbance and Parkinson's disease. The Gormenghast trilogy has elements of the Gothic, the fantastic, and the Kafka-esque. Titus Gro…
(British, 1955– ) What with monks, doctors, and even chefs solving crimes, it's a wonder we need a police force. In crime fiction's never-ending search for a new angle, Iain Pears settled on the world of art theft, drawing on his expertise as an art historian. His Jonathan Argyll series features an art historian scraping a living as a dealer and stumbling into various intrigue…
(British, 1956– ) Pears’ first novel, In the Place of Fallen Leaves (1993), vividly and hypnotically captures the landscape of rural Devon, seen through the eyes of 13-year-old Alison during the long hot summer of 1984. Alison describes the hardships of life on a farm, the bitterness and rivalry between her two older brothers, her own first experience of death in the loss of her gran…
(British, 1913–95) Ellis Peters (pseudonym of Edith Pargeter) was a prolific novelist who spent her life in Shropshire except for war service in the WRNS. She Goes to War (1942), a semi-autobiography, and her war trilogy The Eighth Champion of Christendom (1947), following Jim Benison in action from Dunkirk to Singapore, deserve to be better known. Like all her novels, these are strong in p…
(British, 1958– ) Phillips was born in St Kitts and grew up in England, producing his earliest writing for the theatre. In his 1987 travel book, The European Tribe, he casts an outsider's eye, somewhat like V. S. Naipaul, at well-known bits of Europe, including two intriguing chapters set in Venice, making us look at the familiar differently. His first novel, The Final Passage (1985)…
(US, 1953– ) Pinckney, born and brought up in Indianapolis, is an essayist and critic as well as a novelist. His only novel to date, High Cotton (1992), follows the maturation of its unnamed narrator who, like Pinckney, attends Columbia University, and is probably a novelist. It is a deeply ambivalent portrait of a privileged middle-class black culture, known as ‘the talented tenth&#…
(British, 1906–93) Jean Plaidy was one of seventeen pseudonyms of Eleanor Hibbert, who produced over 200 books. As Plaidy she attempted ‘authentic history in the form of the novel’, from the Normans to the Victorians. Spanish, French, and Italian history are also covered. Steeped in intrigue and romance, the Catherine de’ Medici trilogy gives the full flavour. Madame Se…
(US, 1809–49) Poe had a short and tragic life. His macabre vision was fed by the death of his first wife and continuing poverty. He died after one of his notorious drinking binges. A poet, short-story writer, and respected journalist, Poe is best known for his tightly focused Gothic horror tales. ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (1843) features Nicholas Medina, grieving husband livi…
(US, 1890–1980) Porter was a Southerner by inheritance, her fiction informed by her early life in rural Louisiana and Texas, and by experiences as a journalist during the Mexican Revolution. Her stories and novellas were greatly admired for their conscious use of symbol and allegory; some are reminiscent of early Joyce. ‘Maria Concepcion’ is a characteristic early story, depic…
(US, 1929– ) Chaim Potok was born and raised in the Bronx, New York, in a traditional Orthodox Jewish family. He was ordained as a rabbi in 1954, then turned to writing fiction. His first novel, The Chosen (1967), tells the story of the friendship between two boys, Reuven Malter, son of a Jewish scholar, and Danny Saunders, son of a Chassidic rabbi, revered as the divinely inspired leader o…
(British, 1905–2000) Powell worked in publishing, literary journalism, and the film industry and was awarded an OBE. His first novel, Afternoon Men, a satirical account of the empty lives of a group of London socialites, was published in 1931, but he is best-known for his 12-volume sequence A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–75, televised as a serial in 1997). Dance is narrated by Ni…
(US, 1952– ) Tim Powers is one of the most original of modern fantasy authors. His early work, The Drawing of the Dark (1979), is one of many stories of King Arthur's return, but unlike all the others it is set in sixteenth-century Austria, while the ‘dark’ of its title is dark beer, brewed once a century to bring life back to the Fisher King. The Anubis Gates (1983) is…
(British, 1872–1963) The influence of Powys's West Country boyhood is seen in his fiction. After Cambridge and lecturing, he lived in the United States before settling in Wales. His prolific writings range from poetry, essays, philosophy, and autobiography to the epic novels on which his reputation rests. Start with A Glastonbury Romance (1932), set in the modern town and its ancient…
(British, 1875–1953) T. F. Powys was one of eleven children born to a clergyman in Dorset. (An older brother was the novelist John Cowper Powys.) After running his own farm in Suffolk, T. F. Powys retired to Dorset where he lived an extremely secluded life. He writes in a simple, biblical style, and his novels and short stories are allegories for the twentieth century. His best-known book i…
(British, 1948– ) In terms of sales Terry Pratchett is the most successful British author writing today; it has been calculated that 1 per cent of all fiction titles sold in Britain are of his writing. Yet, although he has a multitude of devoted readers, his work has attracted very little attention from critics. It is not hard to see why. Although he has written other kinds of fiction, nota…
(British, 1943– ) Priest was born in Manchester, and was an accountant before becoming a full-time writer. His earlier science fiction writings include Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972). Begin with this futuristic view of political tensions in England as African refugees arrive from a homeland devastated by nuclear war. In A Dream of Wessex (1977) a group of experimenters link their minds…
(British, 1894–1984) Priestley's literary career spanned fifty years. He survived long enough to be among the last in the line of what used to be called ‘a man of letters’—producing a vast output ranging from journalism, essays, and critical works to novels, stage plays, and film-scripts. He renamed his home town of Bradford ‘Bruddersford’ in his mo…
(British, 1900–97) Best known as a short-story writer and literary journalist, V. S. Pritchett was born in Ipswich, the son of a travelling salesman. He spent his childhood in the English regions and left school in 1915 to take up an apprenticeship in the leather trade. He travelled to Paris in 1921, working as a photographer, then became a journalist in Ireland and Spain. Pritchett publish…
(US, 1935– ) The Shipping News (1993) is that most unusual thing in contemporary fiction, a novel with a convincing happy ending. When we meet the hapless Quoyle, his life is falling apart; bratty kids, failed marriage, no career, no-hoper. He moves to the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland, and within that harsh landscape finds fulfilment. Proulx's quirky, original style made The Shippi…
(French, 1871–1922) Marcel Proust was born into a wealthy French-Jewish family, and lived for some years as a young man-about-town, moving among the most fashionable echelons of Parisian society. Ill-health, the death of his beloved mother, and perhaps boredom, drove him in later years to retire to the seclusion of his cork-lined bedroom, to work on his masterpiece, A La Recherche Du Temps …
(British, 1946– ) Pullman has been a teacher and lecturer, but has for many years been writing lively and enjoyable children's novels, like Ruby in the Smoke (1985) and Broken Bridge (1988). The first part of a trilogy, His Dark Materials, appeared in 1995. Called Northern Lights, it won awards including the Carnegie Medal. In the United States it was called The Golden Compass and re…
(US, 1920–99) Puzo was born to illiterate Italian immigrants in the notorious ‘Hell's Kitchen’ neighbourhood of Manhattan, and this provided the backdrop to most of his novels. The Godfather (1969) is a detailed depiction of the world of the Mafia centred on the life of Vito Corleone. Corleone cultivates an image of respectable family values whilst being the most ruthle…
(British, 1913–80) After graduating from Oxford, Pym spent most of her working life in London, then retired to live with her sister in an Oxfordshire village where, like many of the characters in her novels, she devoted herself to church, gardening, local history, and country walks. She is a subtle and engaging chronicler of middle-class manners whose fiction went out of print during the 19…
(US, 1937– ) Pynchon is a mysterious figure who never communicates with the press. He worked in aircraft design for a while, and his works relate scientific ideas, big business organization, American society and popular culture to each other. The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), the second of his five novels, is the shortest and most approachable—in fact it is very funny, with lots of brilli…
(US 1905–82) Born in Russia, Rand moved to America at the age of 21 where she founded a right-wing political philosophy she called ‘objectivism’ and which has much in common with contemporary libertarian movements, and capitalist liberalism generally. Her first truly science fiction novel was the short anti-communist polemic, Anthem (1938), which owes a great deal to several e…
(US, 1931– ) Born in Chicago, Frederic Raphael grew up in England and was educated at St John's College, Cambridge. Begin with The Glittering Prizes (1976), his acclaimed treatment of the lives of a group of Cambridge students in the years after graduation. The main protagonist's comically inept attempt to pursue a dynamic media career provides much of the entertainment. Rapha…
(British, 1927–2001) Raven was educated at Charterhouse school and Cambridge, and subsequently served in the army; these institutions have formed his fictional territory, in which the upper classes collide with bohemia, foreigners, and especially each other. Raven's fiction is organized into two novel sequences, Alms for Oblivion (10 novels, 1964–76) and The First Born of Egyp…
(German, 1898–1970) Remarque served as a soldier in the German army in the First World War. The war disgusted him, and he wrote All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), one of the great anti-war books of all time. The writing is simple and completely gripping. It tells the story of Paul Bäumer and his friends, young German men who are encouraged by their teachers and parents to fight i…
(British, 1930– ) Ruth Rendell is unique among British crime writers. No one can equal her range or her accomplishment; she has won every major award, at home and abroad. Since she published the first Inspector Wexford novel, From Doom with Death in 1964, she has demonstrated that the genre can continually reinvent itself, assuming new concerns and exploring new ways of telling stories. Her…
(Caribbean/British, 1890–1979) Jean Rhys was born to a Creole mother and a Welsh-born doctor on the island of Dominica. This inheritance gave her the sense of being a permanent outsider and led her to partially identify with the internally divided, black community of her childhood. Her early novel, and perhaps the best work to start with, is Quartet (1928) which describes how Marya Z…
(British, 1873–1957) Dorothy Richardson wrote one of the longest novels in English. Pilgrimage (1915–38) is an autobiographical account of a young woman whose wealthy family loses all its money. At the age of 17 she sets off to make her own living, first as a teacher in Germany, then as a dental secretary in London. The novel celebrates the freedom of city life in the 1890s as Miriam…
(British, 1689–1761) Samuel Richardson received little formal education, though by the age of 13 is reputed to have gained employment writing letters on behalf of young lovers. He was apprenticed to the print trade, and later successfully set up his own printing business. A manual of ‘correct-style’ in letter-writing served as the blueprint for his first and most popular novel…
(Canadian, 1931–2001) Born in Montreal, Richler was often regarded as a black humorist, but his novels have a far greater range and depth of social commentary than that term implies. He both celebrated and satirized the Jewish experience in Canada, and his work is full of pungently funny dialogue and politically incorrect observations. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959), described b…
(British, 1958– ) Riley was born in St Mary, Jamaica, educated at the universities of Sussex and London, and began working for welfare agencies in London in 1983. Begin with The Unbelonging (1985), characteristic of her work in its treatment of a woman's experiences after emigrating to England from the Caribbean. The book's 11-year-old heroine takes refuge from racism and her …
(British, 1954– ) William Rivière was educated at Bradfield, where he was an exact contemporary of Louis de Bernières. He was brought up in Norfolk, which forms the backdrop for many of his novels (Watercolour Sky, 1990; Echoes of War, 1997). After leaving King's College, Cambridge, he spent seven years in Italy rowing Venetian vessels on the lagoon (A Venetian Theory o…
(French, 1922– ) Brittany-born Robbe-Grillet worked as an agronomist before the publication of his first novel, Les Gommes (The Erasers) in 1953. With this and his next three books he helped to define the fledgling nouveau roman, a new form which sought to dispense entirely with all literary convention, with figurative language, with the traditional omniscient narrator and the unrealistic &…
(US, 1912–97) Harold Robbins made his name in the 1950s as the author of a string of best-sellers about the seamy side of American life, and A Stone for Danny Fisher (1955), the story of the descent into crime of a promising championship boxer, later adapted for film as the Elvis Presley vehicle King Creole, remains widely regarded as Robbins's single best novel. More typical is 79 P…
(British/French, 1949– ) Roberts's novels and stories are distinctive for the poetic sensuous quality of her writing, and for her feminist exploration of women's lives, particularly the mother-daughter relationship. Religion is also an important theme. She is always inventive with structure, using multiple narrative voices and telling stories within stories. Begin with …
(British, 1932– ) Robinson writes authentically about air wars in which he was too young to have fought. His best work occupies the intellectual no man's land between genre fiction and serious literature, which is probably why he has not had the recognition he deserves, although Goshawk Squadron (1971), the second novel in a trilogy about a brutal RFC squadron leader bullying callow …
(US 1952– ) The Mars trilogy, Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1994), and Blue Mars (1997), re-established the credibility of science fiction set in space. In dealing with the colonization of another planet, Robinson raises major issues of our time—politics, economics, and the impact of technological decisions on human welfare. The three novels can be read independently but are more sati…
(Canadian, 1885–1961) Mazo de la Roche is best known for her Whiteoaks family saga. Dominated by a fierce matriarch with a parrot, the family, while coming in for its share of romantic drama, is often shown as comic and ridiculous. Jalna (1927) is the best place to start. Introducing the six Whiteoak siblings, it chronicles their romantic entanglements and ends with Grandmother Adeline�…
(US, 1933– ) Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey. His work has developed from satirical outrages and Kafka-like fantasies to the fictionalizing of post-war American history. He is both a popular and serious novelist, whose consistent themes are Jewishness and masculinity. Roth's debut collection of stories, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), proved controversial, portraying conflicts around t…
(British, 1965– ) In the all-too-frequently hyperbolic world of publishing, few today would dispute the claim that Rowling's Harry Potter books make up one of the most extraordinary literary phenomena of the turn of the twenty-first century. They have attracted a vast following with their broad readership of children and adults alike, they have generated unprecedented publicity (enha…
(British, 1928–2004) Born in Cardiff and educated at the University of Wales, Rubens's other career was in film-making. Psychologically interesting, her novels often deal with loneliness, rejection, bleak private worlds, and she was adept at mixing tragedy and comedy. She often wrote about Jewish characters. Begin with The Elected Member (1969). Norman, a barrister, is also a drug ad…
(US, 1946– ) Rucker is a professor of mathematics and a founding father, with William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, of ‘Cyber-punk’ science fiction. He has published eight novels (and several works of non-fiction that operate in that imaginatively fertile area in which higher mathematics, particle physics, and relativity part company with common sense). He won the Philip K. Dick…
(US, 1884–1946) Runyon was born in Kansas but is indelibly linked with the demi-monde of gangsters and performers who worked on Broadway. Indeed, Runyon's ashes were scattered over Broadway from a plane piloted by the famous air ace, Eddie Rickenbacker. In both his syndicated journalism and his fiction, Runyon captured his era's fascination with celebrity and display. His stor…
(British, 1947– ) Rushdie was born into a Muslim family in Bombay, and educated in England; his family joined the Muslim exodus to Pakistan in 1964. He is a richly inventive writer who straddles cultures and draws on the traditions of both East and West. Start with Midnight's Children (1981, Booker Prize), which established him as the voice of post-colonial India. Saleem Sinai, one o…
(US, 1949– ) Richard Russo grew up in the small, mostly working-class town of Gloversville, New York, and his fiction tends to emphasize the effects of class on American life. Although the tone of his work can be one of heartbreak and despair, it is always buffeted by a generous and affable humour. Empire Falls (2001; Pulitzer Prize 2002), a rich, sprawling, and ambitious novel, tells the s…
(French, 1900–44) Saint-Exupéry led a life crammed with more romantic adventure than most fictional heroes. A pioneer aviator in the days when flying depended as much on guts and instinct as on instruments, he was among the first to depict not only the perils of flight but also its ethereal poetry. Night Flight (1932) tells of carrying the mails over the Andes peaks and jungles of Br…
(British, 1870–1916) Although Hector Hugh Munro, better known as Saki, wrote two novels, The Unbearable Bassington (1912) and When William Came (1913), his reputation stems from his mastery of the short story. Witty and erudite, Saki's stories expose the absurdities of the English Edwardian upper classes. Many of his stories originally appeared in newspapers like the Daily Express an…
(US, 1919– ) J. D. Salinger was born in New York and educated at New York University and Columbia University. He has written both short stories and novels, but is best known for his first novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), which has achieved huge success. The novel's narrator, Holden Caulfield, leaves his prep school three days early, wanting to put off the moment when his parents…
(French, 1905–80) Sartre was a central figure in the French philosophical movement known as existentialism. A professor and writer of philosophy, he also used plays and novels to explore his philosophical ideas, arguing that existence is meaningless and that our concern should be what human beings can do in the face of the absurdity of their condition. In his first novel, Nausea (1938), the…
(British, 1886–1967) Brought up in a Kent country house, educated at Marlborough and Cambridge, Sassoon volunteered in 1914. An officer at the Western Front, he was wounded, won an MC (which he threw away), and publicly protested against the conduct of the war, also publishing compassionate, ironic anti-war poetry. Instead of court-martial, he was sent for shell-shock treatment. After the w…
(British, 1893–1957) One of the first women to be granted a degree from Oxford, Sayers was a medieval scholar who completed a notable translation of Dante's Divine Comedy as well as establishing herself as second only to Agatha Christie in the Golden Age of the classic English mystery novel in the 1920s and 1930s. Few writers provoke such extreme responses. In a recent poll of crime …
(German, 1944– ) Bernhard Schlink is Professor of Law at Berlin University. The Reader (1997) tells the story of a 15-year-old boy who is helped and then seduced by an older woman, a tram conductor. Years later, when the boy is a law student, he finds his lover on trial for crimes committed as a concentration camp guard, and eventually he comes to understand the shameful secret which has sh…
(US, 1936– ) Sandra Scoppettone is the author of the crime series featuring lesbian private eye Lauren Laurano, an immensely likeable character whose life with her psychotherapist lover Kip concerns the reader as much as does her investigative work. Scoppettone writes fluently with witty dialogue and touching humour and creates an affectionate portrayal of life in the Greenwich Village area…
(British, 1920–78) Paul Scott was born and brought up in north London, and initially began training as an accountant. His service in the Second World War took him to India, and his experiences and observations there were to prove an undying source of inspiration in his writing career. Scott is best known for his novel sequence The Raj Quartet, which was successfully televised in 1984. The q…
(German, 1949– ) Süskind studied and lives in Munich, and was a television writer and playwright before becoming a novelist. In 1992 his play Double Bass was performed at the Edinburgh Festival and the National Theatre. His most famous work, Perfume (1985), tells the story of Grenouille, an utterly amoral foundling born with a peculiarly intense sense of smell. Grenouille obtains wor…