Post-war to now
English is now a global language, so English literature is written in Lagos, Toronto, Kingston and Mumbai as much as in London — and often about what London did. The centre of gravity moves; the language keeps absorbing. Most writing from this period is still in copyright, which is why the library stops here.
✦Post-colonial writing, and the empire writing back
✦Confessional poetry
✦The theatre of the absurd
✦Global Englishes, in many registers at once
John Steinbeck
He wrote American working life as tragedy without sentimentality.
J. D. Salinger
He wrote the century's most imitated adolescent voice and never repeated it.
George Orwell
He made political language itself a subject of literature.
Samuel Beckett
He reduced drama to its essentials and made silence audible.
Harper Lee
She found a way to make a child's limited understanding the reader's moral instrument.
William Golding
He wrote the counter-argument to every adventure story about children and islands.
Margaret Atwood
She made the speculative novel an instrument of precise political argument.
Sylvia Plath
She described mental illness from inside the prose, not from above it.
Alice Walker
She made the epistolary form a record of a voice becoming free.
Jean Rhys
She turned a silencing into a voice.
Gabriel García Márquez
He made the fantastic and the political inhabit the same sentence.
Salman Rushdie
He wrote history as a family story and a tall tale at once.
Arundhati Roy
She showed how a child's way of hearing a sentence can carry a whole tragedy.
Haruki Murakami
He writes loneliness as a physical climate.
Hanya Yanagihara
She tests the limits of empathy as a literary technique.
Toni Morrison
She made the American novel confront what it had left out.
Khaled Hosseini
He put Afghan women's lives at the centre of the contemporary novel in English.
Frank Herbert
He built the template for the ecological science-fiction epic.
J. R. R. Tolkien
He made invented history feel older than the story being told.
George R. R. Martin
He removed the safety net from epic fantasy and made consequence the plot.
Vladimir Nabokov
He showed that beautiful prose can be an alibi.
Shirley Jackson
She made the haunted house a study of social cruelty.
Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett · 1953
Two men wait beside a tree for someone who does not come.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell · 1949
A state that does not just punish dissent but edits the language you dissent in.
Animal Farm
George Orwell · 1945
A revolution that becomes a management problem, then a dictatorship.
Lord of the Flies
William Golding · 1954
Boys on an island discover what they have already been taught.
The Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger · 1951
Three days in a city with a boy who cannot stop noticing what is fake.
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee · 1960
A trial seen from the height of a child's eyes.
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov · 1955
The most beautiful prose in the room, doing the ugliest possible work.
Dune
Frank Herbert · 1965
A desert planet, a spice, and a prophecy engineered by people who profit from it.
The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien · 1954
A small person carries the one thing nobody powerful can be trusted with.
A Game of Thrones
George R. R. Martin · 1996
Everyone has a claim, and the claims do not agree.
The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood · 1985
A theocracy that renames women after the men who own them.
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath · 1963
A brilliant student watches her own mind become the weather.
The Color Purple
Alice Walker · 1982
Letters to God, then letters to a sister, and a self assembling in between.
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys · 1966
The first Mrs Rochester gets to tell it herself.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967
A family repeats its names, its mistakes and its wars for a century.
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie · 1981
A boy born at the exact hour of independence, wired to the country's fate.
The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy · 1997
Twins, a river, and one afternoon that the whole novel circles.
Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami · 1987
A student, two women, and a decade spent not recovering.
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara · 2015
Four friends, and the question of whether love can repair a person.
East of Eden
John Steinbeck · 1952
Two families, one valley, and the oldest story retold as a choice.
Beloved
Toni Morrison · 1987
A house, a ghost, and a history that will not stay in the past tense.
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini · 2007
Two women in Kabul, three decades, one house.
The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson · 1959
Four people stay in a house that is not sane, and one of them is not sure she is.