The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (41 page)

In 1957, at the early age of 44, Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature. With characteristic modesty he declared that had he been a member of the awarding committee, his vote would certainly have gone to André Malraux. Less than three years later Camus was killed in an automobile accident.

As novelist and playwright, moralist, and political theorist, Albert Camus after World War II became the spokesman of his own generation and the mentor of the next, not only in France but also in Europe and eventually the world. His writings, which addressed themselves mainly to the isolation of man in an alien universe, the estrangement of the individual from himself, the problem of evil, and the pressing finality of death, accurately reflected the alienation and disillusionment of the postwar intellectual. He is remembered, with Sartre, as a leading practitioner of the existential novel.

(b. Dec. 11, 1918, Kislovodsk, Russia—d. Aug. 3, 2008, Troitse-Lykovo, near Moscow)

A
leksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, a Russian novelist and historian, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970.

Solzhenitsyn fought in World War II, achieving the rank of captain of artillery; in 1945, however, he was arrested for writing a letter in which he criticized Joseph Stalin and spent eight years in prisons and labour camps, after which he spent three more years in enforced exile. Rehabilitated in 1956, he was allowed to settle in Ryazan, in central Russia, where he became a mathematics teacher and began to write.

Encouraged by the loosening of government restraints on cultural life that was a hallmark of the de-Stalinizing policies of the early 1960s, Solzhenitsyn submitted his short
novel
Odin den iz zhizni Ivana Denisovicha
(1962;
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
) to the leading Soviet literary periodical
Novy Mir
(“New World”). The novel quickly appeared in that journal's pages and met with immediate popularity, Solzhenitsyn becoming an instant celebrity.
Ivan Denisovich
, based on Solzhenitsyn's own experiences, described a typical day in the life of an inmate of a forced-labour camp during the Stalin era. The book produced a political sensation both abroad and in the Soviet Union, where it inspired a number of other writers to produce accounts of their imprisonment under Stalin's regime.

Solzhenitsyn's period of official favour proved to be short-lived, however. Ideological strictures on cultural activity in the Soviet Union tightened with Nikita Khrushchev's fall from power in 1964, and Solzhenitsyn met first with increasing criticism and then with overt harassment from the authorities when he emerged as an eloquent opponent of repressive government policies. After the publication of a collection of his short stories in 1963, he was denied further official publication of his work, and he resorted to circulating them in the form of
samizdat
(“self-published”) literature—i.e., as illegal literature circulated clandestinely—as well as publishing them abroad.

The following years were marked by the foreign publication of several ambitious novels that secured Solzhenitsyn's international literary reputation, among them
V kruge pervom
(1968;
The First Circle
), which traces the varying responses of scientists at work on research for the secret police as they must decide whether to cooperate with the authorities and thus remain within the research prison or to refuse their services and be thrust back into the brutal conditions of the labour camps.

In 1970 Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he declined to go to Stockholm to receive
the prize for fear he would not be readmitted to the Soviet Union by the government upon his return.

In December 1973 the first parts of
Arkhipelag Gulag
(
The Gulag Archipelago
) were published in Paris after a copy of the manuscript had been seized in the Soviet Union by the KGB. (
Gulag
is an acronym formed from the official Soviet designation of its system of prisons and labour camps.)
The Gulag Archipelago
is Solzhenitsyn's attempt to compile a literary-historical record of the vast system of prisons and labour camps that came into being shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia (1917) and that underwent an enormous expansion during the rule of Stalin (1924–53). Various sections of the work describe the arrest, interrogation, conviction, transportation, and imprisonment of the Gulag's victims as practiced by Soviet authorities over four decades. The work mingles historical exposition and Solzhenitsyn's own autobiographical accounts with the voluminous personal testimony of other inmates that he collected and committed to memory during his imprisonment.

Upon publication of the first volume of
The Gulag Archipelago
, Solzhenitsyn was immediately attacked in the Soviet press. Despite the intense interest in his fate that was shown in the West, he was arrested and charged with treason on Feb. 12, 1974. Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union on the following day, and in December he took possession of his Nobel Prize. The second and third volumes of
The Gulag Archipelago
were published in 1974–75. Solzhenitsyn traveled to the United States, where he eventually settled on a secluded estate in Cavendish, Vt.

In presenting alternatives to the Soviet regime, Solzhenitsyn tended to reject Western emphases on democracy and individual freedom and instead favoured the formation of a benevolent authoritarian regime that would draw upon the resources of Russia's traditional
Christian values. The introduction of
glasnost
(“openness”) in the late 1980s brought renewed access to Solzhenitsyn's work in the Soviet Union. In 1989 the Soviet literary magazine
Novy Mir
published the first officially approved excerpts from
The Gulag Archipelago
. Solzhenitsyn's Soviet citizenship was officially restored in 1990.

Solzhenitsyn ended his exile and returned to Russia in 1994. He subsequently made several public appearances and even met privately with Russian Pres. Boris Yeltsin. Installments of his autobiography,
Ugodilo zernyshko promezh dvukh zhernovov: ocherki izgnaniia
(“The Little Grain Managed to Land Between Two Millstones: Sketches of Exile”), were published from 1998 to 2003. In 2007 Solzhenitsyn was awarded Russia's prestigious State Prize for his contribution to humanitarian causes.

(b. March 12, 1922, Lowell, Mass., U.S.—d. Oct. 21, 1969, St. Petersburg, Fla.)

J
ack Kerouac, an American novelist and poet and the leader of the Beat movement, is best known for his book
On the Road
(1957), which captured the spirit of its time as no other work of the 20th century did.

Kerouac, who spoke joual (a Canadian dialect of French), attended a French Canadian school in Lowell, Mass., in the morning and continued his studies in English in the afternoon. He subsequently went to the Horace Mann School, a preparatory school in New York City, on a football scholarship. In 1940 Kerouac enrolled at Columbia University, where he met two writers who would become lifelong friends: Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Together with Kerouac they are the seminal figures of the Beat movement.

By the time Kerouac and Burroughs met, in 1944, Kerouac had already written a million words. His boyhood ambition had been to write the “great American novel.” His first novel,
The Town & the City
(1950), received favourable reviews but was considered derivative of the novels of Thomas Wolfe, whose
Time and the River
(1935) and
You Can't Go Home Again
(1940) were then popular. Yet Kerouac was unhappy with the pace of his prose. The music of bebop jazz artists Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker began to drive Kerouac toward his “spontaneous bop prosody,” as Ginsberg later called it, which took shape in the late 1940s through various drafts of his second novel,
On the Road
. The original manuscript, a scroll written in a three-week blast in 1951, is legendary: composed of approximately 120 feet (37 metres) of paper taped together and fed into a manual typewriter, the scroll allowed Kerouac the fast pace he was hoping to achieve. Rejected for publication at first, it finally was printed in 1957. Kerouac found himself a national sensation after
On the Road
received a rave review from
The New York Times
.

Readers often confused Kerouac with Sal Paradise, the amoral hipster at the centre of his novel. The critic Norman Podhoretz famously wrote that Beat writing was an assault against the intellect and against decency. This misreading dominated negative reactions to
On the Road
. Through the novel's characterization of hipsters and their nonconformist celebration of sex, jazz, and endless movement, Kerouac wanted to achieve in his writing that which he could find neither in the promise of America nor in the empty spirituality of Roman Catholicism; he strived instead for the serenity that he had discovered in his adopted Buddhism. Kerouac felt that the Beat label marginalized him and prevented him from being treated as he wanted to be treated,
as a man of letters in the American tradition of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman.

As he continued to experiment with his prose style, Kerouac also bolstered his standing among the Beat writers as a poet supreme. With his sonnets and odes he ranged across Western poetic traditions. He also experimented with the idioms of blues and jazz in such works as
Mexico City Blues
(1959), a sequential poem comprising 242 choruses. After he met the poet Gary Snyder in 1955, Kerouac's poetry, as well as that of Ginsberg and fellow Beats Philip Whalen and Lew Welch, began to show the influence of the haiku, a genre mostly unknown to Americans at that time.

Kerouac turned to Buddhist study and practice from 1953 to 1956, after his “road” period and in the lull between composing
On the Road
in 1951 and its publication in 1957. In the fall of 1953 he finished
The Subterraneans
(it would be published in 1958). Fed up with the world after the failed love affair upon which the book was based, he read Henry David Thoreau and fantasized a life outside civilization. He immersed himself in the study of Zen.

By the 1960s Kerouac had finished most of the writing for which he is best known. In 1961 he wrote
Big Sur
in 10 days while living in the cabin of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a fellow Beat poet, in California's Big Sur region. Another important autobiographical book,
Vanity of Duluoz
(1968), recounts stories of his childhood, his schooling, and the dramatic scandals that defined early Beat legend.

In 1969 Kerouac was broke, and many of his books were out of print. An alcoholic, he was living with his third wife and his mother in St. Petersburg, Fla., where he spent his time in local bars. A week after he had been beaten by fellow drinkers whom he had antagonized, he died of internal hemorrhaging while sitting in front of his television.

(b. March 25, 1925, Savannah, Ga., U.S.—d. Aug. 3, 1964, Milledgeville, Ga.)

F
lannery O'Connor was an American novelist and short-story writer whose works, usually set in the rural American South and often treating alienation, are concerned with the relationship between the individual and God.

O'Connor grew up in a prominent Roman Catholic family in her native Georgia. She lived in Savannah until her adolescence, but the worsening of her father's lupus erythematosus forced the family to relocate in 1938 to the home in rural Milledgeville where her mother had been raised. After graduating from Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College & State University) in 1945, she studied creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Her first published work, a short story, appeared in the magazine
Accent
in 1946. Her first novel,
Wise Blood
(1952; film 1979), explored, in O'Connor's own words, the “religious consciousness without a religion.”
Wise Blood
consists of a series of near-independent chapters—many of which originated in previously published short stories—that tell the tale of Hazel Motes, a man who returns home from military service and founds the Church Without Christ, which leads to a series of interactions with the grotesque inhabitants of his hometown. The work combines the keen ear for common speech, caustic religious imagination, and flair for the absurd that were to characterize her subsequent work. With the publication of further short stories, first collected in
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories
(1955), she came to be regarded as a master of the form. The collection's
eponymous story has become possibly her best-known work. In it O'Connor creates an unexpected agent of salvation in the character of an escaped convict called The Misfit, who kills a quarreling family on vacation in the Deep South.