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Reading Rat

Read Me 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) Criticism: Benjamin Ivry essay
Comment: 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) Reference: Nobel Prize
Theory of Relativity (Relativitatstheorie 1921)
The General Principles of Wave Mechanics (Die allgemeinen Prinzipien der Wellenmechanik 1933)

George SEFERIS (1900-1971) Etext: Poem Hunter Etext: Reference: Poetry International Web
Collected Poems (1981)

Theodosius DOBZHANSKY (1900-1975)
One star: Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937)

Jacques PREVERT (1900-1977)
Paroles (1946)

Basil BUNTING (1900-1985) Etext: Poem Hunter | Academy of American Poets Criticism: 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) Criticism: Benjamin Schwarz review | Joseph Epstein review

Nathalie SARRAUTE (1900-1999) Reference: Petri Liukkonen biography
The Planetarium (1959)
The Use of Speech (L’Usage de la parole 1980)

Hart CRANE (1899-1932) Etext: Academy of American Poets | Poem Hunter Criticism: Eric Ormsby review essay
Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose (1966) Criticism: Colm Toibin review

Benjamin PERET (1899-1959) Etext: two poems
From the Hidden Storehouse: Selected Poems (1981)

Ernest HEMINGWAY (1899-1961) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Wikipedia entry Criticism: Andrew O'Hagan review | post
Comment: {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
Two stars: The Sun Also Rises (1926)
Comment: 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
One star: A Farewell to Arms (1929)
Comment: the most integrated of his longer works, stained with lost love and the blood of Caporetto... . --Raphael and McLeish
Comment: 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
One star: The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1938)
Comment: 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) Criticism: Edmund Wilson review
Comment: 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
Comment: 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
One star: The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
Comment: 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) Reference: Wikipedia entry Criticism: Steven Lenzer and William Kristol essay
On Tyranny (1948)

Friedrich HAYEK (1899-1992) Etext: Ludwig von Mises Institute Criticism: post
Comment: 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
Comment: 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) Reference: Publication History
Comment: 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
Comment: 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)
Comment: 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
Comment: 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) Criticism: Richard Tillinghast essay
Collected Stories (1980)

Miguel Angel ASTURIAS (1899-1974) Reference: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Wikipedia entry | Times Topics Criticism: post
Comment: 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
One star: Lolita (1959)
Comment: A beautiful novel-of-authenticity, fusing romantic and empirical sensibilities... --Ricard D. Parker
One star: Pale Fire (1962)
Comment: 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)
Comment: 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 Etext: The New Republic (August 4, 1941)
The University Poem Etext: London Review of Books (June 7, 2012)

Allen TATE (1899-1979)
Collected Poems (1970)

John H. VAN VLECK (1899-1980) Reference: 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) Criticism: post
Is Sex Necsssary? (1929, with James THURBER)
Charlotte's Web (1952)
Comment: 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) Criticism: Jennifer Balderama review
Comment: 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) Bookseller: Levenger
Comment: 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) Criticism: post
Comment: HIs central preoccupations are the problems of time, identity, paradox, and the cyclical nature of knowledge and history. --Philip Ward
One star: Fictions (Ficciones 1944)
Comment: 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
One star: The Aleph and Other Stories (El Aleph 1949)
Comment: “Emma Zunz” places a woman on a path of vengeance that requires her to annihilate a part of herself. --Arnold Weinstein
One star: Dreamtigers (1960)
One star: A Personal Anthology (Antologia personal 1961)
Two stars: Labyrinths (1962)
Three late poems Etext: The New Criterion (March 1999)

Leonie ADAMS (1899-1988) Etext: Academy of American Poets | Taverner's Koans | Kiran Krishna
Poems: A Selection (1954)

Federico Garcia LORCA (1898-1936)
Comment: 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
Comment: 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
One star: Gypsy Ballads (Romancero Gitano 1928)
One star: Blood Wedding (Bodas de sangre 1933)
One star: Yerma (1934)
One star: Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (Llanto por Ignacio Sanchez Mejias 1935)
One star: The House of Bernarda Alma (La casa de Bernarnda Alma 1936)
Comment: This play was a parabolic comment on 1930s Spain--the tyranny of the central female character paralleling that of Franco. --Raphael and McLeish
One star: Selected Poems (1941)

Bertolt BRECHT (1898-1956) Criticism: post
Comment: 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)
One star: The Good Woman of Szechuan (Der gute Mensch von Sezuan 1936)
Galileo (Leben des Galilei 1943)
One star: Mother Courage and Her Children (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 1941)
Comment: The cyclic futility of war parades before us, spiked with marvellous moments ... that make nonsense of theatrical ideology. --Raphael and McLeish
One star: 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)
Comment: 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) Reference: Touchstone | Douglas Gresham fan site | Dave Armstrong fan site Criticism: post
Out of the Silent Planet (1938); Perelandra (1943); That Hideous Strength (1943)
Comment: One of Lewis's attempts to charge SF ideas with Christian principles. --Raphael and McLeish
also
The Abolition of Man (1947)
Comment: 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
Comment: How modern philosophies drain meaning and the sacred from our lives.
--Richard Brookhiser
Mere Christianity (1952) based on radio talks of 1941–1944 --ed.
Comment: 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)
Comment: the senselessness of trench warfare in World War I, and the accompanying degradation of the human spirit. --Nicolaas Bloembergen

Vicente ALEIXANDRE (1898-1984) Reference: 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) Reference: William Faulkner: American Writer Criticism: post
Comment: William Faulkner's writings revealed to me the complexity of the Southern tradition--of guilt, revenge and repentence. --D. Quinn Mills
Sartoris (1929)
Comment: [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
Three stars:The Sound and the Fury (1929) Etext: Saskatchewan
One star: As I Lay Dying (1930)
Comment: 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)
One star: Light in August (1937)
Comment: 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)
Comment: 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)
One star: The Bear (from Go Down Moses 1942)
One star: Pantaloon in Black (from Go Down Moses 1942)
Comment: Faulkner has written in brief compass a veritable saga of racial blindness. --Arnold Weinstein

C. N. HINSHELWOOD (Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood, 1897-1967) Reference: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page
One star: The Ice Palace (1963)
Comment: 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) Reference: The Thornton Wilder Society
The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)
One star: Our Town (1938)
Comment: ...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) Reference: Petri Liukkonen biography | Wolfgang Babilas fan site
Selected Poems

Kenneth BURKE (1897-1993)
Counter-statement (1931)
One star: A Rhetoric of Motives (1961)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page
This Side of Paradise (1920)
One star: Tender Is the Night (1924)
Comment: 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
Two stars: The Great Gatsby (1925) Criticism: William Voegeli review
Comment: 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)
Comment: He wrote good stories all his life--along with bad ones for magazines, to pay debts. --Raphael and McLeish

Antonin ARTAUD (1896-1948) Reference: Arnaud Hubert fan site
Selected Writings (1976)

Giuseppe Tomasi, Principe di LAMPEDUSA (1896-1957) Criticism: post
Comment: 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
One star: The Leopard (1958)
Comment: 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) Criticism: Stephen Schwartz essay
The Manifestoes of Surrealism (Les Manifestes du surrealisme 1955)
Poems (1982)

John DOS PASSOS (1896-1970) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: Richard F. Hill essay
U.S.A. (1938): The 42nd Parallel (1930); Nineteen Nineteen (1932); The Big Money (1936)
Comment: 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)
Comment: 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) Reference:
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) Reference: David Castronovo essay Criticism: post
To the Finland Station (1940)
Comment: The best single book on Karl Marx and Marx's place in modern history. --Arthur Herman
The Shores of Light (1956)
Patriotic Gore (1962)
Comment: A careful reader of American literature works to restore our past. --The Intercollegiate Review
also
Stravinsky Etext: The New Republic (April 1, 1925)
Dorothy Parker's Poems Etext: The New Republic (January 19, 1927)

David JONES (1895-1974)
One star: In Parenthesis (1937)
One star: Anathemata (1955) Criticism: W. H. Auden review

Robert GRAVES (1895-1985)) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Wikipedia entry
Good-Bye to All That (1929)
Comment: 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)
Comment: Pioneering 'autobiographies' of the stammering emperor, at once clean and scabrous. --Raphael and McLeish
King Jesus (1946)
One star: Collected Poems (1965) Criticism: Robert Richman review
Comment: Graves is a strong, spare, almost classical poet; sometimes over-brisk, always invigorating. --Raphael and McLeish

LIN Yutang (1895-1976) Criticism: post
One star: The Importance of Living (1938)
Comment: 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) Criticism: Anthony Heilbut review | Nadine Gordimer review | Jeffrey Eugenides review
The Radetzky March (Radetzkymarsch 1932)
Comment: 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) Reference: Wikipedia
One star: Collected Stories (1957)
Comment: 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
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page
One star: Selected Poems (1974)

Bibhutibhusan BANERJI (1894-1950)
Pather Panchali ("Song of the Road" 1929)

Dashiell HAMMETT (1894-1961) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Wikipedia entry
The Maltese Falcon (1930)
Comment: 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) Reference: Wikipedia entry
Journey to the End of the Night (1934 John H. P. Marks translation; Voyage au bout de la nuit 1932)
Comment: 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)
Comment: lurches from gallows humor to the realities of starvation and death. --Michael Dirda

James THURBER (1894-1961) Criticism: 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)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: Eric Miles Williamson review
Complete Poems (1960)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page | Bibliomania Reference: Petri Liukkonen biography | Matthew A. fan site Criticism: post
Antic Hay (1923)
Point Counter Point (1928)
Comment: 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
One star: Brave New World (1932) Criticism: David Pearce essay
Comment: Brave New World is an early example of modern dystopianism: the future as awful warning. --Raphael and McLeish
Comment: 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) Criticism: William L. Lawrence review
also
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Wikipedia entry
Cane (1923)
Comment: 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)
Comment: Intimate, uninhibited picture of a great painter. From life--or studio portrait? --Raphael and McLeish

Joseph H. WOODGER (1894-1981) Reference: see Brauckmann and Kull
Biological Principles (1929)

J. V. FOIX (1894-1987) Etext: two poems Criticism: Patricia J. Boehne essay
When I Sleep, Then I See Clearly: Selected Poems (1988)

Wilfred OWEN (1893-1918) Etext: The Online Books Page
Collected Poems (1965)

Vladimir Vladimirovich MAYAKOVSKY (1893-1930)
One star: 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)
One star: The Green Child (1935)

MAO Tse-Tung (1893-1976) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Marxists Internet Archive Criticism: post
Comment: ...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
Comment: 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) Reference: Wikipedia entry
Guillen on Guillen: The Poetry and the Poet (1976)

AKUTAGAWA Ryunosuke (1892-1927) Etext: 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)
One star: Selected Poems (1981)

Walter BENJAMIN (1892-1940) Reference: Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (1968)
Comment: 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 Etext: 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)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Wikipedia entry
Comment: 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) Criticism: post
Comment: ...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
Comment: 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)
Comment: 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
Comment: 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) Criticism: post
The Good Earth (1931)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Tolkien Society | The Catholic Imagination Criticism: post
One star: The Hobbit (1937)
Comment: 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
One star: The Lord of the Rings (1954-1956)
Comment: 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) Reference: Nobel Prize
The Bridge on the Drina (1945)

Hugh MACDIARMID (1892-1978)
Complete Poems 1920-1976 (1978)

Rebecca WEST (1892-1983) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: Carl Rollyson essay | Richard Tillinghast essay
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942)
Comment: For its writing, not for its historical accuracy. --Michael Kelly
also
The Duty of Harsh Criticism Etext: The New Republic (November 7, 1914)

Louis DE BROGLIE (1892-1987) Criticism: Davis Associates essay
Comment: 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) Criticism: 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)
One star: Selected Poems (1967)
Comment: 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)
One star: The Master and Margarita (c. 1930's)

Zora Neale HURSTON (1891-1960) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Wikipedia entry Criticism: post
Comment: ...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
One star: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Comment: 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

Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Wikipedia entry
Comment: 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) Criticism: 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) Etext: Twenty-two poems Criticism: post
Selected Poems (1946)
One star: Doctor Zhivago (1957)
Comment: ...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) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Wikipedia entry
Hercule Poirot mysteries (The Mysterious Affair at Styles, 1920-Curtain, 1975)
Comment: 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))
Comment: 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)
Comment: 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) Criticism: Eric Ormsby review

Adolf HITLER (1889-1945) Etext: Hitler Historical Museum Humor: The Daily Hitler Criticism: post
Mein Kampf (1925-27)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Criticism: post
Comment: 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
Comment: 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
One star: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung 1921) Reference: Contents
Comment: A terse summation of the analytic method of the analytic school in philosophy, and a heroic leap beyond it. --Jeffrey Hart
Philosophical Investigations (1953) Reference: Lois Shawver essay
Comment: 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) Criticism: John Bentley Mays essay
Les enfant terribles (1929)
The Infernal Machine (La Machine infernale 1934)

Anna AKHMATOVA (1889-1966) Etext: The Online Books Page | Poetry Lovers Page Reference: Wikipedia entry | Academy of American Poets
Comment: 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)
Comment: the poet transmuted both her serious affairs and passing fancies into lyrics of permanent beauty. --Michael Dirda
Requiem (1988)
Comment: Her book-length elegy for the 1930s... . --Michael Dirda

Christopher DAWSON (1889-1970) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Wikipedia entry Criticism: 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) Etext: Internet Archive
Christianity and Culture: Selections from the Writings of Christopher Dawson (2008) Etext: Internet Archive

Conrad AIKEN (1889-1973) Etext: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: Frederick D. Wilhelmsen essay
A Study of History (1934-1961)
Comment: 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
Comment: 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) Criticism: 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)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Birthplace Criticism: post
The Short Stories (1945)
Comment: Mansfield's best stories, many about her childhood in New Zealand. --Raphael and McLeish
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: eO'Neill | Tao House | National Historic Site Reference: Criticism: post Criticism: Stark Young review
One star: The Emperor Jones (1921)
One star: Desire Under the Elms (1924)
Lazarus Laughed (1925)
One star: Mourning Becomes Electra (1931)
Comment: ... 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
Two stars: The Iceman Cometh (1946)
Comment: 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
Comment: In a cheap tavern, craven dreamers are startled into action by a travelling salesman--in effect a salesman of death. --Raphael and McLeish
Three stars: Long Day's Journey into Night (1956)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Wikipedia entry
Comment: 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
One star: Selected Poems (Peter Rickard translation 1971)
One star: Always Astonished: Selected Prose (1988)
One star: The Book of Disquiet (1991)
One star: The Keeper of the Sheep (1997)
One star: 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)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Wikipedia entry Criticism: post
Selected Essays (1932)
Comment: Shaped the literary taste of the mid-century. --Jeffrey Hart, The 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the Century, National Review, May 3, 1999
Comment: Here, one of the century's foremost literary innovators insists that innovation is only possible through an intense engagement of tradition. --The Intercollegiate Review
Two stars: Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
Comment: This is his most accessible play: the others are elliptical, mannered, sometimes tedious. --Raphael and McLeish
Two stars: The Cocktail Party (1950)
Three stars: Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (1963)
Comment: 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
Comment: 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
Comment: Eliot is one of the greatest English-speaking poets of the modern age, a formidable intellect chastely exploring the sensuous dark. --Raphael and McLeish
Comment: 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) Reference: Nobel Prize | Petri Liukkonen biography Criticism: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: Tillinghast
Selected Poems (1963)

Georg TRAKL (1887-1914)
Selected Poems (1968)

Edwin MUIR (1887-1959) Criticism: Richman
Collected Poems (1965)

Ruth BENEDICT (1887-1948) Etext: The Online Books Page
Patterns of Culture (1934)

Erwin SCHROEDINGER (1887-1961) Humor: Randy F. and Cecil Adams correspondence
One star: What Is Life? The Physical Aspects of the Living Cell (1943)
Comment: invited biologists to think of life in more purely physical terms. --Edward O. Wilson
Statistical Thermodynamics (1946)
Nature and the Greeks (1954)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page
One star: "Poetry" (from Observations 1924) Criticism: Robert Pinsky essay
One star: "Marriage" (from Observations 1924)
The Complete Poems (1981) Criticism: 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)
One star: Anabasis (Anabase 1924)
One star: Birds (1966)
One star: 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)
One star: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: Robert Gottlieb review
Selected Poems (1988)

Karl POLANYI (1886-1964)
The Great Transformation (1944)

TANIZAKI Junichiro (1886-1965)
One star: The Makioka Sisters (Edward Seidenstecker translation 1957; Sasameyuki ['light snow'] 1943-48)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: The Literature Network Criticism: post
Comment: 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
Comment: 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
Comment: some of his books undoubtedly seem, consciously or not, to stress the element of sex. --Henry James Forman
Two stars: Sons and Lovers (1913)
Comment: 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) Criticism: James Wood review
Two stars: Women in Love (1921)
Comment: 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)
Comment: '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) Etext: The Online Books Page
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: The Sinclair Lewis Society
Comment: [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)
Comment: 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
One star: Babbitt (1922)
Comment: 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
Comment: a loving, never sentimental portrait of a small-town businessman... . --Raphael and McLeish
Arrowsmith (1925)
Comment: 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)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: Carrie fan site
Last Poems (1982)

Hermann WEYL (1885-1955) Reference: 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)
Comment: 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)
Comment: I wouldn't mind calling this Isak Dinesen up. --Holden Caulfield
One star: Seven Gothic Tales (1937)
Comment: Sophisticated entertainments, with appealing irony implicit in deliberately old-fashioned narrative method. --Raphael and McLeish
One star: Winter's Tales (1942)
Comment: 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) Etext: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Wikipedia entry Criticism: post | Mark Ford review
Personae (1909)
The Spirit of Romance (1910)
Comment: his study of Provencal poetry... . --Michael Dirda
Cathay (1915)
Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919)
Comment: Most enjoyable of all is the swaggering translation, really an 'imitations'... . --Michael Dirda
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)
Comment: an acid overview of the English literary scene... . --Michael Dirda
One star: Personae: Collected Poems (1926)
Comment: 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)
Comment: 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)
One star: The Cantos (1915-1962)
Comment: 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
One star: Literary Essays (1968)

Yevgeni Ivanovich ZAMYATIN (1884-1937) Reference: R. Kreuzer fan site
My (1924)
Comment: 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
Comment: ...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) Reference: Wikipedia entry
Selected Poems (S. Behlul Toyger translation, 1965)
Comment: 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)
One star: Juno and the Paycock (1925)
One star: The Shadow of a Gunman (1925)
One star: The Plough and the Stars (1926)

Etienne GILSON (1884-1978)
The Unity of Philosophical Experience (1937)
The Arts of the Beautiful (1965)
Comment: 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) Reference: Wikipedia entry
One star: The Good Soldier Schweik (1920-23)
Comment: Endearing, caustic satire on war and the lunatic proceduralists who wage it. --Raphael and McLeish
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: The Kafka Project Criticism: post
Comment: 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)
One star: The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung 1915)
Comment: Kafka's most haunting story, in which he found a perfect image for his pervasive sense of alienation. --Raphael and McLeish
Comment: What have I become? / Uncertain, Gregor Samsa / puts out some feelers. --David M. Bader, Haiku U.
A Country Doctor (Ein Landarzt, 1919)
Comment: 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]
Three stars: The Trial (Muirs translation 1953, Der Process 1925) Criticism: David Luhrssen review
Comment: 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
Two stars: The Castle (Muirs translation 1957, Das Schloss 1926)
Comment: '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)
Comment: '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) Reference: Wood
Islandia (1942)

also
Joseph SCHUMPETER (1883-1950) Etext: Ludwig von Mises Institute Reference: The Economist column Criticism: The Economist essay
Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Archive for the History of Economic Thought Criticism: post
The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)
Comment: [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)
Comment: Influential in suggesting that the business cycle can be modified by government investment and manipulation of tax rates --Jeffrey Hart
Comment: 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)
Comment: 'Spineless Spain' --ed.
Comment: 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
One star: The Revolt of the Masses (1929)
Comment: 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 Etext: Modern Age (Summer 1957) [pdf]
Pedagogy and Anachronism Etext: 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) Etext: Poets Criticism: post
Spring and All (1923)
Paterson (Book I 1946; Books I-V 1963)
Two stars: Collected Poems (Vol. 1 1988; Vol. 2 1989)

Sholem ASCH (Szulim Asz 1883-1953)
East River (1946)

James JOYCE (1882-1941) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: Brian Phillips essay Humor: The Onion
Comment: Ireland’s most famous exile --Emily Allen
One star: Dubliners (1914)
Comment: Small lives seen closely enough to disclose eternal truths. --Lloyd Weinreb
Comment: 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
Two stars: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) Criticism: H. G. Wells review
Comment: 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
Three stars: Ulysses (1922) Criticism: Joe Carter essay | Franz S. Klein essay | Tim Cavanaugh review
Comment: 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
Comment: a turgid welter of schoolboy pornography --Edith Wharton
Comment: 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
Comment: All of English literature in one book--compressed and mythologized through the language and vision of a unique modern artist. --Robert Brustein
One star: Finnegan's Wake (1939)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: post
Comment: ... 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)
Comment: 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
One star: Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Comment: 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
Two stars: To the Lighthouse (1927)
Comment: 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
One star: Orlando (1928)
Three Guineas (1928)
Comment: 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
One star: A Room of One's Own (1929)
Comment: 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
Comment: 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
One star: The Waves (1931)
Comment: 'The Waves' is marvelous: a richly brocaded poetic tapestry, close- patterned with Bloomsbury figures. --Raphael and McLeish
Comment: I still think Woolf's The Waves should get at least two stars :) --Timothy Burns
Between the Acts (1941)
also
The Movies and Reality Etext: The New Republic (August 4, 1926)
The Letters of Virginia Woolf (edited by Nigel Nicolson, 6 vol., 1975-80)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page
The Internal Constitution of the Stars (1926)
The Nature of the Physical World (1928)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Nobel Prize | Petri Liukkonen biography Criticism: post
Kristin Lavransdatter (1922)
Comment: 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) Reference: Nobel Prize
The Logic of Modern Physics (1927)

Jacques MARITAIN (1882-1973) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: 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)
Comment: 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] Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Wikipedia entry
One star: Selected Stories (1972); Silent China; selected writings, Gladys Yang translation, 1973)
Comment: [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
Comment: [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)
Comment: 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) Criticism: Peter Medawar review

Guillaume APOLLINAIRE (1880-1918) Etext: Thracian Minorities Criticism: Marjorie Perloff review | Donald Lyons review Apollinaire,
Comment: 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) Reference: The Changing Earth Criticism: post
The Origin of Continents and Oceans (Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane 1915)

Lytton STRACHEY (1880-1932) Etext: The Online Books Page
Eminent Victorians (1918)
Comment: 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) Reference: Spengler column by David P. Goldman Criticism: post
Decline of the West (1918)
Comment: 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)
Comment: 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
One star: The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften 1930-43) Criticism: Roger Kimball review
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Marxist Internet Archive Criticism: Slavoj Zizek essay | Slavoj Zizek review
Comment: 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
Comment: 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)
Comment: ...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)
One star: The State and Revolution (1918)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page
Collected Poems (1998)
also
The Art of the Moving Picture (1915) Criticism: Francis Hackett review

Paul KLEE (1879-1940)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page
My Brilliant Career (1901)

Albert EINSTEIN (1879-1955) Etext: The Online Books Page | Lesikar Reference: Albert Einstein Online Criticism: post
Comment: The most important physicist since Newton. --Michael Lind
Two stars: Relativity, the Special and General Theory (Uber die Spezielle und die Allgemeine Relativitatstheorie 1905-15)
Comment: ...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
Comment: 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)
Two stars: 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) Etext: Academy of American Poets Reference: The Wallace Stevens Society | Wikipedia | Hartford Friends and Enemies fan site
Comment: Of course he had time to write poetry; he was house counsel! --Steve Cornelius, Attorney at Law
The Necessary Angel (1951)
Two stars: Collected Poems (1954)
Comment: 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) Criticism: Helen Vendler review

Nagai KAFU (1879-1959)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: post
Howard's End (1910)
Two stars: A Passage to India (1924)
Comment: a brave. liberal view of British India at its confident, uncertain zenith. --Raphael and McLeish
Comment: 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) Etext: 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) Criticism: post
I and Thou (1923)

Upton SINCLAIR (1878-1968) Etext: The Online Books Page
The Jungle (1906) Criticism: Christopher Hitchens review
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page | Marxist Internet Archive Criticism: post
Comment: 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
Comment: 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) Reference: Nobel
The Chemistry of the Radio Elements (1911)

Hermann HESSE (1877-1962) Etext: The Online Books Page Criticism: post
Narcissus and Goldmund (1930)
One star: The Glass Bead Game or Magister Ludi (Der Glasperlenspiel, 1943)
Translations: Mervyn Savill (1949); Richard and Clara Winston (1969).
Comment: 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) Criticism: post
Asrar-i-Khudi ("Secrets of the Self" 1915)
Comment: 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)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page Reference: Center
One star: Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
Comment: 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) Etext: The Online Books Page
A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)

George Macaulay TREVELYN (1876-1962)
History of England (1926)
Comment: 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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