THE AGE OF INNOCENCE. Yes, I know the Age of Innocence was published in 1920 but no literary list is complete without Edith Wharton. If Edith Wharton isn’t on a literary list then it’s NOT a literary list. It’s a grocery list or a “things to do” list or a list of writers who wish they could write like Edith Wharton. And anyway, The Age of Innocence was republished numerous times in the last 75 years. It must be in its 100th reprinting by now so cut me some slack, man.

The story of THE AGE OF INNOCENCE is similar to other EW stories. It would be --- A woman makes a bad decision concerning a member of the male sex and then society makes her pay for that bad decision. This story takes place on New York City’s upper east side in the 1880s and 1890s. Everybody dresses great. (No one is walking around in flip-flops, boogie shorts and a tank top.) Everything’s gilded. The furniture’s overstuffed. Everyone knows how to behave in public. There are no “big scenes.” Everyone is slightly repressed. It’s heaven. It’s heaven in a beautiful setting with well made furniture and starched shirts.

When not reading or re-reading THE AGE OF INNOCENCE you might read ETHAN FROMME or the CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY. (The custom of the country is divorce, of course.) I also like EW’s GHOST STORIES. In one of her GHOST STORIES there are mute dogs that silently watch people walk into a court yard. The dogs are the ghosts! Those dogs are mighty scary. Other EW books with great female characters are SUMMER with my all-time favorite character, the slattern, Charity Royall and HOUSE OF MIRTH with the slightly sad Lily Bart. Edith Wharton’s writing is super fan-tab-u-lous. She only won one Pulitzer Prize but she should have won more. (The “man” was keeping her down.) On top of all that she has the best title for any autobiography ever written, which is, A BACKWARD GLANCE.

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"The Stranger is not merely one of the most widely read novels of the 20th century, but one of the books likely to outlive it. Written in 194[2], Camus’s compelling and troubling tale of a disaffected, apparently amoral young man has earned a durable popularity (and remains a staple of U.S. high school literature courses) in part because it reveals so vividly the anxieties of its time. Alienation, the fear of anonymity, spiritual doubt--all could have been given a purely modern inflection in the hands of a lesser talent than Camus, who won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and was noted for his existentialist aesthetic. The remarkable trick of The Stranger, however, is that it’s not mired in period philosophy.

The plot is simple. A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he’s imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. The trial’s proceedings are absurd, a parsing of incidental trivialities--that Meursault, for instance, seemed unmoved by his own mother’s death and then attended a comic movie the evening after her funeral are two ostensibly damning facts--so that the eventual sentence the jury issues is both ridiculous and inevitable.

Meursault remains a cipher nearly to the story’s end--dispassionate, clinical, disengaged from his own emotions. “She wanted to know if I loved her,” he says of his girlfriend. “I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn’t mean anything but that I probably didn’t.” There’s a latent ominousness in such observations, a sense that devotion is nothing more than self-delusion. It’s undoubtedly true that Meursault exhibits an extreme of resignation; however, his confrontation with “the gentle indifference of the world” remains as compelling as it was when Camus first recounted it.” --Ben Guterson

http://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Albert-Camus/dp/0679720200

• 1940 - 1949 •
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In writing one of the first “non-fiction novels,” blazing a trail for a “new journalism,” and at the same time accurately capturing the mood, spirit, and rhythm of the 1960s by telling it from his own unique point of view, this was by far the best book ever written by one of America’s best authors of the 20th century. It’s not a question of honesty, of how much he “fictionalized.” He dramatized, but he also made it come to life all over again, for each and every new reader. Mailer’s passion and conviction, as well as his simple humanity, breathe life into the scenes depicted in his true story of the march on the Pentagon in 1967.

As Alfred Kazin wrote in 1968, “Of course Mailer presents this book as his nonfiction novel--he simply cannot stop dreaming about himself as a novelist. But it is a fact that only a born novelist could have written a piece of history so intelligent, mischievous, penetrating and alive, so vivid with crowds, the great stage that is American democracy, the Washington streets and bridges, the Lincoln Memorial, the women, students, hippies, Negroes and assorted intellectuals for peace, the M.P.’s and United States marshals, the American Nazis chanting “We want dead Reds.” (From the New York Times Book Review: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/04/reviews/mailer-armies.html)

• 1960 - 1969 •
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The most captivating book that I have ever read is The Color Purple, the 1982 epistolary novel by author Alice Walker.

The story addresses many issues related to African-American life during the early to mid-20th century in the American south, especially focusing on women’s position in social culture.

Due to The Color Purple’s explicit content, it has been the frequent target of censors.  It even ranked 18 on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000.

• 1980 - 1989 •
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I am an admitted fan of Southern Gothica, having experienced it firsthand, but rediscovering Carson McCullers has been a great pleasure. I read Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) on a recent trip to New Orleans. I had just finished The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers by Virginia Spencer Carr, and was eager to bring Carson along on my trip, which landed me in rural Mississippi after a week of intolerable heat and humidity in the Crescent City.

The prose of Reflections in a Golden Eye was sparse, yet sharpened like a blade. The repressed and claustrophobic atmosphere of the South seeped out of the pages and stained, permanently, perhaps. Many of the characters I recognized from my childhood, or facsimiles, at least. Taking place in an army camp, obsession and desire seemed uncontainable, with tragic consequences.

The film by John Huston starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor is quite good, but the real star is McCullers herself, having created such a riveting and beguiling story. She deserves her place as in the 75 Years of Books.

Also of interest:
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

• 1940 - 1949 •
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