The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (39 page)

Orwell's revulsion against imperialism led not only to his personal rejection of the bourgeois life-style but to a political reorientation as well. Immediately after returning from Burma he called himself an anarchist and continued to do so for several years; during the 1930s, however, he began to consider himself a socialist. Orwell's first socialist book was an original and unorthodox political treatise entitled
The Road to Wigan Pier
(1937). It begins by describing his experiences when he went to live among the destitute and unemployed miners of northern England, sharing and observing their lives; it ends in a series of sharp criticisms of existing socialist movements. It combines mordant reporting with a tone of generous anger that was to characterize Orwell's subsequent writing.

In the 1940s Orwell was a prolific journalist, writing many newspaper articles and reviews, together with serious criticism, that combined patriotic sentiment with the advocacy of a libertarian, decentralist socialism. In 1944 Orwell finished
Animal Farm
, a political fable based on the story of the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin. In this book a group of barnyard animals overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters and set up
an egalitarian society of their own. When it appeared in 1945
Animal Farm
made him famous and, for the first time, prosperous.

Orwell's last book,
1984
(1949), is a novel he wrote as a warning after years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism. The novel is set in an imaginary future in which the world is dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states. Orwell's warning of the potential dangers of totalitarianism made a deep impression on his contemporaries and upon subsequent readers, and the book's title and many of its coined words and phrases (“Big Brother is watching you,” “newspeak,” “doublethink”) became bywords for modern political abuses.

Orwell wrote the last pages of
1984
in a remote house on the Hebridean island of Jura, which he had bought from the proceeds of
Animal Farm
. He worked between bouts of hospitalization for tuberculosis, of which he died in a London hospital in January 1950.

(b. July 12, 1904, Parral, Chile—d. Sept. 23, 1973, Santiago)

P
ablo Neruda, a Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. He was perhaps the most important Latin American poet of the 20th century.

Born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, Neruda began to write poetry at age 10. His father tried to discourage him from writing, which was probably why the young poet began to publish under the pseudonym Pablo Neruda, which he was legally to adopt in 1946. Neruda first published his poems in the local newspapers and later in magazines published in the Chilean capital, Santiago. In 1921 he moved to Santiago to continue his
studies and become a French teacher. His first book of poems,
Crepusculario
, was published in 1923. His second book,
Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada
(1924;
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
), was inspired by an unhappy love affair. It became an instant success and is still one of Neruda's most popular books. The verse in
Twenty Love Poems
is vigorous, poignant, and direct, yet subtle and very original in its imagery and metaphors. The poems express young, passionate, unhappy love perhaps better than any book of poetry in the long Romantic tradition.

More collections followed, but his poetry was not a steady source of income. He managed to get himself appointed honorary consul to Rangoon in Burma (now Yangôn, Myanmar), and for the next five years he represented his country in Asia. He continued to live in abject poverty, however, since as honorary consul he received no salary, and he was tormented by loneliness.

From Rangoon Neruda moved to Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He increasingly came to identify with the South Asian masses, who were heirs to ancient cultures but were downtrodden by poverty, colonial rule, and political oppression. It was during these years in Asia that he wrote
Residencia en la tierra, 1925–1931
(1933;
Residence on Earth
). In this book Neruda moves beyond the lucid, conventional lyricism of
Twenty Love Poems
, abandoning normal syntax, rhyme, and stanzaic organization to create a highly personalized poetic technique. His personal and collective anguish gives rise to nightmarish visions of disintegration, chaos, decay, and death that he recorded in a cryptic, difficult style inspired by Surrealism.

In 1930 Neruda was named consul in Batavia (modern Jakarta), which was then the capital of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). In 1932 Neruda returned to
Chile, but he still could not earn a living from his poetry. In 1933 he was appointed Chilean consul in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

In 1934 Neruda took up an appointment as consul in Barcelona, Spain, and soon he was transferred to the consulate in Madrid, where he moved ever closer to communism.

A second, enlarged edition of the
Residencia
poems entitled
Residencia en la tierra, 1925–35
was published in two volumes in 1935. In this edition, Neruda begins to move away from the highly personal, often hermetic poetry of the first
Residencia
volume, adopting a more extroverted outlook and a clearer, more accessible style in order to better communicate his new social concerns to the reader.

After supporting the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, Neruda returned to Chile in 1937 and entered his country's political life, giving lectures and poetry readings while also defending Republican Spain and Chile's new centre-left government. In 1939 he was appointed special consul in Paris, where he supervised the migration to Chile of many defeated Spanish Republicans who had escaped to France. In 1940 he took up a post as Chile's consul general in Mexico. He also began work on a long poem,
Canto general
(1950; “General Song,” Eng. trans.
Canto general
), that he would complete only after being driven into exile from Chile, after the government he had supported as a member of the Communist Party turned toward the right. Resonant with historical and epic overtones, this epic poem celebrates Latin America—its flora, its fauna, and its history, particularly the wars of liberation from Spanish rule and the continuing struggle of its peoples to obtain freedom and social justice. It also, however, celebrates Joseph Stalin, the bloody Soviet dictator in power at the time. The poem would become one of his key works.

In 1952 the political situation in Chile once again became favourable, and Neruda was able to return home. By that time his works had been translated into many languages, and he was rich and famous. One of his major works,
Odas elementales
(
Elemental Odes
), was published in 1954. Its verse was written in a new poetic style—simple, direct, precise, and humorous—and it contained descriptions of everyday objects, situations, and beings (e.g.,
Ode to the Onion
and
Ode to the Cat
). Neruda's poetic output during these years was stimulated by his international fame and personal happiness; 20 books of his appeared between 1958 and his death in 1973, and 8 more were published posthumously. While already ill with cancer in France, Neruda in 1971 learned that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. After traveling to Stockholm to receive his prize, he returned to Chile bedridden and terminally ill.

(b. April 13?, 1906, Foxrock, County Dublin, Ire.—d. Dec. 22, 1989, Paris, France)

A
uthor, critic, and playwright Samuel Beckett was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. He wrote in both French and English and is perhaps best known for his plays, especially
En attendant Godot
(1952;
Waiting for Godot
).

Beckett was born in a suburb of Dublin. Like his fellow Irish writers George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats, he came from a Protestant, Anglo-Irish background. At the age of 14 he went to the Portora Royal School, in what became Northern Ireland, a school that catered to the Anglo-Irish middle classes.

From 1923 to 1927, he studied Romance languages at Trinity College, Dublin, where he received his bachelor's
degree. After a brief spell of teaching in Belfast, he became a reader in English at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1928. There he met the self-exiled Irish writer James Joyce, the author of the controversial and seminally modern novel
Ulysses
, and joined his circle. Contrary to often-repeated reports, however, he never served as Joyce's secretary. He returned to Ireland in 1930 to take up a post as lecturer in French at Trinity College, but after only four terms he resigned, in December 1931, and embarked upon a period of restless travel in London, France, Germany, and Italy.

In 1937 Beckett decided to settle in Paris. As a citizen of a country that was neutral in World War II, he was able to remain there even after the occupation of Paris by the Germans, but he joined an underground resistance group in 1941. When, in 1942, he received news that members of his group had been arrested by the Gestapo, he immediately went into hiding and eventually moved to the unoccupied zone of France. Until the liberation of the country, he supported himself as an agricultural labourer. In 1945 he returned to Ireland but volunteered for the Irish Red Cross and went back to France as an interpreter in a military hospital in Saint-Lô, Normandy. In the winter of 1945, he finally returned to Paris and was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his resistance work.

There followed a period of intense creativity, the most concentratedly fruitful period of Beckett's life. His relatively few prewar publications included two essays on Joyce and the French novelist Marcel Proust. The volume
More Pricks Than Kicks
(1934) contained 10 stories describing episodes in the life of a Dublin intellectual, Belacqua Shuah, and the novel
Murphy
(1938) concerns an Irishman in London who escapes from a girl he is
about to marry to a life of contemplation as a male nurse in a mental institution. His two slim volumes of poetry were
Whoroscope
(1930), a poem on the French philosopher René Descartes, and the collection
Echo's Bones
(1935). A number of short stories and poems were scattered in various periodicals. He wrote the novel
Dream of Fair to Middling Women
in the mid-1930s, but it remained incomplete and was not published until 1992.

During his years in hiding in unoccupied France, Beckett also completed another novel,
Watt
, which was not published until 1953. After his return to Paris, between 1946 and 1949, Beckett produced a number of stories, the major prose narratives
Molloy
(1951),
Malone meurt
(1951;
Malone Dies
), and
L'Innommable
(1953;
The Unnamable
), and two plays, the unpublished three-act
Eleutheria
and
Waiting for Godot
.

It was not until 1951, however, that these works saw the light of day. After many refusals, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil (later Mme Beckett), Beckett's lifelong companion, finally succeeded in finding a publisher for
Molloy
. When this book not only proved a modest commercial success but also was received with enthusiasm by the French critics, the same publisher brought out the two other novels and
Waiting for Godot
. It was with the amazing success of
Waiting for Godot
at the small Théâtre de Babylone in Paris, in January 1953, that Beckett's rise to world fame began. Beckett continued writing, but more slowly than in the immediate postwar years. Plays for the stage and radio and a number of prose works occupied much of his attention.

Beckett continued to live in Paris, but most of his writing was done in a small house secluded in the Marne valley, a short drive from Paris. His total dedication to his art extended to his complete avoidance of all personal
publicity, of appearances on radio or television, and of all journalistic interviews. When, in 1969, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, he accepted the award but declined the trip to Stockholm to avoid the public speech at the ceremonies.

In spite of Beckett's courageous tackling of the ultimate mystery and despair of human existence, he was essentially a comic writer. Far from being gloomy and depressing, the ultimate effect of seeing or reading Beckett is one of cathartic release, an objective as old as theatre itself.

(b. Sept. 4, 1908, near Natchez, Miss., U.S.—d. Nov. 28, 1960, Paris, France)

T
he novelist and short-story writer Richard Wright was among the first black American writers to protest white treatment of blacks, notably in his novel
Native Son
(1940) and his autobiography,
Black Boy
(1945). He inaugurated the tradition of protest explored by other black writers after World War II.

Wright's grandparents had been slaves. His father left home when he was five, and the boy, who grew up in poverty, was often shifted from one relative to another. He worked at a number of jobs before joining the northward migration, first to Memphis, Tenn., and then to Chicago. There, after working in unskilled jobs, he got an opportunity to write through the Federal Writers' Project. In 1932 he became a member of the Communist Party, and in 1937 he went to New York City, where he became Harlem editor of the Communist
Daily Worker
.

Wright first came to the general public's attention with a volume of novellas,
Uncle Tom's Children
(1938), based on
the question: How may a black man live in a country that denies his humanity? In each story but one the hero's quest ends in death. His fictional scene shifted to Chicago in
Native Son
. Its protagonist, a poor black youth named Bigger Thomas, accidentally kills a white girl, and in the course of his ensuing flight his hitherto meaningless awareness of antagonism from a white world becomes intelligible. The book was a best-seller and was staged successfully as a play on Broadway (1941) by Orson Welles. Wright himself played Bigger Thomas in a motion-picture version made in Argentina in 1951.