The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (40 page)

In 1944 Wright left the Communist Party because of political and personal differences.
Black Boy
, written a year later, is a moving account of his childhood and young manhood in the South. The book chronicles the extreme poverty of his childhood, his experience of white prejudice and violence against blacks, and his growing awareness of his interest in literature.

After World War II, Wright settled in Paris as a permanent expatriate.
The Outsider
(1953), acclaimed as the first American existential novel, warned that the black man had awakened in a disintegrating society not ready to include him. Three later novels were not well-received. Among his polemical writings of that period was
White Man, Listen!
(1957), which was originally a series of lectures given in Europe.
Eight Men
, a collection of short stories, appeared in 1961.

The autobiographical
American Hunger
, which narrates Wright's experiences after moving to the North, was published posthumously in 1977. Some of the more candid passages dealing with race, sex, and politics in Wright's books had been cut or omitted before original publication. Unexpurgated versions of
Native Son
,
Black Boy
, and his other works were published in 1991, however.

(b. April 13, 1909, Jackson, Miss., U.S.—d. July 23, 2001, Jackson)

E
udora Welty was an American short-story writer and novelist whose work is mainly focused with great precision on the regional manners of people inhabiting a small Mississippi town that resembles her own birthplace and the Delta country.

Welty attended Mississippi State College for Women before transferring to the University of Wisconsin, from which she graduated in 1929. During the Great Depression she was a photographer on the Works Progress Administration's Guide to Mississippi, and photography remained a lifelong interest.
Photographs
(1989) is a collection of many of the photographs she took for the WPA. She also worked as a writer for a radio station and newspaper in her native Jackson, Mississippi, before her fiction won popular and critical acclaim.

Welty's first short story was published in 1936, and thereafter her work began to appear regularly, first in little magazines such as the
Southern Review
and later in major periodicals such as
The Atlantic Monthly
and
The New Yorker
. Her readership grew steadily after the publication of
A Curtain of Green
(1941; enlarged 1979), a volume of short stories that contains two of her most anthologized stories, “The Petrified Man” and “Why I Live at the P.O.” In 1942 her short novel
The Robber Bridegroom
was issued, and in 1946 her first full-length novel,
Delta Wedding
. Her later novels include
The Ponder Heart
(1954),
Losing Battles
(1970), and
The Optimist's Daughter
(1972), which won a Pulitzer Prize.
The Wide Net and Other Stories
(1943),
The Golden Apples
(1949), and
The Bride of Innisfallen and Other Stories
(1955) are collections of short stories, and
The Eye of the Story
(1978) is a volume of essays.
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
was published in 1980.

Welty's main subject is the intricacies of human relationships, particularly as revealed through her characters' interactions in intimate social encounters. Among her themes are the subjectivity and ambiguity of people's perception of character and the presence of virtue hidden beneath an obscuring surface of convention, insensitivity, and social prejudice. Welty's outlook is hopeful, and love is viewed as a redeeming presence in the midst of isolation and indifference. Her works combine humour and psychological acuity with a sharp ear for regional speech patterns.

One Writer's Beginnings
, an autobiographical work, was published in 1984. Originating in a series of three lectures given at Harvard, it beautifully evoked what Welty styled her “sheltered life” in Jackson and how her early fiction grew out of it.

(b. De
c
. 11, 1911, Cairo, Egypt—d. Aug. 30, 2006, Cairo)

T
he Egyptian novelist and screenplay writer Naguid Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, the first Arabic writer to be so honoured.

Mahfouz was the son of a civil servant and grew up in Cairo's Al-Jam
ā
liyyah district. He attended Fu'
ā
d I University (now Cairo University), where in 1934 he received a degree in philosophy. He worked in the Egyptian civil service in a variety of positions from 1934 until his retirement in 1971.

Mahfouz's earliest published works were short stories. His early novels, such as
R
ā
d
Å«
b
Ä«
s
(1943; “Radobis”), were set in ancient Egypt, but he had turned to describing modern Egyptian society by the time he began his major work,
Al-Thul
ā
thiyyah
(1956–57), known as
The Cairo Trilogy
. Its three novels—
Bayn al-qasrayn
(1956;
Palace Walk
),
Qa
á¹£
r
al-shawq
(1957;
Palace of Desire
), and
Al-Sukkariyyah
(1957;
Sugar Street
)—depict the lives of three generations of different families in Cairo from World War I until after the 1952 military coup that overthrew King Farouk. The trilogy provides a penetrating overview of 20th-century Egyptian thought, attitudes, and social change.

In subsequent works Mahfouz offered critical views of the old Egyptian monarchy, British colonialism, and contemporary Egypt. Several of his more notable novels deal with social issues involving women and political prisoners. His novel
Awl
ā
d
ḥ
ā
ratin
ā
(1959;
Children of the Alley
) was banned in Egypt for a time because of its controversial treatment of religion and its use of characters based on Muhammad, Moses, and other figures. Islamic militants, partly because of their outrage over the work, later called for his death, and in 1994 Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck.

Mahfouz's other novels include
Al-Li
ṣṣ
wa-al-kil
ā
b
(1961;
The Thief and the Dogs
),
Al-Sha
ḥḥ
ā
dh
(1965;
The Beggar
), and
M
Ä«
r
ā
m
ā
r
(1967;
Miramar
), all of which consider Egyptian society under Gamal Abdel Nasser's regime;
Afr
āḥ
al-qubba
(1981;
Wedding Song
), set among several characters associated with a Cairo theatre company; and the structurally experimental
Ḥ
ad
Ä«
th al-
á¹£
ab
āḥ
wa-al-mas
ā
'
(1987;
Morning and Evening Talk
), which strings together in alphabetical order dozens of character sketches. Together, his novels, which were among the first to gain widespread acceptance in the Arabic-speaking world, brought the genre to maturity within Arabic literature.

Mahfouz's achievements as a short-story writer are demonstrated in such collections as
Duny
ā
All
ā
h
(1963;
God's World
).
The Time and the Place, and Other Stories
(1991) and
The Seventh Heaven
(2005) are collections of his stories in English translation. Mahfouz wrote more than 45 novels and short-story collections, as well as some 30 screenplays
and several plays.
Asd
ā
' al-s
Ä«
rah al-dh
ā
tiyyah
(1996;
Echoes of an Autobiography
) is a collection of parables and his sayings. In 1996 the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature was established to honour Arabic writers.

(b. Nov. 7, 1913, Mondovi, Alg.—d. Jan. 4, 1960, near Sens, France)

T
he French novelist, essayist, and playwright Albert Camus was best known for such novels as
L'Étranger
(1942;
The Stranger
),
La Peste
(1947;
The Plague
), and
La Chute
(1956;
The Fall
) and for his work in leftist causes. He received the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature.

While attending the University of Algiers, Camus was particularly influenced by one of his teachers, Jean Grenier, who helped him to develop his literary and philosophical ideas. He obtained a
diplôme d'études supérieures
in 1936 for a thesis on the relationship between Greek and Christian thought in the philosophical writings of Plotinus and St. Augustine. His candidature for the
agrégation
(a qualification that would have enabled him to take up a university career) was cut short, however, by an attack of tuberculosis. To regain his health he went to a resort in the French Alps—his first visit to Europe—and eventually returned to Algiers via Florence, Pisa, and Genoa.

Throughout the 1930s, Camus broadened his interests. He read the French classics as well as the writers of the day—among them André Gide, Henry de Montherlant, André Malraux—and was a prominent figure among the young left-wing intellectuals of Algiers. For a short period in 1934–35 he was also a member of the Algerian Communist Party. In addition, he wrote, produced, adapted, and acted for the Théâtre du Travail (Workers' Theatre, later named the Théâtre de l'Équipe), which
aimed to bring outstanding plays to working-class audiences. He maintained a deep love of the theatre until his death. Ironically, his plays are the least-admired part of his literary output, although
Le Malentendu
(
Cross Purpose
) and
Caligula
, first produced in 1944 and 1945, respectively, remain landmarks in the Theatre of the Absurd.

In the two years before the outbreak of World War II, Camus served his apprenticeship as a journalist with
Alger-Républicain
in many capacities. He reviewed some of Jean-Paul Sartre's early literary works and wrote an important series of articles analyzing social conditions among the Muslims of the Kabylie region. These articles, reprinted in abridged form in
Actuelles III
(1958), drew attention (15 years in advance) to many of the injustices that led to the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954.

He enjoyed the most influence as a journalist during the final years of the occupation of France and the immediate post-Liberation period. As editor of the Parisian daily
Combat
, the successor of a Resistance newssheet run largely by Camus, he held an independent left-wing position based on the ideals of justice and truth and the belief that all political action must have a solid moral basis.

By now Camus had become a leading literary figure.
L'Étranger
(
The Stranger
), a brilliant first novel begun before the war and published in 1942, is a study of 20th-century alienation with a portrait of an “outsider” condemned to death less for shooting an Arab than for the fact that he never says more than he genuinely feels and refuses to conform to society's demands. The same year saw the publication of an influential philosophical essay,
Le Mythe de Sisyphe
(
The Myth of Sisyphus
), in which Camus, with considerable sympathy, analyzed contemporary nihilism and a sense of the “absurd.” He was already seeking a way of overcoming nihilism, and his second novel,
La Peste
(1947;
The Plague
), is a symbolical account of the fight against an epidemic in Oran by characters whose importance lies less in the (doubtful) success with which they oppose the epidemic than in their determined assertion of human dignity and fraternity. His other major literary works are the technically brilliant novel
La Chute
(1956) and a collection of short stories,
L'Exil et le royaume
(1957;
Exile and the Kingdom
).
La Chute
reveals a preoccupation with Christian symbolism and contains an ironical and witty exposure of the more complacent forms of secular humanist morality.