The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Anatoli Rybakov (1911- ) spent time in Stalinist prison camps during his twenties; after military service in World War II he achieved success as a writer of novйis for young people. His great work, Children of the Arbat, was written in secrecy in the 1960s and not published until 1987, when the glasnost policies of Gorbachev made it safe to criticize the excesses of Stalin's rule. The novel tells the story of several idealistic young people from Moscow's Arbat district whose fates take strikingly different turns during the terror of the 1930s. The Arbat Trilogy continues with Fear and Dust and Ashes.

J.D. Salinger (1919- ), early in his career as a writer, turned his attention to the idealism, social ineptitude, and general angst of ado- lescence, and produced a modern classic, Catcherin the Rye (1951). Its protagonist, Holden Caulfield, has often been compared with Huckleberry Finn as the prototypical American boy (though Twain's novel is by far the greater book). After publishing a handful of other novellas and short stories (Franny and Zooey; Raise High the Roof

Beam_y Carpenter), Salinger ceased writing, or at least publishing; he lives a quiet, reclusive life in New Hampshire.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), like Andrй Malraux, energetically cultivated his own reputation, which has gone into something of a decline since his death and the gradual emergence of a recollected picture of him as being a not very pleasant person. But by almost any standard Sartre must be judged an important writer, as a novel- ist, a philosopher, and a playwright. He was a proponent and theo- retician of existentialism, arguing in Being and Nothingness (1943) that pure consciousness is the source of human freedom. Being an apostle of existential freedom, however, did not spare him from a pessimistic outlook of "existential dread," explored in plays such as, most famously, No Exit (1945).

Simon Schama (1945- ), born in England of Polish Jewish descent, has spent most of his adult life in America, teaching at Harvard and Columbia. A prolific and wide-ranging historian, his most notable book to date is Citizens (1989), a marvelously comprehensive and readable social history of the French Revolution. Schama suggests that the Revolution was the great watershed in modern history because it caused the transformation of European peoples from "subjects" to "citizens."

Leopold Sedar Senghor (1906- ) became independent SenegaTs first president in 1960, and retired from office in 1980. Born in Senegal, he was educated in France and served in the French army during World War II, spending two years as a German prisoner of war. In the 1930s, he and other pioneering Black African and Caribbean writers propounded the theory of Nйgritude, an aes- thetic based on the concept of the uniqueness of the Black experi­ence. Many of Senghors poems are written as songs, set to be accompanied by specified African musical instruments. His poems (written originally in French) have been widely translated; I like the Selected Poems translated by Melvin Dixon.

Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) is the unchallenged personification of the American muckraking novelist. His novel The Jungle (1906) was turned down by a succession of commercial publishing houses; Sinclair finally published it privately and saw it become a bestseller; it made his reputation. The book's exposure of the brutal working conditions and disgustingly unsanitary environment of Chicago's meat-packing industry led directly to the establishment of the fed­eral Food and Drug Administration, but not to the labor reforms Sinclair had hoped to inspire; he commented, "I aimed at the pub- lic's heart and hit its stomach." He wrote a number of other novelis- tic exposйs, and, rather quixotically, ran as a Socialist for governor of Califуrnia in 1934 (losing badly). Today the prose of his novйis seems rather overheated, but his criticai stance still carnes weight.