The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (42 page)

Her other works of fiction are a novel,
The Violent Bear It Away
(1960), and the short-story collection
Everything That Rises Must Converge
(1965). A collection of occasional prose pieces,
Mystery and Manners
, appeared in 1969.
The Complete Stories
, published posthumously in 1971, contained several stories that had not previously appeared in book form; it won a National Book Award in 1972.

Disabled for more than a decade by the lupus erythematosus she inherited from her father, which eventually proved fatal, O'Connor lived modestly, writing and raising peafowl on her mother's farm at Milledgeville. The posthumous publication of her letters, under the title
The Habit of Being
(1979), and her book reviews and correspondence with local diocesan newspapers, published as
The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews
(1983), provided valuable insight into the life and mind of a writer whose works defy conventional categorization. O'Connor's corpus is notable for the seeming incongruity of a devout Catholic whose darkly comic works commonly feature startling acts of violence and unsympathetic, often depraved, characters. She explained the prevalence of brutality in her stories by noting that violence “is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace.” It is this divine stripping of man's comforts and hubris, along with the attendant degradation of the corporeal, that stands as the most salient feature of O'Connor's work.

(b. Feb. 18, 1931, Lorain, Ohio, U.S.)

T
oni Morrison is an American writer noted for her examination of the black experience, particularly black female experience. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.

Morrison, born Chloe Anthony Wofford, grew up in the American Midwest in a family that possessed an intense love of and appreciation for black culture. Storytelling, songs, and folktales were a deeply formative part of her childhood. She attended Howard University (B.A., 1953) and Cornell
University (M.A., 1955). After teaching at Texas Southern University for two years, she taught at Howard from 1957 to 1964. In 1965 she became a fiction editor. From 1984 she taught writing at the State University of New York at Albany, leaving in 1989 to join the faculty of Princeton University.

Morrison's first book,
The Bluest Eye
(1970), is a novel of initiation concerning a victimized adolescent black girl who is obsessed by white standards of beauty and longs to have blue eyes. In 1973 a second novel,
Sula
, was published; it examines (among other issues) the dynamics of friendship and the expectations for conformity within the community.
Song of Solomon
(1977) is told by a male narrator in search of his identity; its publication brought Morrison to national attention.
Tar Baby
(1981), set on a Caribbean island, explores conflicts of race, class, and sex. The critically acclaimed
Beloved
(1987), which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is based on the true story of a runaway slave who, at the point of recapture, kills her infant daughter in order to spare her a life of slavery.
Jazz
(1992) is a story of violence and passion set in New York City's Harlem during the 1920s. Subsequent novels are
Paradise
(1998), a richly detailed portrait of a black utopian community in Oklahoma, and
Love
(2003), an intricate family story that reveals the myriad facets of love and its ostensible opposite.
A Mercy
(2008) deals with slavery in 17th-century America.

A work of criticism,
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
, was published in 1992. Many of her essays and speeches were collected in
What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction
(edited by Carolyn C. Denard), published in 2008. Additionally, Morrison released several children's books, including
Who's Got Game?: The Ant or the Grasshopper?
and
Who's Got Game?: The Lion or the Mouse?
, both written with her son and published in 2003.
Remember
(2004) chronicles the hardships
of black students during the integration of the American public school system; aimed at children, it uses archival photographs juxtaposed with captions speculating on the thoughts of their subjects. She also wrote the libretto for
Margaret Garner
(2005), an opera about the same story that inspired
Beloved
.

The central theme of Morrison's novels is the black American experience. In an unjust society, her characters struggle to find themselves and their cultural identity. Her use of fantasy, her sinuous poetic style, and her rich interweaving of the mythic gave her stories great strength and texture.

(b. July 13, 1934, Abeokuta, Nigeria)

W
ole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright and political activist who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He sometimes wrote of modern West Africa in a satirical style, but his serious intent and his belief in the evils inherent in the exercise of power usually was evident in his work as well.

A member of the Yoruba people, Soyinka attended Government College and University College in Ibadan before graduating in 1958 with a degree in English from the University of Leeds in England. Upon his return to Nigeria, he founded an acting company and wrote his first important play,
A Dance of the Forests
(produced 1960; published 1963), for the Nigerian independence celebrations. The play satirizes the fledgling nation by stripping it of romantic legend and by showing that the present is no more a golden age than was the past.

He wrote several plays in a lighter vein, making fun of pompous, Westernized schoolteachers in
The Lion and the Jewel
(first performed in Ibadan, 1959; published 1963) and
mocking the clever preachers of upstart prayer-churches who grow fat on the credulity of their parishioners in
The Trials of Brother Jero
(performed 1960; published 1963) and
Jero's Metamorphosis
(1973). But his more serious plays, such as
The Strong Breed
(1963),
Kongi's Harvest
(opened the first Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, 1966; published 1967),
The Road
(1965),
From Zia, with Love
(1992), and even the parody
King Baabu
(performed 2001; published 2002), reveal his disregard for African authoritarian leadership and his disillusionment with Nigerian society as a whole.

Other notable plays include
Madmen and Specialists
(performed 1970; published 1971),
Death and the King's Horseman
(1975), and
The Beatification of Area Boy
(1995). In these and Soyinka's other dramas, Western elements are skillfully fused with subject matter and dramatic techniques deeply rooted in Yoruba folklore and religion. Symbolism, flashback, and ingenious plotting contribute to a rich dramatic structure. His best works exhibit humour and fine poetic style as well as a gift for irony and satire and for accurately matching the language of his complex characters to their social position and moral qualities.

From 1960 to 1964, Soyinka was coeditor of
Black Orpheus
, an important literary journal. From 1960 onward he taught literature and drama and headed theatre groups at various Nigerian universities, including those of Ibadan, Ife, and Lagos. After winning the Nobel Prize, he also was sought after as a lecturer, and many of his lectures were published—notably the Reith Lectures of 2004, as
Climate of Fear
(2004).

Though he considered himself primarily a playwright, Soyinka also wrote novels—
The Interpreters
(1965) and
Season of Anomy
(1973)—and several volumes of poetry. The latter include
Idanre, and Other Poems
(1967) and
Poems from Prison
(1969; republished as
A Shuttle in the Crypt
, 1972),
published together as
Early Poems
(1998);
Mandela's Earth and Other Poems
(1988); and
Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known
(2002). His verse is characterized by a precise command of language and a mastery of lyric, dramatic, and meditative poetic forms. He wrote a good deal of
Poems from Prison
while he was jailed in 1967–69 for speaking out against the war brought on by the attempted secession of Biafra from Nigeria.
The Man Died
(1972) is his prose account of his arrest and 22-month imprisonment. Soyinka's principal critical work is
Myth, Literature, and the African World
(1976), a collection of essays in which he examines the role of the artist in the light of Yoruba mythology and symbolism.
Art, Dialogue, and Outrage
(1988) is a work on similar themes of art, culture, and society. He continued to address Africa's ills and Western responsibility in
The Open Sore of a Continent
(1996) and
The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness
(1999).

Soyinka was the first black African to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. An autobiography,
Aké: The Years of Childhood
, was published in 1981 and followed by the companion pieces
Ìsarà: A Voyage Around Essay
(1989) and
Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years: A Memoir, 1946–1965
(1994). In 2006 he published another memoir,
You Must Set Forth at Dawn
. In 2005–06 Soyinka served on the Encyclopædia Britannica Editorial Board of Advisors.

(b. June 19, 1947, Bombay [now Mumbai], India)

S
ir Salman Rushdie remains best known as the Anglo-Indian novelist who was condemned to death by leading Iranian Muslim clerics in 1989 for allegedly having blasphemed Islam in his novel
The Satanic Verses
. His case became the focus of an international controversy.

Rushdie was the son of a prosperous Muslim businessman in India. He was educated at Rugby School and the University of Cambridge, receiving an M.A. degree in history in 1968. Throughout most of the 1970s he worked in London as an advertising copywriter, and his first published novel,
Grimus
, appeared in 1975. His next novel,
Midnight's Children
(1981), an allegory about modern India, was an unexpected critical and popular success that won him international recognition. Like Rushdie's subsequent fiction,
Midnight's Children
is an allegorical fable that examines historical and philosophical issues by means of surreal characters, brooding humour, and an effusive and melodramatic prose style.

The novel
Shame
(1983), based on contemporary politics in Pakistan, was also popular, but Rushdie's fourth novel,
The Satanic Verses
, encountered a different reception. Some of the adventures in this book depict a character modeled on the Prophet Muhammad and portray both him and his transcription of the Qur'
ā
n in a manner that, after the novel's publication in the summer of 1988, drew criticism from Muslim community leaders in Britain, who denounced the novel as blasphemous. Public demonstrations against the book spread to Pakistan in January 1989. On February 14 the spiritual leader of revolutionary Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, publicly condemned the book and issued a fatwa (legal opinion) against Rushdie; a bounty was offered to anyone who would execute him. He went into hiding under the protection of Scotland Yard, and—although he occasionally emerged unexpectedly, sometimes in other countries—he was compelled to restrict his movements.

Despite the standing death threat, Rushdie continued to write, producing
Imaginary Homelands
(1991), a collection of essays and criticism; the children's novel
Haroun
and the Sea of Stories
(1990); the short-story collection
East, West
(1994); and the novel
The Moor's Last Sigh
(1995). In 1998, after nearly a decade, the Iranian government announced it would no longer seek to enforce its fatwa against Rushdie.

Rushdie's subsequent novels include
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
(1999) and
Fury
(2001).
Step Across This Line
(2002) is a collection of essays he wrote between 1992 and 2002 on subjects from the September 11 attacks to
The Wizard of Oz
.
Shalimar the Clown
(2005), a novel set primarily in the disputed Kashmir region of the Indian subcontinent, examines the nature of terrorism.
The Enchantress of Florence
(2008) is based on a fictionalized account of the Mughal emperor Akbar.

Rushdie received the Booker Prize in 1981 for
Midnight's Children
. He subsequently won the Booker of Bookers (1993) and the Best of the Booker (2008). These special prizes were voted on by the public in honour of the prize's 25th and 40th anniversaries, respectively. Rushdie was knighted in 2007, an honour criticized by the Iranian government and Pakistan's parliament.