One of the best known children’s diaries, this work records the last two years of a 13 year old Jewish girl whose family hid in an Amsterdam apartment during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. This first-hand account is an important work in the literature of the Holocaust and serves as a testament to the human spirit.
This was the first of the Kinsey Reports, and was followed in 1953 by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The Reports were extraordinarily important in their role as one of the first statistical descriptions of human sexual behavior as it is, rather than as an author thought it should be.
Not surprisingly, the results were controversial. In fact, the results still ignite criticism—some based on the changes and improvements in sampling and statistical work, and others on moral grounds, just as they did when it was first published. Joseph Fulsom, for example, astutely characterized that strand of objection in as follows, in 1954:
“Maybe it’s true, but it’s not good policy to broadcast detailed truth without some consideration of how people are going to use it.”
Apart from making it clear that America sexual behavior didn’t conform to prescribed behaviors, another legacy from Kinsey’s work is the sexual orientation scale, rejecting the concept of a binary sexuality. For these reasons, Kinsey’s work is exceptionally important.
Nineteen Eighty-Four tells the story of a totalitarian society where people live in constant fear of monitoring and persecution by the omniscient ruling party. The main character dares to have a love affair, which breaks several party rules, and is then systematically tortured to accept Big Brother’s control. Themes of censorship, individuality, and surveillance are explored and many parallels are drawn to the Soviet Union’s embrace of Communism in the post-war period.
The influences of Nineteen Eighty-Four on popular culture are many, most notably on language. Terms such as “Big Brother” and “Orwellian” are now part of the vernacular and the popular show Big Brother, which features a group of people under constant surveillance, is seen world-wide.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was the first of the Narnia chronicles by C.S. Lewis, a set of tales that introduced many of us to fantasy literature. The books were controversial initially—a fantasty story at a time when it was considered entirely possible that fantasy would render children incapable of dealing with the real world. Happily, that seems to have been incorrect.
Certainly, the books are products of their time and cultural milieu. For some, that is an insurmountable barrier; for others, it’s an opportunity to write new works. Neil Gaiman’s short story, “The Problem of Susan,” for example, engages the question what it means to be an adult woman, and how that fits or doesn’t fit into the ideology of Narnia. It’s also been suggested that some of Phillip Pullman’s work has been a reaction to Lewis’s Christian ideology.
Despite its issues, many of us have, at some point in our childhood, peered into a wardrobe or its nearest analogue to see whether the back might lead into a forest this time…
Graham Greene writes:
I remember distinctly the suddenness with which a key turned in a lock and I found I could read – not just the sentences in a reading book with the syllables coupled like railway carriages, but a real book.
This book is a collection of essays about authors, Greene’s childhood and reading. The Times Literacy Supplement wrote about the book:
The individual studies constantly please the reader with wit, stimulate with imagination, move him to admiration by their original thinking, and by the excellence of their writing. ( Book Jacket)
Published first in 1951, this book is an early work of non fiction of the author who went on to write such well known works as Travels with my Aunt, Brighton Rock, and The Quiet American. Much of his work reflected his 
Catholic upbringing and explored moral and social issues. The author of more than fifty books during a sixty-year career, Graham Greene (1904–1991) unquestionably ranks among the twentieth century’s great writers. His novels alone have sold more than 20 million copies and have been translated into nearly thirty languages.
Read more at the site for the Graham Green International Festival and the New York Times Reference Page on Greene.
In this American literary classic, the anonymous black narrator introduces himself in this way: “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”
Still in print today, this book is one of Bradbury’s most well-known works of fiction that portrays a society in the not so distant future when fireman burn books forbidden by the totalitarian regime.
Bradbury shares insights into the book in the preface:
Photo courtesy of Biography Resource Center
Fahrenheit 451 show how important books are to freedom, morality, and the search for truth. The novel concludes with Montag, a fireman who has rejected his role as book burner, joining a community that strives to preserve books by memorizing them.
Bradbury concludes the Preface with the following statement:
Fahrenheit 451 was written, in its entirety, in the basement of the library at UCLA, on a pay-typewriter into which, every half hour I had to feed ten cents. I wrote in a roomful of students who didn’t know what I was doing there, just as I didn’t know what they were doing there. Perhaps some other novelist was in the basement room working away; I should like to think so. What finer place is there to work than in such a library deeps?
Bradbury was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, died on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91 after a long illness.
Additional Resources:
The Fellowship of the Ring is the first volume of Tolkien’s epic fantasy saga The Lord of the Rings. It was critically acclaimed when it was first published in 1954 and has since influenced countless fantasy fiction writers and is also directly related to the rise of various role-playing games in the 1960s. Its influence extends to modern video games as well as popular film.
One of the most controversial novels ever published, Lolita is the story of a man who has a sexual relationship with his twelve-year-old step-daughter and it examines both his and her struggles with the implications. The narrator’s voice is so tortured and yet sophisticated that readers may “find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents”. Although it was banned in both the UK and France when it was first published, Lolita is consistently on many “Best Books” lists. The name Lolita has been adopted into popular language as a term to describe a seductive young girl or situation in which an older man is infatuated with a young girl or vice versa.
I first came upon this story through the movie starring Paul Newman. This novel tells the fictional story of a star baseball pitcher who tries to support his catcher, who has Hodgkin’s Disease. A great sports read for any baseball fan.
