Reading Rat

What to read, 1876-1900

\/ 1851-1875 | 1901-1925 /\

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Late 19th Century

Antoine de SAINT-EXUPERY (1900-1944)

The Little Prince (1943) Benjamin Ivry essay
Written for children 'because adults don't understand anything', this story of a downed aviator and his friend, a prince from a far-off star, has surface beauty, emotional profundity. --Raphael and McLeish

Wolfgang PAULI (1900-1958) Nobel Prize

Theory of Relativity (Relativitatstheorie 1921)

The General Principles of Wave Mechanics (Die allgemeinen Prinzipien der Wellenmechanik 1933)

George SEFERIS (1900-1971) Poem Hunter Poetry International Web

Collected Poems (1981)

Theodosius DOBZHANSKY (1900-1975)

Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937)

Jacques PREVERT (1900-1977)

Paroles (1946)

Basil BUNTING (1900-1985) Poem Hunter | Academy of American Poets Don Share essay

Collected Poems (1985)

Gilberto FREYRE (1900-1987)

The Masters and the Slaves (1933)

The Mansions and the Shanties (1936)

Order and Progress (1959)

V. S. PRITCHETT (1900-1997) Benjamin Schwarz review | Joseph Epstein review

Nathalie SARRAUTE (1900-1999) Petri Liukkonen biography

The Planetarium (1959)

The Use of Speech (L’Usage de la parole 1980)

Hart CRANE (1899-1932) Academy of American Poets | Poem Hunter Eric Ormsby review essay

Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose (1966) Colm Toibin review

Benjamin PERET (1899-1959) two poems

From the Hidden Storehouse: Selected Poems (1981)

Ernest HEMINGWAY (1899-1961) The Online Books Page Wikipedia entry Andrew O'Hagan review | post
{H]e showed for all time--contrary to the Romantic notion of creativity--that economic comfort and good health are conducive to writing ... --Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The New York Times Book Review, July 26, 1981

The Sun Also Rises (1926)
Inspired by The Sun Also Rises, hundreds of young Americans appeared in Paris lugging typewriters and dreams. --Robert Messenger, A dime store Jane Austen, The New Criterion, March 2007, p. 23

A Farewell to Arms (1929)
the most integrated of his longer works, stained with lost love and the blood of Caporetto... . --Raphael and McLeish
Only those who have not realized that Hemingway's cruelty is of the surface could be surprised he made childbirth the tragic climax of this novel and his tragic ending the loss of both child and mother. --Edwin Berry Burgum

The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1938)
That consciousness of technique is unquestionably the reason Hemingway won't achieve glory with his novels, but will with his more disciplined short stories. --Gabriel Garcia Marquez

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) Edmund Wilson review
One trouble is it isn't a novel at all but rather a series of short stories, some of them excellent ... imbedded in a mixture of sentimental love scenes, too much talk, rambling narrative sequences, and the rather dull interior monologues by Jordan. --Dwight Macdonald, Hemingway's Unpolitical Political Novel, Partisan Review, January-February 1941
It is a fine title, and an apt one, for this is a book filled with the imminence of death, and the manner of man's meeting it. That is as it should be; this is a story of the Spanish war. But in it Hemingway has struck universal chords, and he has struck them vibrantly. --J. Donald Adams

The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
More even than the familiar bullfights and game hunting, this story reduces the contest to its very elements: a man, fish, and the sea. --Arnold Weinstein

The Garden of Eden (1986)

Leo STRAUSS (1899-1973) Wikipedia entry Steven Lenzer and William Kristol essay

On Tyranny (1948)

Friedrich HAYEK (1899-1992) Ludwig von Mises Institute post
For Hayek, ... the economist's problem is to explain how this wildly dispersed knowledge can produce a coordinated scheme of activity, which, if it 'were to be brought about deliberately, would require a knowledge on the part of the directing mind which no single person can possess.' Here, in a nutshell, is the Austrian case against central planning. --Greg Hill, 'Don't shoot the messenger: Caldwell's Hayek and the insularity of the Austrian project', Critical Review, Vol. 17, Nos. 1-2, p. 76
portrayed capitalism as a spontaneous system that unleashes more human potential than governments can control... --Stephen H. Webb, New Theology, Old Economics, First Things, April 2007, p. 12

The Road to Serfdom (1944) Publication History
In the negative part of Professor Hayek's thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often--at any rate it is said not nearly often enough--that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisition never dreamed of. --George Orwell, review, 1944
Shatters the myth that the totalitarianisms 'of the Left' and 'of the Right' stem from differing impulses. --Mark Helprin

also

The Constitution of Liberty (1960)
Thoughtful reflections on the conditions and limitations of liberty in the modern world, written by a deeply cultured Austrian who found his home in the Anglo-Saxon world. The 'Summa' of classical political economy in our century. --The Intercollegiate Review, The Fifty Worst (and Best) Books of the Century, Fall 1999
A great re-statement for this century of classical liberalism by its greatest modern exponent. --John O'Sullivan

LAU Shaw (Lao She 1899-1966)

Rickshaw (1979)

Yury OLESHA (1899-1966)

Envy (1927)

KAWABATA Yasunari (1899-1972)

The Snow Country (Yukiguni 1947)

The Thousand Cranes (Senbazuru 1949-51)

Beauty and Sadness (Utsukushisa to Kanashimi to 1964)

Elizabeth BOWEN (1899-1973) Richard Tillinghast essay

Collected Stories (1980)

Miguel Angel ASTURIAS (1899-1974) Nobel Prize

Men of Maize (Hombres de maiz 1949)

G. B. EDWARDS (1899-1976)

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page (1981)

Vladimir NABOKOV (1899-1977) The Online Books Page Wikipedia entry | Times Topics post
An uprooted victim of violent revolution, a scientist and scholar, he wandered across two continents and wrote, in two languages, subtly sophisticated, exquisitely stylish, and teasingly elusive books. --Jeffrey Myers, 'Shade's Shadow', The New Criterion, May 2006 p. 31

Lolita (1959)
A beautiful novel-of-authenticity, fusing romantic and empirical sensibilities... --Ricard D. Parker

Pale Fire (1962)
The imagery is superb; it is like dreaming in Color-Vision. The story is ridiculous, poignant, and enchanting, but it opens up a world of the imagination that becomes more real than the real world. --Gordon R. Willey

Speak, Memory (1967)
Russian novelist writes of his childhood in a wealthy, pre-Revolutionary family--a never forgotten dream of happiness irretrievably snatched away. --Raphael and McLeish

Ada or Ardor: a Family Chronicle (1969)

also

The Art of Translation The New Republic (August 4, 1941)

The University Poem London Review of Books (June 7, 2012)

Allen TATE (1899-1979)

Collected Poems (1970)

John H. VAN VLECK (1899-1980) Nobel Prize

The Theory of Electric and Magnetic Susceptibilities (1932)

Henri MICHAUX (1899-1984)

Selected Writings (1990)

E. B. WHITE (Elwyn Brooks White 1899-1985) post

Is Sex Necsssary? (1929, with James THURBER)

Charlotte's Web (1952)
What the book is about is friendship on earth, affection and protection, adventure and miracle, life and death, trust and treachery, pleasure and pain, and the passing of time. --Eudora Welty

The Elements of Style (1959, with William STRUNK) Jennifer Balderama review
If only every writer would remember just one of Strunk & White's wonderful injunctions: 'Omit needless words.' Omit needless words. --Abigail Thernstrom

Essays of E. B. White (1978) Levenger
His mesmerized devotion to the objects of his affection-his family, the female sex, his farm, the English language, Manhattan, the sea, America, Maine, and freedom, in descending order-is movingly absolute. --David Gelernter

Jorge Luis BORGES (1899-1986) post
HIs central preoccupations are the problems of time, identity, paradox, and the cyclical nature of knowledge and history. --Philip Ward

Fictions (Ficciones 1944)
Terse, teasing, sometimes intriguing jeux d'esprit by a writer whose favourite joke is the reader. --Raphael and McLeish
"The Garden of Forking Paths" takes the labyrinth as a metaphor for the mission of a Chinese spy, his mysterious relationship with a venerated ancestor, and fi nally fate itself. --Arnold Weinstein

The Aleph and Other Stories (El Aleph 1949)
“Emma Zunz” places a woman on a path of vengeance that requires her to annihilate a part of herself. --Arnold Weinstein

Dreamtigers (1960)

A Personal Anthology (Antologia personal 1961)

Labyrinths (1962)

Three late poems The New Criterion (March 1999)

Leonie ADAMS (1899-1988) Academy of American Poets | Taverner's Koans | Kiran Krishna

Poems: A Selection (1954)

Federico Garcia LORCA (1898-1936)
You, on the foundation of the ancient Spanish form of the romance, along with Juan Ramon and Machado, created another style, strange and strong, at once both a support and a crown for the old Castilian tradition. --Rafael Alberti, 'Words for Federico Garcia Lorca', New Masses, January 11, 1938
And in Madrid he acquired the habit, ingrained in the city's cafe intellectuals, of talking knowledgeably about books he hadn't read. --David Gilmour, 'The New York Review of Books' November 4, 1999 p. 43

Gypsy Ballads (Romancero Gitano 1928)

Blood Wedding (Bodas de sangre 1933)

Yerma (1934)

Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias 1935)

The House of Bernarda Alma (La casa de Bernarnda Alma 1936)
This play was a parabolic comment on 1930s Spain--the tyranny of the central female character paralleling that of Franco. --Raphael and McLeish

Selected Poems (1941)

Bertolt BRECHT (1898-1956) post
an epic satirist never far from the morality play, though his great gifts as a poet are constantly breaking through his Marxist ideological straitjacket. --Philip Ward

The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper 1928)

The Good Woman of Szechuan (Der gute Mensch von Sezuan 1936)

Galileo (Leben des Galilei 1943)

Mother Courage and Her Children (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 1941)
The cyclic futility of war parades before us, spiked with marvellous moments ... that make nonsense of theatrical ideology. --Raphael and McLeish

The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Der kaukasische Kreidekreis 1949)

Poems (2000)

Suryakant Tripathi NIRALA (1898-1961)

A Season on the Earth: Selected Poems, (David Rubin, translation 1977)
Nirala's poetry in Hindi can be divided into two phases: the Romantic phase corresponding to the literary style called Chayavad, influence by English Romanticism and devoted to aspects of Nature; and the later Pragativad style, roughly analogous to Soviet socialist realism fo the period from around 1933. --Philip Ward

C. S. LEWIS (1898-1963) Touchstone | Douglas Gresham fan site | Dave Armstrong fan site post

Out of the Silent Planet (1938); Perelandra (1943); That Hideous Strength (1943)
One of Lewis's attempts to charge SF ideas with Christian principles. --Raphael and McLeish

also

The Abolition of Man (1947)
Preferable to Lewis's other remarkable books simply because of the title, which reveals the true intent of liberalism. --The Intercollegiate Review, The Fifty Worst (and Best) Books of the Century, The Intercollegiate Review, Fall 1999
How modern philosophies drain meaning and the sacred from our lives. --Richard Brookhiser

Mere Christianity (1952) based on radio talks of 1941–1944 --ed.
The most influential book of the most influential Christian apologist of the century. --Richard John Neuhaus

Erich Maria REMARQUE (1898-1970)

All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
the senselessness of trench warfare in World War I, and the accompanying degradation of the human spirit. --Nicolaas Bloembergen

Vicente ALEIXANDRE (1898-1984) Petri Liukkonen biography

A Longing for the Light: Selected Poems (1979)

Melvin B. TOLSON (1898-1966)

Harlem Gallery (1965)

Will DURANT (1885-1981) and Ariel DURANT (1898-1981)

The Story of Civilization (12 vol., 1935-1967)

John B. WHEELWRIGHT (1897-1940)

Collected Poems (1983)

Georges BATAILLE (1897-1962)

Blue of Noon (Le Bleu du ciel 1957)

William FAULKNER (1897-1962) William Faulkner: American Writer post
William Faulkner's writings revealed to me the complexity of the Southern tradition--of guilt, revenge and repentence. --D. Quinn Mills

Sartoris (1929)
[I]ntroduces the two families that will always figure in the series: the Sartorises and the Snopeses, who represent respectively the top and the bottom of Jefferson society. --Mark Van Doren, The Great Ideas Today 1969, p. 306

The Sound and the Fury (1929) Saskatchewan

As I Lay Dying (1930)
The story is of the trip to Jefferson in a mule wagon with Addie and her coffin properly displayed. --Mark Van Doren, The Great Ideas Today 1969, p. 308

Sanctuary (1931)

Light in August (1937)
The locale is again the 'deep South'; and the characters include the white trash of which he has drawn such relentless portraits, plain folk of a better strain, whites of a higher order, Negroes, of for the subject of his most detailed attention a poor white with a probable mixture of Negro blood. --J. Donald Adams

Absalom, Absalom! (1937)
The saga of Sutpen and his family, and Quentin Compson's attempt to come to terms with it, embody all the tensions in Southern and indeed American history--race, sex, regionalism, the individual and community, etc.--as well as basic epistemological questions. --Elizabeth McKinsey

If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (The Wild Palms 1939)

The Hamlet (1940)

The Bear (from Go Down Moses 1942)

Pantaloon in Black (from Go Down Moses 1942)
Faulkner has written in brief compass a veritable saga of racial blindness. --Arnold Weinstein

C. N. HINSHELWOOD (Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood, 1897-1967) Nobel Prize

The Kinetics of Chemical Change in Gaseous Systems (1923)

Louise BOGAN (1897-1970)

The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968 (1968)

Tarjei VESAAS (1897-1970) The Online Books Page

The Ice Palace (1963)
Two little girls, occupying quite different places in the social order, develop a bond so deep it transcends identity. When one makes a fateful, fatal visit to the eponymous Ice Palace, the other experiences an Orphic transformation, becoming a living dead girl for a time. --Arnold Weinstein

The Boat in the Evening (1971)

Thornton WILDER (1897-1975) The Thornton Wilder Society

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)

Our Town (1938)
...utterly simple and basic, about birth, love, life, death, the immediately important dramatic themes. --Raphael and McLeish

The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)

The Matchmaker (1954)

George Wilson KNIGHT (1897-1985)

The Wheel of Fire (1930)

The Burning Oracle (19390

Louis ARAGON (1897-1986) Petri Liukkonen biography | Wolfgang Babilas fan site

Selected Poems

Kenneth BURKE (1897-1993)

Counter-statement (1931)

A Rhetoric of Motives (1961)
Complex, ingenious 'new' critic, Marxist maverick whose capacity to see what is going on in a work of literature is enthralling and revealing; his manner is mannered, but the realization of the interplay between character and 'scene' is valuable and enthralling. --Raphael and McLeish

Ole Edvart ROLVAAG (1896-1931)

Giants in the Earth (1927)

F. Scott FITZGERALD (1896-1940) The Online Books Page

This Side of Paradise (1920)

Tender Is the Night (1924)
John Updike bounces this kind of response back into the work itself. 'As so often in Fitzgerald,' he writes, 'we have only the afterglow of a dream to see by.' --Geoff Dyer, 'Fitzgerald's Afterglow', The American Scholar, Spring 2001, p. 138

The Great Gatsby (1925) William Voegeli review
Fitzgerald's lyric masterpiece tells us about the dreams, desires and heartbreaks that 'float in the wake' (to use a good Fitzgeraldian phrase) of the search for money and power. The whole narrative is also pervaded by the ever-present concern for social class and status that lay--and still lies--just below the surface of American life. --Gordon R. Willey

Babylon Revisited and Other Stories (1960)
He wrote good stories all his life--along with bad ones for magazines, to pay debts. --Raphael and McLeish

Antonin ARTAUD (1896-1948) Arnaud Hubert fan site

Selected Writings (1976)

Giuseppe Tomasi, Principe di LAMPEDUSA (1896-1957) post
Fittingly for a chronicler of decay, Lampedusa was himself the last of his line -- the last Prince of Lampedusa, the tiny Italian island between Malta and the African coast, today better-known as a staging post for would-be illegal immigrants than as an outpost of European civilization standing sentinel over the Barbary Coast. --Derek Turner, 'Lampedusa's The Leopard,' The Salisbury Review, Summer 2005, p. 33

The Leopard (1958)
Social disintegration, the failure of revolution, a sterile and unchanging South are evident on every page of the novel. --Edward Said, 'Thoughts on Late Style,' London Review of Books, August 5, 2004, p. 5

Edwin Justus MAYER (1896-1960)

Children of Darkness (1930)

Tristan TZARA (1896-1963)

Seven Dada Manifestos (1924)

Andre BRETON (1896-1966) Stephen Schwartz essay

The Manifestoes of Surrealism (Les Manifestes du surrealisme 1955)

Poems (1982)

John DOS PASSOS (1896-1970) The Online Books Page Richard F. Hill essay

U.S.A. (1938): The 42nd Parallel (1930); Nineteen Nineteen (1932); The Big Money (1936)
came quite early in the wave of revisionism and disillusion with World War I that reached these shores well before the Depression. --Reginald Phelps

Jacob GLATSTEIN (1896-1971)

Selected Poems (1972)

Eugenio MONTALE (1896-1981)
Montale's poetry, like his prose, followed no program, but hewed closely to the shifts of his inner life. Nevertheless, at various points in his career the critics were eager to link his work with this or that school, most often with 'hermeticism'--the movement that espoused the aesthetic of difficulty and veiled reference. --Sven Birkerts

Cuttlefish Bones: Poems (1925)

The Occasions: Poems (Le occasioni 1939)

Selected Essays (1978)

The Storm and Other Things (1978)

The Second Life of Art (1982)

Otherwise: Last and First Poems (1984)

Poems (1985)

Andrei PLATONOV (1895-1951)

The Foundation Pit (Kotlovan 1929–1930)

Paul ELUARD (Eugene Emile Paul Grindel 1895-1952)

Selected Poems (1946)

Mikhail ZOSHCHENKO (1895-1958)

Nervous People and Other Satires (1963)

Jean GIONO (1895-1970)

The Horseman on the Roof (Le Hussard sur le toit 1951)

Edmund WILSON (1895-1972) David Castronovo essay post

To the Finland Station (1940)
The best single book on Karl Marx and Marx's place in modern history. --Arthur Herman

The Shores of Light (1956)

Patriotic Gore (1962)
A careful reader of American literature works to restore our past. --The Intercollegiate Review

also

Stravinsky The New Republic (April 1, 1925)

Dorothy Parker's Poems The New Republic (January 19, 1927)

David JONES (1895-1974)

In Parenthesis (1937)

Anathemata (1955) W. H. Auden review

Robert GRAVES (1895-1985)) The Online Books Page Wikipedia entry

Good-Bye to All That (1929)
Argument about which is the finest set of British memoirs of World War I stops here. Post-war pages tell of T.E. Lawrence, friends in Oxford and Bloomsbury, marriage, children--and divorce in 1929, when he went to live abroad. --Raphael and McLeish

I, Claudius (1934)
Pioneering 'autobiographies' of the stammering emperor, at once clean and scabrous. --Raphael and McLeish

King Jesus (1946)

Collected Poems (1965) Robert Richman review
Graves is a strong, spare, almost classical poet; sometimes over-brisk, always invigorating. --Raphael and McLeish

LIN Yutang (1895-1976) post

The Importance of Living (1938)
One of those rare books which enchants while it enlightens, 'The Importance of Living' is written lightly yet with extraordinary insight. --Philip Ward

Susanne K. LANGER (1895-1985)

Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (3 vol. 1967-1982)

Joseph ROTH (1894-1939) Anthony Heilbut review | Nadine Gordimer review | Jeffrey Eugenides review

The Radetzky March (Radetzkymarsch 1932)
The principal characters are silent and solitary; they move under an enormous mass of empty sky. At the center of 'The Radetzky March' is, finally, not so much family or individuality as the whirring of time in the lives of men (women are almost entirely excluded). --Sven Birkerts

Isaac Emmanuelovich BABEL (1894-1941) Wikipedia

Collected Stories (1957)
These stories, like so much of Russian literature, question what seems to be the prime faith of intellectuals, that truth is to be found in extreme situations--the idea that everyday life is hopelessly banal, bourgeois, and deceitful, that reality is only authentic where things are starkest. --Gary Saul Morson, The New Criterion, January 2002, p. 63
His stories are brief and vivid, his viewpoint that of a Jew 'with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart'. --Raphael and McLeish

Marina Ivanova TSVETAYEVA (1894-1941) The Online Books Page

Selected Poems (1974)

Bibhutibhusan BANERJI (1894-1950)

Pather Panchali ("Song of the Road" 1929)

Dashiell HAMMETT (1894-1961) The Online Books Page Wikipedia entry

The Maltese Falcon (1930)
a San Francisco murder mystery--who killed Spade's partner, Miles Archer?--fastened onto an international caper plot, the kind in which all the gang members end up turning on each other. --Michael Dirda

Louis-Ferdinand CELINE (Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, 1894-1961) Wikipedia entry

Journey to the End of the Night (1934 John H. P. Marks translation; Voyage au bout de la nuit 1932)
opens with its semi-autobiographical hero's grim experiences during World War I, in the African jungle, and in America (where he works on the Ford assembly line in Detroit), and ends with Bardamu as a down-and-out doctor in Paris. --Michael Dirda

Death on the Installment Plan (U.S.) or Death on Credit (1938 John H. P. Marks translation; Mort a credit, 1936)
lurches from gallows humor to the realities of starvation and death. --Michael Dirda

James THURBER (1894-1961) F. H. Buckley review | Robert Gottlieb review

Is Sex Necsssary? (1929, with E. B. WHITE)

My Life and Hard Times (1933)

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (The New Yorker, March 18, 1939)
In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Thurber's typical henpecked husband daydreams as he dances attendance on his wife, finally refusing a blindfold to face a firing squad. --Raphael and McLeish

E. E. CUMMINGS (1894-1962) The Online Books Page Eric Miles Williamson review

Complete Poems (1960)
Some of his sentimentality, his easy lyric sweetness I enjoy in the way one enjoys a rather commonplace composer's half-sweet, half-cloying melodies, but much if it is straight ham, straight corn. --Randall Jarrell

Aldous HUXLEY (1894-1963) The Online Books Page | Bibliomania Petri Liukkonen biography | Matthew A. fan site post

Antic Hay (1923)

Point Counter Point (1928)
Ostentatiously 'libellous', Point Counter Point retains interest as a portrait of 1930s galere (D. H. Lawrence et al.). Prurience and wit are lively and sustaining. --Raphael and McLeish

Brave New World (1932) David Pearce essay
Brave New World is an early example of modern dystopianism: the future as awful warning. --Raphael and McLeish
He has satirized the imminent spiritual trustification of mankind, and has made rowdy and impertinent sport of the World State whose motto shall be Community, Identity, Stability. --John Chamberlain

Collected Essays (1958)

Norbert WIENER (1894-1964)

Cybernetics (1948) William L. Lawrence review

also

The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)
Along with technical developments that made them [computers and robotics] possible, there developed a profound theory on information and control. This book is a milestone in the documentation and translation of that theory for the general reader. --S. James Adelstein

Jean TOOMER (1894-1967) The Online Books Page Wikipedia entry

Cane (1923)
the vexed issues of race and identity inform the jazzy medley of sketches, poems and stories that make up Cane. --Michael Dirda

Mark VAN DOREN (1894-1972)

Selected Poems (1954)

Jean RENOIR (1894-1979)

Renoir, My Father (1962)
Intimate, uninhibited picture of a great painter. From life--or studio portrait? --Raphael and McLeish

Joseph H. WOODGER (1894-1981) see Brauckmann and Kull

Biological Principles (1929)

J. V. FOIX (1894-1987) two poems Patricia J. Boehne essay

When I Sleep, Then I See Clearly: Selected Poems (1988)

Wilfred OWEN (1893-1918) The Online Books Page

Collected Poems (1965)

Vladimir Vladimirovich MAYAKOVSKY (1893-1930)

The Bedbug and Selected Poetry (1975)

Israel Joshua SINGER (1893-1944)

Yoshe Kalb (1932)

The Brothers Ashkenazi (1937)

Carles RIBA (1893-1959)

Poems (1970)

Herbert READ (1893-1968)

The Contrary Experience: Autobiographies (1963)

The Green Child (1935)

MAO Tse-Tung (1893-1976) The Online Books Page Marxists Internet Archive post
...he must be accounted the most evil man who ever lived, of whom we have detailed knowledge, without any redeeming qualities whatsoever. --Paul Johnson, 'The Human Race', The New Criterion, November 2006, p. 13
Anyone not taking account of the nation's leader during the decades of the Communist era will risk a myopic view of world events. --Philip Ward

Quotations from Chairman Mau Tse-tung (1961)

Selected Works (1977)

Jorge GUILLEN y Alvarez (1893-1984) Wikipedia entry

Guillen on Guillen: The Poetry and the Poet (1976)

AKUTAGAWA Ryunosuke (1892-1927) The Devil and Tobacco

Rashomon and other stories (1915)

Cesar VALLEJO (1892-1938)

Spain, Take This Cup from Me (Espana, aparte de mi este calize 1939)

Selected Poems (1981)

Walter BENJAMIN (1892-1940) Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (1968)
What prevents Benjamin's vision of the situation from being entirely hopeless (as it is in Kafka) is the belief that the scattered pieces still possess some residual attraction for one another, that the original reality can theoretically be rediscovered. --Sven Birkerts

also

1940 Survey of French Literature New Left Review (May-June 2008)

Bruno SCHULZ (1892-1942)

The Street of Crocodiles (1936; Sklepy Cynamonowe "Cinnamon Shops")

Sanitorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1988; Sanatorium Pod Klepsydra)

Pedro SALINAS (1892-1951)

My Voice Because of You (1976; La voz a ti debida)

Konstantin PAUSTOVSKY (1892-1968)

The Story of a Life (Manya Harari and Michael Duncan translation 1964, Povest' o Zhimi 1946-64)
a magnificent autobiography which delineates life in the Soviet Union during the first half of the twentieth century (he traveled very widely) in all its endless variety. --Philip Ward

Ivy COMPTON-BURNETT (1892-1969) The Online Books Page Wikipedia entry
Imagine a mix of Oscar Wilde, Wilkie Collins, and Sophocles, or think of a gloomy P. G. Wodehouse. --Michael Dirda

Brothers and Sisters (1929)

Bullivant and the Lambs (U.S.) or Manservant and Maidservant (1947)

A God and his Gifts (1963)

Reinhold NIEBUHR (1892-1971) post
...argued that democracy cannot be defended by appealing to Enlightenment rationalism or faith in historical progress but only by a hard-headed appreciation of 'original sin.' --Daniel J. Mahoney, The Public Interest, Fall 2001, p. 120
Niebuhr, who has come into fashion again among liberals intent on devising a third way between neoconservatives and antiwar Democrats, supported the cold war struggle against the Soviet Union but warned against wallowing in American righteousness. --Jacob Heilbrun, A Question of Character, review of 'Hard Call' by John McCain with Mark Salter, The New York Times Book Review, September 9, 2007, p. 26

The Nature and Destiny of Man (1941-1943)
Niebuhr is often categorized as a 'Christian realist' about worldly affairs and as 'Neo-orthodox' in his theological view of man. The second claim comes from his insistence that contrary to Pollyannaish liberal Protestants, man is indeed sinful and unlikely to do good just because the welfare state has helped him out of poverty. Niebuhr's politics are called 'realist' because he argued, eloquently and at length, that our pious worries about geopolitics leading to injustice and complicity with evil should not impede us from making hard-nosed political desisions in a cruel world. --Daniel P. Moloney, Crisis, July/August 2002, p. 47
A biting critique of secular thought and a persuasive and inspiring exposition of man's Christian destiny. --The Intercollegiate Review

also

Serenity Prayer (1944)

Pearl BUCK (1892-1973) post

The Good Earth (1931)
Its powerful presentation of some basic cultural differences was a valuable way to be introduced to the importance of seeing and respecting different cultures and values, of accepting cultural differences and of acknowledging the value of other perspectives. --Matina Horner

J. R. R. TOLKIEN (1892-1973) The Online Books Page Tolkien Society | The Catholic Imagination post

The Hobbit (1937)
Hobbits are small, home-loving creatures; Bilbo's uncharacteristic expedition with the dwarfs to find dragon treasure leads, among other things, to finding the fateful ring which, in later (adult) 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy, leads his nephew Frodo to the edge of Mordor and the destruction of its dark powers. --Raphael and McLeish

The Lord of the Rings (1954-1956)
The hero, Frodo Baggins, belongs to a race called hobbits, who may be only three feet high, have hairy feet and prefer to live in underground houses, but in their thinking and sensibility resemble very closely those arcadian rustics who inhabit so many British detective stories. --W. H. Auden

Ivo ANDRIC (1892-1975) Nobel Prize

The Bridge on the Drina (1945)

Hugh MACDIARMID (1892-1978)

Complete Poems 1920-1976 (1978)

Rebecca WEST (1892-1983) The Online Books Page Carl Rollyson essay | Richard Tillinghast essay

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942)
For its writing, not for its historical accuracy. --Michael Kelly

also

The Duty of Harsh Criticism The New Republic (November 7, 1914)

Louis DE BROGLIE (1892-1987) Davis Associates essay
If waves (such as light) can act like paricles, then perhaps particles (such as electrons) can act like waves. --Stephen M. Barr, Faith and Quantum Theory, First Things, March 2007, p. 21

Investitgations on Quantum Theory (Recherches sur la theorie des quanat 1924)

J. P. MARQUAND (1892-1960) Jonathan Yardley essay

H. M. Pulham, Esquire (1941)

Archibald MACLEISH (1892-1982)

The Human Season, Selected Poems 1926-1972 (1972)

Osip Emilievich MANDELSTAM or MANDELSHTAM (1891-1938)

Selected Poems (1967)
What we get, in English, is at best a kind of camera obscura rendering of a phenomenon that is densely textured, quick with allusion, and that derives its internal propulsion from the intransmissible word itself. --Sven Birkerts

Mikhail BULGAKOV (1891-1940)

The Master and Margarita (c. 1930's)

Zora Neale HURSTON (1891-1960) The Online Books Page Wikipedia entry post
...belongs in the same category with that of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway of enduring American literature. --Saturday Review, quoted by Linton Weeks, Washington Post, in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, January 6, 2002, p. 5E

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Janice's self-knowledge, tenacity and humor, as well as her story, make her one of the more memorable characters in American fiction. --Elizabeth McKinsey

Par LAGERKVIST (1891-1974)

Barabbas (1950)

Evening Land (Aftonland 1953)

The Sibyl (Sibyllan 1956) The Sibyl picks up all these themes—being unblessed, being confused and even undone by an encounter with a god—but adds substantially to the mix by dint of its polytheistic plot and gender issues. --Arnold Weinstein

After 1890, however, the inherited cultural and social continuum disolved, thereby diminishing certainties about the purpose of human endeavor. --Oscar Handlin

Isaac ROSENBERG (1890-1918)

Collected Poems (1974)

H. P. LOVECRAFT (1890-1937) The Online Books Page Wikipedia entry
Lovecraft firmly believed that the successful weird tale should be utterly realistic except for the one shattering incursion from the Outside. Nonetheless, from the very first words his stories constantly hint that something is awry, off-kilter, not quite right. --Michael Dirda

The Colour Out of Space (1927)

The Call of Cthulhu (1928)

The Dunwich Horror (1929)

At the Mountains of Madness (1936)

The Shadow Out of Time (1936)

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1941)

Karel CAPEK (1890-1938) Patricia Hampl essay

R. U. R. (Rossumovi univerzalni roboti 1920; Rossum's Universal Robots)

War with the Newts (Valka s mloky 1936)

Boris PASTERNAK (1890-1960) Twenty-two poems post

Selected Poems (1946)

Doctor Zhivago (1957)
...includes a panoramic view of Russian history during the first thirty years of the twentieth century, a classic love story, and philosophical and religious observations on questions of life, morals, and power which inevitably drew attention to the inadequacies of Marxism as a way of life, and to the bloody events during and after the Russian Revolution that led to the emasculation under Stalinism of intellectual and artistic activity. --Philip Ward

R. A. FISHER (1890-1962)

The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930)

Agatha CHRISTIE (1890-1976) The Online Books Page Wikipedia entry

Hercule Poirot mysteries (The Mysterious Affair at Styles, 1920-Curtain, 1975)
His general practice was simply to encourage people to talk about themselves, their activities at the time of the murder, and the victim. Some personality trait, a casual discrepancy in alibi, the smallest, least likely detail might be enough to set his orderly mind on the right track. He would then meditate on his 'little ideas' until he discovered the one pattern that would explain every anamoly. --Michael Dirda

Miss Marple mysteries (The Thirteen Problems 1927-Sleeping Murder, 1976))
an elderly spinster living in a quiet English village, whose penetrating blue eyes miss absolutely nothing. Not surprisingly, the Miss Marple novels often examine domestic of familial tragedies. --Michael Dirda

Jean RHYS (1890-1979)

Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
More than merely filling in the gaps in Bronte’s novel [Jane Eyre], it is a challenging and evocative tale of colonialism, identity, and madness. --Arnold Weinstein

Katherine Anne PORTER (1890-1980)

Collected Stories (1965) Eric Ormsby review

Adolf HITLER (1889-1945) Hitler Historical Museum The Daily Hitler post

Mein Kampf (1925-27)
Nothing is lacking in that book; the blood and land, the living space, the Jew as the eternal enemy, the Germans who embody 'the highest form of humanity on earth', the other countries openly regarded as the instruments of German domination. --Primo Levi

Ludwig WITTGENSTEIN (1889-1951) The Online Books Page Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy post
For Wittgenstein, as for Hegel, reality lay precisely in other people and other things, that is, outside the self whose own reality they underwrite. --Robert Grant, The Salisbury Review, Summer 2001, p. 45
Wittgenstein countered Descartes’ dualism, after all, by observing that the philosophical question he was most famous for — *how do I know that I am?* — contained the seeds of its destruction in the very phrasing: Only by *presupposing* a community of language believers, Wittgenstein argued, could this question about radical oneness make sense. --Mary Eberstadt, 'How the West Really Lost God', Policy Review, June & July 2007

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung 1921) Contents
A terse summation of the analytic method of the analytic school in philosophy, and a heroic leap beyond it. --Jeffrey Hart

Philosophical Investigations (1953) Lois Shawver essay
In a century littered with ill-considered arguments about the linguistic "construction of reality," this landmark of the later Wittgenstein stands in a wholly different category. --The Intercollegiate Review

E. P. HUBBLE (1889-1953)

The Realm of the Nebulae (1936)

Pierre REVERDY (1889-1960)

Selected Poems (1991)

Jean COCTEAU (1889-1963) John Bentley Mays essay

Les enfant terribles (1929)

The Infernal Machine (La Machine infernale 1934)

Anna AKHMATOVA (1889-1966) The Online Books Page | Poetry Lovers Page Wikipedia entry | Academy of American Poets
Style aims at sense rather than sound, clarity rather than vagueness--and is particularly susceptible to translation. --Raphael and McLeish

Evening (1912)

Rosary (1914)

White Flock (1915)
the poet transmuted both her serious affairs and passing fancies into lyrics of permanent beauty. --Michael Dirda

Requiem (1988)
Her book-length elegy for the 1930s... . --Michael Dirda

Christopher DAWSON (1889-1970) The Online Books Page Wikipedia entry Michael Richard Lynch dissertation [pdf]

Progress and Religion: An Historical Enquiry (1929)

Enquiries into Religion and Culture (1933)

Religion and the Modern State (1935)

also

The Dynamics Of World History (1956) Internet Archive

Christianity and Culture: Selections from the Writings of Christopher Dawson (2008) Internet Archive

Conrad AIKEN (1889-1973) The Online Books Page | Poetry Archive | Academy of American Poets

Collected Poems 1916-1970 (1970)

Taha HUSAYN (1889-1973)

An Egyptian Childhood (1932)

Arnold TOYNBEE (1889-1975) The Online Books Page Frederick D. Wilhelmsen essay

A Study of History (1934-1961)
The proletariats are 'softened' (in Toynbee's phrase) by their imitation of the manners and morals of a dominant elite. But when a society begins to falter, the imitation proceeds largely in the opposite direction: the dominant elite is coarsened by its imitation of proletarian manners. --Notes & Comments, The New Criterion, March 2001 p. 2
Made the possibility of a divine role in history respectable among serious historians. --The Intercollegiate Review

Civilization on Trial (1948)

Radio Debate (1948)

An Historian's Approach to Religion (1956; Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh, 1952-1953)

Martin HEIDEGGER (1889-1976) Leland de la Durantaye essay | Adam Kirsch review | Simon Blackburn review | Glenn W. Most essay | Robert Sokolowski review | Simon Blackburn review | Berel Lang review | William E. Hughes essay | Denis Dutton essay

Being and Time (1962)
A seminal thinker, notwithstanding his disgraceful error of equating National Socialism with the experience of 'Being.' --Jeffrey Hart

Harry Elmer BARNES (1889-1968)

A History of Historical Writing (2nd Ed., 1962)

Katherine MANSFIELD (Kathleen Murry 1888-1923) The Online Books Page Birthplace post

The Short Stories (1945)
Mansfield's best stories, many about her childhood in New Zealand. --Raphael and McLeish
And I was jealous of her stories--the only writing I have ever been jealous of. --Virginia Woolf, quoted by Patrical Hampl, 'The Relics of Saint Katherine', The American Scholar, Summer 2001, p. 139

Eugene O'NEILL (1888-1933) The Online Books Page eO'Neill | Tao House | National Historic Site post Stark Young review

The Emperor Jones (1921)

Desire Under the Elms (1924)

Lazarus Laughed (1925)

Mourning Becomes Electra (1931)
... the success of Mourning Becomes Electra's three closely linked plays had shown him what had been missing from his earlier work, or at least only weakly present--a sense of history, of time at work on America. --Thomas Flanangan, 'Master of the Misbegotten', 'New York Review of Books' October 5, 2000 p. 14

The Iceman Cometh (1946)
The Iceman Cometh is indeed made of ice or iron; it is full of will and fanatic determination; it appears to have been written at some extreme temperature of the mind. --Mary McCarthy, quoted from 1946 'New Yorker' review, by Thomas Flanangan in 'Master of the Misbegotten', 'New York Review of Books' October 5, 2000 p. 14
In a cheap tavern, craven dreamers are startled into action by a travelling salesman--in effect a salesman of death. --Raphael and McLeish

Long Day's Journey into Night (1956)
Essentially, 'Long Day's Journey into Night' is not so much a tale as O'Neill's remorseless attempt to tell the blunt truth about his family as a matter of artistic conscience. --Brooks Atkinson

Fernando PESSOA (1888-1935) The Online Books Page Wikipedia entry
The work for which he will always be remembered was written by himself, under his own name, and under three heteronyms, each of which represented a complete autonomous poetic life and work in the Pirandellian sense of divided by whole identities. --Philip Ward

Selected Poems (Peter Rickard translation 1971)

Always Astonished: Selected Prose (1988)

The Book of Disquiet (1991)

The Keeper of the Sheep (1997)

Poems of Fernando Pessoa (1998)

Umberto SABA (Umberto Poli 1888-1957)

Poems (1911)

Stories and Recollections (1993)

H. LEIVICK (Leivick Halpern 1888-1962)

The Golem (Der Golem 1919)

Edith HAMILTON (1867-1963)

Mythology (1940)

RAMON Gomez de la Serna (1888-1963)

Gregurias. Seleccion, 1910-1960 (1960, edited by Philip Ward)
A greguria is defined by Ramon as 'humour + metaphor' and was chosen because--among other reasons--it is used by farmers to describe the squealing of piglets chasing a sow. --Philip Ward

T. S. ELIOT (1888-1965) The Online Books Page Wikipedia entry post

Selected Essays (1932)
Shaped the literary taste of the mid-century. --Jeffrey Hart, The 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the Century, National Review, May 3, 1999
Here, one of the century's foremost literary innovators insists that innovation is only possible through an intense engagement of tradition. --The Intercollegiate Review

Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
This is his most accessible play: the others are elliptical, mannered, sometimes tedious. --Raphael and McLeish

The Cocktail Party (1950)

Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (1963)
For twenty years I’ve / stared my level best / To see if evening—any evening—would suggest / A patient etherised upon a table; / In vain. I simply wasn’t able. --C.S. Lewis
His attempt in fact was to restore the greatest tradition of all, the tradition that forces poetry in any age to face the spirit of that age and reflect it without loss or blur. --Mark Van Doren, The Great Ideas Today 1969, p. 290
Eliot is one of the greatest English-speaking poets of the modern age, a formidable intellect chastely exploring the sensuous dark. --Raphael and McLeish
Eliot's use [in 'Four Quartets'] of the garden as metaphor, his juxtaposition of nature's time and human time, struck a deep resonance. --Anne Whiston Spirn

S. Y. AGNON (Shmuel Yosef Halevi Czaczkes, 1888-1970) Nobel Prize | Petri Liukkonen biography Vyas

In the Heart of the Seas (1948)

Twenty-one Stories (1970)

Giuseppe UNGARETTI (1888-1970)

The Buried Harbour: Selected Poems (1970)

Selected Poems (1975)

John Crowe RANSOM (1888-1979) The Online Books Page Tillinghast

Selected Poems (1963)

Georg TRAKL (1887-1914)

Selected Poems (1968)

Edwin MUIR (1887-1959) Richman

Collected Poems (1965)

Ruth BENEDICT (1887-1948) The Online Books Page

Patterns of Culture (1934)

Erwin SCHROEDINGER (1887-1961) Randy F. and Cecil Adams correspondence

What Is Life? The Physical Aspects of the Living Cell (1943)
invited biologists to think of life in more purely physical terms. --Edward O. Wilson

Statistical Thermodynamics (1946)

Nature and the Greeks (1954)
its thesis, that science is nothing more nor less than that habit of 'looking at the world in the Greek way.' --Raphael and McLeish

Charles Galton DARWIN (1887-1962)

The Next Million Years (1952)

Robinson JEFFERS (1887-1967)

Selected Poems (1965)

Marianne MOORE (1887-1972) The Online Books Page

"Poetry" (from Observations 1924) Robert Pinsky essay

"Marriage" (from Observations 1924)

The Complete Poems (1981) William Logan review | Frank Kermode review

J. HUXLEY (1887-1975)

Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942)

St.-John PERSE (Marie-Rene-Auguste-Alexis Leger, 1887-1975)

Anabasis (Anabase 1924)

Birds (1966)

Exile and Other Poems (1949)

Pierre-Jean JOUVE (1887-1976)

Despair Has Wings: Selected Poems (2007)

Samuel Eliot MORISON (1887-1976)

The Oxford History of the United States (1963)

Henri ALAIN-FOURNIER (Henri-Alban Fournier, 1886-1914)

Le Grand Meaulnes (1913)

Ronald FIRBANK (1886-1926)

Five Novels: The Artificial Princess (1915); Valmouth (1919); The Flower Beneath The Foot (1923); Prancing Nigger or Sorrow in Sunlight (1925); Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926);

Moshe-Leib HALPERN (1886-1932)

In New York (1982; In Nyu-York 1954)

Hermann BROCH (1886-1951)

The Sleepwalkers (Die Schlafwandler 1932)

The Death of Virgil (Der Tod des Vergil 1945)

Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time (Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit 1974)

Gottfried BENN (1886-1956)

Selected Poems (1970)

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle 1886-1961) The Online Books Page Robert Gottlieb review

Selected Poems (1988)

Karl POLANYI (1886-1964)

The Great Transformation (1944)

TANIZAKI Junichiro (1886-1965)

The Makioka Sisters (Edward Seidenstecker translation 1957; Sasameyuki ['light snow'] 1943-48)
a great Proustian novel concerned with an Osaka family, and their quest for a husband for one of the sisters, Yukiko. --Philip Ward

Velimir KHLEBNIKOV (1885-1922)

The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian (1990)

D. H. LAWRENCE (David Herbert Lawrence 1885-1930) The Online Books Page The Literature Network post
T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, to name only two, attacked the lyricfiction of Lawrence precisely because of the moral polemic embodied in it. --Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (1966) p. 191
In literature too there is an attempt to return man to Paradise after an obvious Fall. D. H. Lawrence would reintegrate man through sex... --Fulton J. Sheen, 'Winning Converts' Rev. John O'Brien, ed., quoted in 'This Rock' September 1999, p. 40
some of his books undoubtedly seem, consciously or not, to stress the element of sex. --Henry James Forman

Sons and Lovers (1913)
Lawrence has been less admired since the rise of militant feminism, yet 'Sons and Lovers', as a particular case (if not 'philosopy'), is unrivalled; Paul Morel's working class youth is thick with sensitive pain and observed life. --Raphael and McLeish

The Rainbow (1915) James Wood review

Women in Love (1921)
The Rainbow and Women in Love form a diptych; two sisters and their married destinies against the background of Nottingham farming and mining life. --Raphael and McLeish

Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

Complete Poems (1964)

Collected Stories (1994)
'Odour of Chrysanthemums' and 'The Rocking-Horse Winner' are the most memorable; but all are interesting, surprisingly relaxed. --Raphael and McLeish

Dino CAMPANA (1885-1932)

Orphic Songs and Other Poems (1991)

Ring LARDNER (Ringgold Lardner 1885-1933) The Online Books Page
Edmund Wilson once said 'What bell might not Lardner ring if he set out to give us the works?' Lardner did give us the works. In the vernacular. There must have been something wrong with Wilson's bell. --Raphael and McLeish

You Know Me Al (1916)

The Young Immigrants (1920)

Haircut and Other Stories (1925)

Sinclair LEWIS (1885-1951) The Online Books Page The Sinclair Lewis Society
[T]he most celebrated American novelist never to have written a great work of literature... --Alan Wolfe, 'The Opening of the Evangelical Mind' in 'The Atlantic Monthly' October, 2000 p. 58

Main Street (1920)
The publication of Main Street ranks with that of Uncle Tom's Cabin as one of the few literary events in American history that proved to be a political and social event as well. --Jane Smiley, New York Times Book Review, January 20, 2002, p. 10

Babbitt (1922)
How often have the privileged taken to their bosoms the writers who execrated them! The Babbitts of America were to a great extent responsible for the success of Sinclair Lewis. --Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (1957), p. 212
a loving, never sentimental portrait of a small-town businessman... . --Raphael and McLeish

Arrowsmith (1925)
The perfect young man's book: a vision of a pure life devoted to the search for scientific truth, above money grubbing and hypocrisy. --Edward O. Wilson

Elmer Gantry (1927)
debunks religious revivalism through the person of one phoney preacher. --Raphael and McLeish

Dodsworth (1929)

It Can't Happen Here (1935)

Elinor WYLIE (1885-1951) The Online Books Page Carrie fan site

Last Poems (1982)

Hermann WEYL (1885-1955) The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive

Space, Time, Matter (Raum, Zeit, Materie 1918)

Group Theory and Quantum Mechanics (Gruppentheorie und Quantenmechanik 1928)

Ernst Robert CURTIUS (1885-1956)

European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948)

Isak DINESEN (Karen Blixen, 1885-1962)
She had a magic way of endowing people with powers--beauty, clairvoyance, passion--undreamed of by the realists who surrounded her. Her world is cool, strangely lighted, and somehow perfect. --Mark Van Doren, The Great Ideas Today 1969, p. 295

The Roads Around Pisa (1934)

Out of Africa (1937)
I wouldn't mind calling this Isak Dinesen up. --Holden Caulfield

Seven Gothic Tales (1937)
Sophisticated entertainments, with appealing irony implicit in deliberately old-fashioned narrative method. --Raphael and McLeish

Winter's Tales (1942)
Like most of their [Merimee, Hoffmann, and Kleist's] work, her 'Gothic' or 'Winter's' tales are generally set in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, but Dinesen's are deliberately suffused with a courtly and refined decadence. --Michael Dirda

Niels BOHR (1885-1964)

The Theory of Spectra and Atomic Constitution (1922)

Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (1958)

also

On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules (Philosophical Magazine 26:1–24 1913) IHEP/COMPAS [pdf]

Francois MAURIAC (1885-1970)

The Desert of Love (1949; Le Desert de l'amour 1925)

Therese (1928; Therese Desqueyroux 1927)

The Woman of the Pharisees (1946; La Pharisienne 1941)

Ezra POUND (1885-1972) The Online Books Page Wikipedia entry post | Mark Ford review

Personae (1909)

The Spirit of Romance (1910)
his study of Provencal poetry... . --Michael Dirda

Cathay (1915)

Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919)
Most enjoyable of all is the swaggering translation, really an 'imitations'... . --Michael Dirda

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)
an acid overview of the English literary scene... . --Michael Dirda

Personae: Collected Poems (1926)
One muat be thankful for what he is and realize that after years of ridicule from calf-brains he indubitably stands upon an eminence from which he must not be easily shaken. --Herbert S. Gorman

ABC of Reading (1934)
An epitome of the aging aesthetic movement that will be forever known as modernism. --Richard Brookhiser

The Pisan Cantos (1948; LXXIV–LXXXIV of The Cantos, 1915-1962)

The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941 (1950, D. D. Paige, editor)

The Cantos (1915-1962)
anyone interested in poetry should read the first seven or so cantos, most of the Pisan Cantos ... and such dazzling set pieces as the 'with usura' aria of Canto XLV and the 'pull down thy vanity' climax of Canto LXXXI. --Michael Dirda

Literary Essays (1968)

Yevgeni Ivanovich ZAMYATIN (1884-1937) R. Kreuzer fan site

My (1924)
Indeed, the ways by which the men and women in 'We' resist 'social engineering' and futuristic regimes are both enigmatic and engaging. --Thomas Galton Marullo, The Review of Politics, Summer 2003, pp. 466-467
...a nightmare of life in the distant future, when human beings are known by numbers and they live in the One State ruled by the so-called Benefactor. --Philip Ward

Angelos SIKELIANOS (1884-1951)

Selected Poems (1996)

Yahya Kemal BEYATLI (1884-1958) Wikipedia entry

Selected Poems (S. Behlul Toyger translation, 1965)
Bayath resists the Westernization of Turkish culture with dignity and restraint. His poetry is small in extent and circumscribed in range, but as perfect in its richness and harmony. It is reminiscent of Turkish miniatures. --Philip Ward

Eugene HERRIGEL (1884-1955)

Zen in the Art of Archery (1948)

Sean O'CASEY (1884-1964)

Juno and the Paycock (1925)

The Shadow of a Gunman (1925)

The Plough and the Stars (1926)

Etienne GILSON (1884-1978)

The Unity of Philosophical Experience (1937)

The Arts of the Beautiful (1965)
Gilson (a noted and dependable critic) writes with grace and style not of pictures only, but of art in general. --Raphael and McLeish

Jaroslav HASEK (1883-1923) Wikipedia entry

The Good Soldier Schweik (1920-23)
Endearing, caustic satire on war and the lunatic proceduralists who wage it. --Raphael and McLeish
It is perhaps not a very great book. It gives me, however, a sense of comic relief when I am confronted with the arrogance of the powerful. --Dante Della-Terza

Franz KAFKA (1883-1924) The Online Books Page The Kafka Project post
He felt imprisoned by the insurance company in which he was obliged by his father to work until tuberculosis ended his working life. --Philip Ward

In the Penal Colony (1913)

The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung 1915)
Kafka's most haunting story, in which he found a perfect image for his pervasive sense of alienation. --Raphael and McLeish
What have I become? / Uncertain, Gregor Samsa / puts out some feelers. --David M. Bader, Haiku U.

A Country Doctor (Ein Landarzt, 1919)
The doctor goes to the patient-with-wound on strange horses; at some level, we go there too. --Arnold Weinstein

The Blue Octavo Notebooks [1917-1919]

Diaries [1910-1923]

The Trial (Muirs translation 1953, Der Process 1925) David Luhrssen review
allegory of the relationship of man to a God who is omnipotent and incomprehensible, whose moral authority he recognizes while struggling against His concrete manifestations which are always absurd or unjust or both. --Dwight Macdonald

The Castle (Muirs translation 1957, Das Schloss 1926)
'The Castle' is a superb comic chiller of the search for a spiritual keep. --Raphael and McLeish

Amerika (Willa and Edwin Muir translation 1962, Amerika or Der Verschollene 1927)
'America' is a comedy of the immigrant Kafka never was (he never saw America). --Raphael and McLeish

Description of a Struggle (Beschreibung eines Kampfes 1936)

Wedding Preparations in the Country (Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande 1953)

Gesammelte Werke (1950-1958)

The Complete Stories (1971)

Parables, Fragments, Aphorisms

Austin Tappan WRIGHT (1883-1931) Wood

Islandia (1942)

also

Joseph SCHUMPETER (1883-1950) Ludwig von Mises Institute The Economist column The Economist essay

Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942)
Schumpeter captured the essence of modern economic development with his focus on technological change and the 'creative destruction' that it brings about. ... --Jeffrey Sachs

John Maynard, 1st Baron KEYNES (1883-1946) The Online Books Page Archive for the History of Economic Thought post

The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)
[Keynes said] 'Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist'. Yet for over eight decades...our world-historical view [of Versailles] has been influenced by the same defunct economist who promulgated the assertion. --Andrew Roberts, A History of the English Speaking Poeples Since 1900

The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1935-1936)
Influential in suggesting that the business cycle can be modified by government investment and manipulation of tax rates --Jeffrey Hart
This book did for Big Government what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did for the tse-tse fly. --The Fifty Worst (and Best) Books of the Century, The Intercollegiate Review, Fall 1999

Mani LEIB (Mani Leib Brahinsky 1883-1953)

Selected Poems

Jose ORTEGA y Gasset (1883-1955)

Invertebrate Spain (1921)
'Spineless Spain' --ed.
The cancer that was fatally undermining the fragile stability of Spanish society was, he claimed, the 'particularist' propensityof each Spanish individual or group to live purely for himself or itself, heedless of others, and as he put it, not to contar con los demas (to have to deal with others). --Curtis Cate, 'How Vertebrate Is Spain,' The Salisbury Review, Spring 2005

The Revolt of the Masses (1929)
Prophesied the 20th century's debauchery of democracy and science, the barbarism of the specialist, and the inevitable fatuity of public opinion. --George Gilder

also

Morbid Democracy Modern Age (Summer 1957) [pdf]

Pedagogy and Anachronism Modern Age (Summer 1957) [pdf]

Nikos KAZANTZAKIS (1883-1957)

The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1938)

Zorba the Greek (1946)

The Greek Passion (1948)

William Carlos WILLIAMS (1883-1963) Poets post

Spring and All (1923)

Paterson (Book I 1946; Books I-V 1963)

Collected Poems (Vol. 1 1988; Vol. 2 1989)

Sholem ASCH (Szulim Asz 1883-1953)

East River (1946)

James JOYCE (1882-1941) The Online Books Page Brian Phillips essay The Onion
Ireland’s most famous exile --Emily Allen

Dubliners (1914)
Small lives seen closely enough to disclose eternal truths. --Lloyd Weinreb
One story, 'The Dead', is a masterpiece. The rest would perhaps not seem so interesting now if Joyce had not gone on to write Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. --Raphael and McLeish

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) H. G. Wells review
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a 'conventional' narrative of Stephen Dedalus's Dublin adolescence at the turn of the century, branded by Catholic bigotry; increasingly less 'difficult' in the light of its derivatives. --Raphael and McLeish

Ulysses (1922) Joe Carter essay | Franz S. Klein essay | Tim Cavanaugh review
This happened with many of us: 'Ulysses' gradually--but with an effect of suddenness--became accessible. It was because in the interim we had been reading diluted Joyce in writers like Faulkner and so had got used to his ways, at second remove. --Mary McCarthy, 'Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936-1938' (1993) p. 25
a turgid welter of schoolboy pornography --Edith Wharton
To the uninitiated, it appeared that Mr. Joyce had taken some half million assorted words--many such as are not ordinarily heard in reputable circles--shaken them up in a colossal hat ... laid them end to end. --quoted in 'Time, Vol. 1, No. 1' by Dwight Macdonald, Partisan Review, April 1938
All of English literature in one book--compressed and mythologized through the language and vision of a unique modern artist. --Robert Brustein

Finnegan's Wake (1939)
It was the end product of an evolution that conceivably could be called tragic, since it culminated in a book from which most readers are shut out. --Mark Van Doren, The Great Ideas Today 1969, p. 297

Virginia WOOLF (1882-1941) The Online Books Page post
... that poster girl for twentieth-century feminism, department of snobbish literary neurasthenia. --Roger Kimball, Gallimaufry & more: 'The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,' New Criterion, January 2005, p. 4

Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street (The Dial July 1923)
The story appears to set up Clarissa as the whipping boy of an outdated and deluded Victorianism. ... High Modernism can, in this way, feel a bit smug, a bit self-satisfied in its intellectual and political superiority, and ultimately a bit cold. --Emily Allen

Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Clarissa's day, the impressions she gives and receives, the memories and recognitions which stir in her, the events which are initiated remotely and engineered almost to touching distance of the impervious Clarissa, capture in a definite matrix the drift of thought and feeling in a period, the point of view of a class, and seem almost to indicate the strength and weakness of an entire civilization. --John M. Crawford

To the Lighthouse (1927)
It gets at the amazingly complex but ephemeral ideas and emotions that are there every second in everyone without ever telling you anything straight out. --Duncan Kennedy

Orlando (1928)

Three Guineas (1928)
deftly examined the relationship between gender and social values in education and the professions, and the implications of this relationship for both individuals and society as a whole. --Constance Buchanan

A Room of One's Own (1929)
Long essay on the need for women to have economic independence to fulfill their potential. Beautifully written, though now (dated by the changes it helped to bring about) seems rather ladylike. --Raphael and McLeish
In pointing to some of the connections between the poverty of women's institutions and the poverty of women's history, Woolf illuminates questions that we have not yet managed to resolve, and creates a new character--Shakespeare's sister--to live in our collective imagination. --Clarissa Atkinson

The Waves (1931)
'The Waves' is marvelous: a richly brocaded poetic tapestry, close- patterned with Bloomsbury figures. --Raphael and McLeish
I still think Woolf's The Waves should get at least two stars :) --Timothy Burns

Between the Acts (1941)

also

The Movies and Reality The New Republic (August 4, 1926)

The Letters of Virginia Woolf (edited by Nigel Nicolson, 6 vol., 1975-80)
The sheer verbal skill in these dashed-off letters is superb--and they are marvelously perceptive and penetrating. --Bernard Bailyn

A. S. EDDINGTON (1882-1944) The Online Books Page

The Internal Constitution of the Stars (1926)

The Nature of the Physical World (1928)
This was perhaps the most memorable of several books of popular science that both fired and helped to gratify my curiosity about the basis, bounds and inner workings fo physical reality. --Willard V. Quine

Jean GIRAUDOUX (1882-1944)

Four Plays (1958)
Ondine; Enchanted; Madwoman of Challot; Apollo of Bellac;

Sigrid UNDSET (1882-1949) The Online Books Page Nobel Prize | Petri Liukkonen biography post

Kristin Lavransdatter (1922)
This long tale of a formidible medieval Norsewoman who fought for her ideals, embodied as they were in her family and political allegiances, enthralled me as I pondered what the twentieth-century equivalent of her life as an American woman would be. --Patricia Albjerg Graham

P. W. BRIDGMAN (1882-1961) Nobel Prize

The Logic of Modern Physics (1927)

Jacques MARITAIN (1882-1973) The Online Books Page Jacques Maritain Association | Jacques Maritain Center

Introduction to Philosophy (Elements de philosophie 1920)

Theonas: Conversations of a Sage (1933; Theonas ou les entretiens d'un sage et deux philosophes sur diverses matieres inegalement actuelles. 1920)

Art and Scholasticism (1962; Art et scolastique 1920)
attempted to direct philosophy's attention toward the good of the artistic product rather than the good of the artist or viewer. --Daniel B Gallagher, A Canterbury Tale, review of 'Grace and Necessity' by Rowan Williams, First Things, April 2007, p. 49

The Frontiers of Poetry (1962; Frontières de la poesie (1927)

Distinguish to Unite: or, The Degrees of Knowledge (1959; Distinguer pour unir: ou, les degres du savoir 1932)

Freedom in the Modern World (1935; Du regime temporel et de la liberte 1933)

True Humanism (1938); or Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom (1968) (Humanisme integral: problemes temporels et spirituals d'une nouvelle chretiente 1936)

The Conquest of Freedom (in Freedom: Its Meaning 1940)

Scholasticism and Politics (with Mortimer J. Adler, 1940)

The Rights of Man and Natural Law (1943; Les droits de l'homme et la loi naturelle 1942)

also

Saint Thomas and the problem of evil (1942)

LU XUN (Zhou Shuren, 1881-1936) [Lu Hsun] The Online Books Page Wikipedia entry

Selected Stories (1972); Silent China; selected writings, Gladys Yang translation, 1973)
[A Madman's Diary (1918)] Do we have evidence that this madman is the bearer of some awful truth about the society he lives in, or is he truly mad? Is there a kind of truth, perhaps a metaphoric one, in the idea of an entire culture made up of cannibals? --Grant L. Voth
[In the Wine Shop (1924)] Perhaps the course of Chinese history after the Republican Revolution of 1911, in which Lu Xun and his generation had invested so much hope, has broken their spirits. Perhaps it is simply the world-weariness of age. Perhaps the world has prepared such traps for us all. --Grant L. Voth

Juan Ramon JIMENEZ (1881-1958)

Invisible Reality: Poems (La realidad invisible 1917-1920, 1924)

Pierre TEILHARD DE CHARDIN (1881-1955)
His ideas, when formularized, bear an uncomfortable resemblance to a baptized Herbert Spencer. --Kenneth Rexroth, More Classics Revisited (1989), p. 47

The Phenomenon of Man (1955) Peter Medawar review

Guillaume APOLLINAIRE (1880-1918) Thracian Minorities Marjorie Perloff review | Donald Lyons review Apollinaire,
Experimental, lyric poet of the early 20th century, in style somewhat akin to Owen, though without the toughness of the trenches. --Raphael and McLeish

Selected Writings (Roger Shattuck translation 1971)

Aleksandr BLOK (1880-1921)

The Twelve and Other Poems (1970)

A. L. WEGENER (Alfred Lothar Wegener, 1880-1930) The Changing Earth post

The Origin of Continents and Oceans (Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane 1915)

Lytton STRACHEY (1880-1932) The Online Books Page

Eminent Victorians (1918)
Elegant, mocking studies... . The book marks the beginning of the immense influence of Bloomsbury on modern British biography... . --Raphael and McLeish

Queen Victoria (1921)

Andrey BELY (1880-1934)

Petersburg (1916, 1922)

PREMCHAND (Dhanpat Ray Shrivastav, 1880-1936)

The Gift of a Cow (Godan 1936)

The World of Premchand: a selection of short stories (1969)

Oswald SPENGLER (1880-1936) Spengler column by David P. Goldman post

Decline of the West (1918)
Nevertheless, Spengler's deterministic allegiance to the analogy between civilizations and organisms ultimately infuses his discussion with an air of unreality. --Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, June 2002, p. 5

Robert MUSIL (1880-1942)

The Confusions of Young Torless (Die Verwirrungen des Zoglings Torless 1906)
we see Musil in his first attempts at the depiction of psychic reality, here as it is manifested in the growth process of a young man in an Austrian military school. --Sven Birkerts

The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften 1930-43) Roger Kimball review
The plot is, as it were, a coatrack, a pretext for the play of ideas. We don't read Musil for the story--we read him for his mental ferocity, his humor, and his uncanny grasp of the contradictions of the modern age. --Sven Birkerts

Richard H. TAWNEY (1880-1962)

The Acquisitive Society (1920)

Equality (1931)

LENIN (Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, 1879-1924) The Online Books Page Marxist Internet Archive Slavoj Zizek essay | Slavoj Zizek review
If there'd been no Lenin, I'd have stayed a choirboy and seminarian... --Stalin, quoted by Alexander Nazaryan, Birth of a Despot, review of 'Young Stalin' by Simon Sebag Montefiore, The New Criterion, October 2007, p. 78
There once was a Marxist called Lenin / Who did two or three million men in / --That's a lot to have done in / But where he did one in / That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in. --Robert Conquest, quoted in 'He Told Us So,' by David Pryce Jones, The New Criterion, February 2000, p. 69

What is to be Done? (1902)
...the work that made his name in every sense, since it was the first he signed 'Lenin.' --Martin Malia, New York Review of Books, November 1, 2001, p. 32

Imperialism (1917)

The State and Revolution (1918)
To Lenin belongs the credit for formulating, for the first time, a corpus of Marxian political theory. --Robert B. Downs

Letter to American Workers (August 22, 1918)

Selected Works (1964)

Vachel LINDSAY (1879-1931) The Online Books Page

Collected Poems (1998)

also

The Art of the Moving Picture (1915) Francis Hackett review

Paul KLEE (1879-1940)
These two beautiful illustrated notebooks of the great Swiss artist demonstrate how good a teacher he must have been at the Bauhaus, and how discipline and patient investigation of colours and the excitement of 'taking a line for a walk' can be coupled with poetic and graphic originality of the highest order. --Philip Ward

The Thinking Eye (1956)

The Nature of Nature (1970)

Miles FRANKLIN (Stella Miles Franklin 1879-1954) The Online Books Page

My Brilliant Career (1901)

Albert EINSTEIN (1879-1955) The Online Books Page | Lesikar Albert Einstein Online post
The most important physicist since Newton. --Michael Lind

Relativity, the Special and General Theory (Uber die Spezielle und die Allgemeine Relativitatstheorie 1905-15)
...after he finished his theory of general relativity, [Einstein] concluded that the gravitational potentials in that theory characterized the physical qualities of empty space and served as a medium that could transmit disturbances. He began referring to this as a new way to conceive of the ether. --Walter Isaacson, 'Einstein: His Life and Universe', p. 318
In a way, relativity has elaborated on the Copernican revolution--the idea that the Earth is no longer at the center of the universe. Relativity says there's no place or state of motion that is special --Richard Wofson

Sidelights on Relativity (1920-21)

The Meaning of Relativity (1922)

The Method of Theoretical Physics (1933)

The Evolution of Physics (1938, with Leopold Infield [or Infeld] 1898-1968)

Autobiographical Notes

Wallace STEVENS (1879-1955) Academy of American Poets The Wallace Stevens Society | Wikipedia | Hartford Friends and Enemies fan site
Of course he had time to write poetry; he was house counsel! --Steve Cornelius, Attorney at Law

The Necessary Angel (1951)

Collected Poems (1954)
Stevens thought of his poetry as a world, which, to distinguish it from the 'real' world, he called his mundo. --Frank Kermode

Opus Posthumous (1957)

The Palm at the End of the Mind (1972)

also

Selected Poems (2009) Helen Vendler review

Nagai KAFU (1879-1959)
Kafu's two loves were the French Naturalism of Zola (whom he translated into Japanese) and the Edo Culture that was disappearing as he was writing novels to celebrate the street life, the arts, and the teahouses and courtesans of the rapidly-changing capital. --Philip Ward

Kafu the Scribbler: the Life and Writings by Edward Seidensticker (1965)

E. M. FORSTER (Edward Morgan Forster 1879-1970) The Online Books Page post

Howard's End (1910)

A Passage to India (1924)
a brave. liberal view of British India at its confident, uncertain zenith. --Raphael and McLeish
It conveys no more than his modus operandi to state that the book circles about a young Indian, Dr. Aziz, who is unjustly accused of attempted assault by a hysterical English girl and who therefore serves as a hinge from which both humanities--British and Indian--break. --Herbert S. Gorman

Edward THOMAS (1878-1917) The Online Books Page

Collected Poems (1920)

Eino LEINO (Armas Eino Leopold Lonnbohm, 1878-1926)

Helkavirsta (1903 Whitsongs, and 1916)

L. J. HENDERSON (1878-1942)

The Fitness of the Environment (1913)

The Order of Nature (1917)

Robert WALSER (1878-1956)

Selected Stories (2002)

Alfred DOBLIN (1878-1957)

Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)

Martin BUBER (1878-1965) post

I and Thou (1923)

Upton SINCLAIR (1878-1968) The Online Books Page

The Jungle (1906) Christopher Hitchens review
Classic realistic--compare Frank Norris' 'The Pit'--expose of Chicago stockyards during the heyday of union-bashing beef barons. --Raphael and McLeish

Raymond ROUSSEL (1877-1933)

Locus Solus (1914)

Leon TROTSKY (Leib Davydovich Bronstein 1877-1940) The Online Books Page | Marxist Internet Archive post
Trotsky first applied the term 'national socialism' to Stalin's program of industrial autarky in 1930. --Michael Weiss, Stepson of the time, The New Criterion, March 2007, p. 35
Trotsky's failure as a leader came from his neglect, or more probably his inability, to create a machine of able and loyal lieutenants. --Eric Hoffer

The History of the Russian Revolution (1931-1933)

Frederick SODDY (1877-1956) Nobel

The Chemistry of the Radio Elements (1911)

Hermann HESSE (1877-1962) The Online Books Page post

Narcissus and Goldmund (1930)

The Glass Bead Game or Magister Ludi (Der Glasperlenspiel, 1943)
Translations: Mervyn Savill (1949); Richard and Clara Winston (1969).
Hesse postulates a province called 'Castalia' (in Greek myth, the Castalian Spring on Mount Parnassus is sacred to Apollo and the Muses), where the highest political office belongs to the sage Master of the Glass Bead Game, who personifies the serenity and aesthetic appreciation resulting from a life devoted to the refinement of mind and soul. --Philip Ward

Sir Muhammed IQBAL (1876-1938) post

Asrar-i-Khudi ("Secrets of the Self" 1915)
this poem asserts the role of the individual over what seemed to Iqbal to be the false emphasis of the Sufis on mystical communion with the Divine. --A Guide to Oriental Classics

Rumuz-i-Bekhudi ("Hints of Selflessness" 1918)
This long Persian poem is a passionate expression of the bases of an ideal Islamic society. --A Guide to Oriental Classics

Sherwood ANDERSON (1876-1941) The Online Books Page Center

Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
These 23 stories present, in straightforward, intense style, moments in the lives of inhabitants of the kind of small town in which he grew up. --Raphael and McLeish

Death in the Woods (1933)

Max JACOB (1876-1944)

Selected Poems (1999)

David LINDSAY (1876-1945) The Online Books Page

A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)

George Macaulay TREVELYN (1876-1962)

History of England (1926)
While dramatic and narrowly political events are not neglected, the sharpest focus is reserved for the life of the people as a whole. --Clifton Fadiman

\/ 1851-1875 | 1901-1925 /\

Revised January 5, 2013.

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