The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (38 page)

The subject matter of Nabokov's novels is principally the problem of art itself presented in various figurative disguises. The same may be said of his plays,
Sobytiye
(“The Event”), published in 1938, and
The Waltz Invention
. The problem of art again appears in Nabokov's best novel in Russian,
The Gift
, the story of a young artist's development in the spectral world of post–World War I Berlin. This novel, with its reliance on literary parody, was a turning point. Serious use of parody thereafter became a key device in Nabokov's art. His first novels in English,
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
(1941) and
Bend Sinister
(1947), do not rank with his best Russian work.
Pale Fire
(1962), however, a novel consisting of a long poem and a commentary on it by a mad literary pedant, extends and completes Nabokov's mastery of unorthodox structure, first shown in
The Gift
and present also in
Solus Rex
, a Russian novel that began to appear serially in 1940 but was never completed.
Lolita
(1955), with its antihero, Humbert Humbert, who is possessed by an overpowering desire for very young girls, is yet another of Nabokov's subtle allegories: love examined in the light of its seeming opposite, lechery.
Ada
(1969), Nabokov's 17th and longest novel, is a parody of the family chronicle form. All of his earlier themes come into play in the novel, and, because the work is a medley of Russian, French, and English, it is his most difficult work.

Nabokov's major critical works are an irreverent book about Nikolay Gogol (1944) and a monumental four-volume
translation of, and commentary on, Pushkin's
Eugene Onegin
(1964). What he called the “present, final version” of the autobiographical
Speak, Memory
, concerning his European years, was published in 1967, after which he began work on a sequel,
Speak On, Memory
, concerning the American years.

As Nabokov's reputation grew in the 1930s so did the ferocity of the attacks made upon him. His idiosyncratic, somewhat aloof style and unusual novelistic concerns were interpreted as snobbery by his detractors—although his best Russian critic, Vladislav Khodasevich, insisted that Nabokov's aristocratic view was appropriate to his subject matters: problems of art masked by allegory.

(b. July 21, 1899, Cicero [now in Oak Park], Ill., U.S.—d. July 2, 1961, Ketchum, Idaho)

E
rnest Hemingway, an American novelist and short-story writer, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous and widely publicized life. His succinct and lucid prose style exerted a powerful influence on American and British fiction in the 20th century.

Hemingway entered World War I as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross. On July 8, 1918, not yet 19 years old, he was injured on the Austro-Italian front at Fossalta di Piave. He was decorated for heroism.

After recuperating at home, Hemingway sailed for France as a foreign correspondent for the
Toronto Star
. Advised and encouraged by other American writers in Paris—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound—he began to see his nonjournalistic work appear in print there, and in 1925 his first important book, a collection of
stories called
In Our Time
, was published in New York City; it was originally released in Paris in 1924. In 1926 he published
The Sun Also Rises
, a novel with which he scored his first solid success.

The writing of books occupied Hemingway for most of the postwar years. He remained based in Paris, but he traveled widely for the skiing, bullfighting, fishing, and hunting that by then had become part of his life and formed the background for much of his writing. His position as a master of short fiction had been advanced by
Men Without Women
in 1927 and thoroughly established with the stories in
Winner Take Nothing
in 1933. At least in the public view, however, the novel
A Farewell to Arms
(1929) overshadowed such works. Reaching back to his experience as a young soldier in Italy, Hemingway developed a grim but lyrical novel of great power, fusing love story with war story.

Hemingway's love of Spain and his passion for bull-fighting resulted in
Death in the Afternoon
(1932), a learned study of a spectacle he saw more as tragic ceremony than as sport. A minor novel of 1937 called
To Have and Have Not
is about a Caribbean desperado and is set against a background of lower-class violence and upper-class decadence in Key West during the Great Depression.

By now Spain was in the midst of civil war. Still deeply attached to that country, Hemingway made four trips there, once more a correspondent. He also raised money for the Republicans in their struggle against the Nationalists under General Francisco Franco. The harvest of Hemingway's considerable experience of Spain in war and peace was the novel
For Whom the Bell Tolls
(1940), a substantial and impressive work that some critics consider his finest novel. It was also the most successful of all his books as measured in sales. Set during the Spanish Civil War, it tells of Robert Jordan, an American volunteer who
is sent to join a guerrilla band behind the Nationalist lines in the Guadarrama Mountains. Through dialogue, flashbacks, and stories, Hemingway offers telling and vivid profiles of the Spanish character and unsparingly depicts the cruelty and inhumanity stirred up by the civil war.

Following World War II in Europe, which he experienced firsthand as a journalist, Hemingway returned to his home in Cuba and began to work seriously again. He also traveled widely, and, on a trip to Africa, he was injured in a plane crash. Soon after (in 1953), he received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for
The Old Man and the Sea
(1952), a short heroic novel about an old Cuban fisherman who, after an extended struggle, hooks and boats a giant marlin only to have it eaten by voracious sharks during the long voyage home. This book, which played a role in gaining for Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, was enthusiastically praised.

By 1960 Fidel Castro's revolution had driven Hemingway from Cuba. He settled in Ketchum, Idaho, and tried to lead his life and do his work as before. For a while he succeeded, but, anxiety-ridden and depressed, he was twice hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where he received electroshock treatments. Two days after his return to the house in Ketchum, he took his life with a shotgun.

Hemingway's prose style was probably the most widely imitated of any in the 20th century. In striving to be as objective and honest as possible, Hemingway hit upon the device of describing a series of actions by using short, simple sentences from which all comment or emotional rhetoric has been eliminated. The resulting terse, concentrated prose is concrete and unemotional yet is often resonant and capable of conveying great irony through understatement.

(b. Feb. 27, 1902, Salinas, Calif., U.S.—d. Dec. 20, 1968, New York, N.Y.)

T
he American novelist John Steinbeck is best known for
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939), which summed up the bitterness of the Great Depression decade and aroused widespread sympathy for the plight of migratory farm workers. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature for 1962.

Steinbeck attended Stanford University in California intermittently between 1920 and 1926, but did not take a degree. Before his books attained success, he spent considerable time supporting himself as a manual labourer while writing, and his experiences lent authenticity to his depictions of the lives of the workers in his stories. He spent much of his life in Monterey County, Calif., which later was the setting of some of his fiction.

Steinbeck's first novel,
Cup of Gold
(1929), was followed by
The Pastures of Heaven
(1932) and
To a God Unknown
(1933), none of which were successful. He first achieved popularity with
Tortilla Flat
(1935), an affectionately told story of Mexican-Americans. The mood of gentle humour turned to one of unrelenting grimness in his next novel,
In Dubious Battle
(1936), a classic account of a strike by agricultural labourers and a pair of Marxist labour organizers who engineer it. The novella
Of Mice and Men
(1937), which also appeared in play and film versions, is a tragic story about the strange, complex bond between two migrant labourers.

The Grapes of Wrath
won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award and was made into a notable film in 1940. The novel is about the migration of a dispossessed family from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California and describes their subsequent exploitation by a ruthless system of agricultural economics. A protest novel punctuated by prose-poem
interludes,
The Grapes of Wrath
tells of the Joad family's almost biblical journey, during which they learn the necessity for collective action among the poor and downtrodden to prevent them from being destroyed individually.

After the best-selling success of
The Grapes of Wrath
, Steinbeck went to Mexico to collect marine life with the freelance biologist Edward F. Ricketts, and the two men collaborated in writing
Sea of Cortez
(1941), a study of the fauna of the Gulf of California. During World War II Steinbeck wrote some effective pieces of government propaganda, among them
The Moon Is Down
(1942), a novel of Norwegians under the Nazis. He also served as a war correspondent. His immediate postwar work—
Cannery Row
(1945),
The Pearl
(1947), and
The Wayward Bus
(1947)—contained the familiar elements of his social criticism but were more relaxed in approach and sentimental in tone.

Steinbeck's later writings were comparatively slight works of entertainment and journalism interspersed with three conscientious attempts to reassert his stature as a major novelist:
Burning Bright
(1950),
East of Eden
(1952), and
The Winter of Our Discontent
(1961). In critical opinion, none equaled his earlier achievement.
East of Eden
, an ambitious epic about the moral relations between a California farmer and his two sons, was made into a film in 1955. Steinbeck himself wrote the scripts for the film versions of his stories
The Pearl
(1948) and
The Red Pony
(1949). Outstanding among the scripts he wrote directly for motion pictures were
Forgotten Village
(1941) and
Viva Zapata!
(1952).

Steinbeck's reputation rests mostly on the naturalistic novels with proletarian themes he wrote in the 1930s. It is in these works that his building of rich symbolic structures and his attempts at conveying mythopoeic and archetypal qualities in his characters are most effective.

(b. 1903, Mot
Ä«
h
ā
ri, Bengal, India—d. Jan. 21, 1950, London, Eng.)

E
ric Arthur Blair, better known by his pseudonym George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels
Animal Farm
(1945) and
1984
(1949), the latter a profound anti-Utopian novel that examines the dangers of totalitarian rule.

Orwell was born in Bengal, into the class of sahibs. His father was a minor British official in the Indian civil service; his mother, of French extraction, was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma. He won scholarships to two of England's leading schools, Winchester and Eton, and chose the latter. He stayed from 1917 to 1921. Instead of accepting a scholarship to a university, Orwell decided to follow family tradition and, in 1922, went to Burma as assistant district superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. When he realized how much against their will the Burmese were ruled by the British, he felt increasingly ashamed of his role as a colonial police officer. Later he was to recount his experiences and his reactions to imperial rule in his novel
Burmese Days
and in two brilliant autobiographical sketches, “Shooting an Elephant” and “A Hanging,” classics of expository prose.

In 1927 Orwell, on leave to England, decided not to return to Burma, and on Jan. 1, 1928, he took the decisive step of resigning from the imperial police. Having felt guilty that the barriers of race and caste had prevented his mingling with the Burmese, he thought he could expiate some of his guilt by immersing himself in the life of the poor and outcast people of Europe. Donning ragged clothes, he went into the East End of London to live in cheap lodging houses among labourers and beggars. He spent a period in the slums of Paris and worked as a
dishwasher in French hotels and restaurants, and tramped the roads of England with professional vagrants and joined the people of the London slums in their annual exodus to work in the Kentish hopfields. These experiences gave Orwell the material for
Down and Out in Paris and London
(1933), in which actual incidents are rearranged into something like fiction. The book's publication in 1933 earned him some initial literary recognition. Orwell's first novel,
Burmese Days
(1934), established the pattern of his subsequent fiction in its portrayal of a sensitive, conscientious, and emotionally isolated individual who is at odds with an oppressive or dishonest social environment.