20th century classics

[rodanho]

up till now i have only read novels by charles dickens, mark twain and other writers in the 18th and 19th century. i think what they wrote is the real english, and i've always had a distrust and prejudice against those works written in the 20th century. but now that i have finished reading the old man and the sea by ernest hemingway, my former views are simply reversed. i am just overwhelmed by it, and i think i have come across no characters so impressive in any of the novels written in the victorian era. so i decided to give other works in the 20th century a try. can you recommend me some great writings you have read that was written by a 20th century writer? if so, tell me the name of the book and the reason why you like it.

[Monica]

Umberto Eco. Actually he's a 20th/21st centuries writer but 3 of his 5 books were written in the 20th century. "The Name of the Rose" is the most famous one but "Foucault's Pendulum" is much better in my opinion. Here's a part of my essay about it:

"Foucault's Pendulum" is an encyclopaedia of arcane sects and orders, all our knowledge flows through this novel initiated into thousands of secrets and here Eco's Middle Ages transcend the traditional periodization, the game of presumtions devours the whole Earth. All its components: literary, historical, scientific, magical, esoteric and symbolic create an oblique reality, and that was Eco's main aim - to tell a story about the false relations betweehn the real elements.

It's a great, great book :)

[PeterL]

Eco is also at the top of my list, but you might also read Nabokov.

[miss_gaskell]

Umberto is fantastic but my personal favourite is Gabriel Garcia Marquez. "100 Years of Solitude" is his best novel but he is consistently good. Another fantastic 20th century writer is Milan Kundera.

[EAP]

'Lord of the Rings' - J. R. R. Tolkien

[Wendigo_49]

Since you liked Mark Twain, I think you should read some Faulkner which has the same southern dialect that is in Twain's writings. Here are some others I liked.

Early 20th Century

James Joyce - Ulysses
Hermann Hesse - Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund, The Glass Bead Game
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain
Par Lagerkvist - Barrabas, The Dwarf

Later 20th Century

William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Light in August
Samuel Beckett - Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Joseph Heller - Catch-22
Umberto Eco - Foucault's Pendulum
Albert Camus - The Stranger, The Plague
Douglas Adams - The Ultimate Hitchiker's Guide to the Universe
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five

[Rosalind]

Umberto is fantastic but my personal favourite is Gabriel Garcia Marquez. "100 Years of Solitude" is his best novel but he is consistently good. Another fantastic 20th century writer is Milan Kundera.


'100 Hundred Years of Solitude' is great, but I would especially reccomend Garcia Marquez' short stories and novellas. To add my two cents to the dollar, ditto on Umberto Eco. I'd also add Robert Graves, if you like classical history at all.

[Darlin]

My recommendation would be Pearl S. Buck. Her Good Earth trilogy based in China, The Living Reed based in Korea, and especially Dragon Seed and its sequel The Promise , based in China and Burma respectively, are exceptional books that I believe would qualify as 20th century classics.

I recommend them because I feel the books are timeless despite being set in the World War II era. She has such an immense comprehension of human beings whether male or female that one can hardly put the books down. And though the language is somewhat old fashioned since you seem to like books of that vein these might be a good place to start.

All her books are wonderfully written and feel so personal as well as informative. It’s as if she’s opening up new worlds to the reader, as if she sat for days and months and years just studying the people around her no matter where she was, such is her extraordinary talent for bringing her characters to vivid life. I hope you look into them and if you do let me know what you think. It's admirable to find such a young person reading the classics. :)

[becca2389]

I cannot recommend Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis and EM Forster enough.

Also Salman Rushdie 's Midnight's Children is an outstanding piece of post-colonial English fiction. It's written from the point of view of one Indian's life after independance and has won the Booker of Bookers prize. However that summary does not do it justice. It is an amazing rich and deep novel, written in English, but very much in an Indian style. It has so many interlocking plot threads but you never lose your way. The characters are completely unique and all equally engaging.

[subterranean]

I've read Amis' poems but haven't have the change to read the stories

[mono]

I strongly agree with all of the above replies, but must also add J.D. Salinger, Flannery O'Connor, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence (who wrote mostly in the 20th century), William Golding, Ursula le Guin, Shirley Jackson, Jean-Paul Sartre, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sharon Olds, William Stafford, Raymond Carver, Gunter Grass, and John Steinbeck.
Whew! :D