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Favorite Authors

Those writers whose work resonates most with me are close observers of human nature in all its mysterious multiplicity.  They attempt neither to reform readers nor comfortably confirm their assumptions.  They reveal as they entertain.  This list is a work in progress.

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R. K. Narayan

R. K. Narayan (1906-2001) was one of the great Indian authors of the 20th century.  Writing in English, he published 34 novels, short stories, non-fiction (mainly memoirs), and condensed narratives of the Hindu epics The Ramayana (1972) and The Mahabharata (1978).  

 

Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayanswami was born into a Tamil Brahmin family in Madras (now Chennai), India.  He used “R. K. Narayan” for his pen name on the advice of British writer Graham Greene, a major promoter of Narayan’s career.  Greene explained, "Narayan wakes in me a spring of gratitude … Without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian.”

 

An avid reader in his youth, Narayan graduated from Maharaja College of Mysore, then briefly taught school until resigning when ordered to substitute for the physical education teacher. He thereafter dedicated his professional career to writing, initially as a journalist.

 

Many of Narayan’s novels and short stories are set in the fictional Indian town of Malgudi, beginning with Swami and Friends (1935), which features a group of schoolboys.  The novel is the first of a semi-autobiographical trilogy, which also include The Bachelor of Arts (1937) and The English Teacher (1945).  

 

The Guide (1958) interweaves two stories, past and present, about the title character, Raju, a shopkeeper in Malgudi.  He becomes a tourist guide to an anthropologist, Marco, and his wife, Rosie, with whom Raju falls in love.  He eventually manages her dancing career, but her success is his downfall.  He starts spending extravagantly and is tricked into forgery, which lands him in jail.  

 

Upon release, Raju is mistaken for a holy man while resting in a temple.  At first, he does not correct the misconception so that food donations from devotees will continue, but as larger groups await his spiritual guidance, he starts taking his role seriously. This excellent novel ends on an ambiguous, thought-provoking note.  The Guide won the Sahitya Akademi Award from India’s National Academy of Letters in 1960. 

 

Raman, the titular character in The Painter of Signs (1977), considers himself “an artist in lettering.”  He lives with his elderly aunt, who raised him from childhood after his parents’ death, and who lives to serve him.  Often a source of irritation to Raman, he will finally realize all the work she has done for him and is “[aghast… he had taken so much for granted all these years” (pp. 136-137) Narayan, although not orphaned, had spent a considerable amount of his youth in the care of his grandmother, a possible model for the aunt.  

 

In The Painter of Signs, the aunt is very religious, attending temple daily to hear The Ramayana read and consulting astrology to advise Raman (unsolicited) and village women who visit.  Raman, however, “was determined to establish the Age of Reason in the world.” (p. 5) 

 

But Raman’s rational world is unsettled by his love for Daisy, who heads the family planning center in Malgudi.  Determined to remain a bachelor, Raman tries to resist his feelings, but while on a tour with Daisy of villages where she wants him to paint signs promoting birth control, he prays to a temple goddess to make Daisy his wife. 

 

In her youth, Daisy had run away from a large Hindu family, and ended up educated by Christian missionaries.  Resolutely independent, she refused to be baptized but adopted an English name and applies missionary zeal to her quest to limit India’s growing population.  “She smiled when she could forget her mission, and became grim when the population problems oppressed her mind.” (p. 49)  

 

Although very different in personality and beliefs, both the aunt and Daisy have sacrificed much to serve:  the one and the many, respectively.  The two women do not interact.  The aunt is concerned about Daisy possibly being of another caste and religion.  When Daisy jokes about the aunt’s religious practices, Raman at first joins the jocularity, then remarks that his “aunt has complete trust in the gods and possesses greater serenity than anyone else I have known.” (p. 142).

 

The Painter of Signs ends in Voltairean fashion:  “He … turned towards The Boardless—that solid, real world of sublime souls who minded their own business.” (p. 153)


Narayan’s other major novels include The Financial Expert (1952), Waiting for the Mahatma (1955), The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961), The Vendor of Sweets (1967), and A Tiger for Malgudi (1983). He was the recipient of numerous awards and honors.

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William Maxwell

I first learned about writer and editor William Maxwell (1908-2000) on Patrick Kurp’s invaluable “Anecdotal Evidence” literary blog.  In 2008, Kurp wrote, “I come close to thinking … that Maxwell was our greatest novelist. I can’t defend that critically or rationally, and thoughts of Melville, James, Cather, Faulkner and Bellow rush to my higher thought centers, but the part inside where language and emotion share space knows otherwise.”  Kurp and the late D. G. Myers of “A Commonplace Blog” listed Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) on a list of Best American Fiction, 1968-1998.

 

William Maxwell graduated from the University of Illinois (B.A., 1930) and Harvard University (M.A., 1931), returning to the University of Illinois to teach English until hired in 1936 by The New Yorker.  He worked for the publication until 1976, initially in the art department and then as its longtime, influential fiction editor, collaborating with major authors, such as John Cheever, Mavis Gallant, Shirley Hazzard, Vladimir Nabokov, J.D. Salinger, and Eudora Welty.  Maxwell’s own fiction often dealt with the small-town Midwest of his origin.  He published his first novel, Bright Center of Heaven, in 1934 and his last, So Long, See You Tomorrow, in 1980, along with several short story collections (1966-1995).  In 2008, the Library of America published his collected works in two volumes.

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Novels:

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Bright Center of Heaven (1934) looks at life on a struggling Midwestern farm, where a widow and her two sons live with relatives, a cook, and a variety of lodgers.

 

They Came Like Swallows (1937) poignantly explores the 1918 flu pandemic’s impact on a Midwestern family.

 

The Folded Leaf (1945) set in Chicago and a Midwestern college, focuses on the friendships of three teens, two boys and a girl.

 

Time Will Darken It (1948) considers desire, familial duty, and the strains on a marriage between a husband who has befriended his female foster cousin and his pregnant wife.

 

The Chateau (1961) set in post-World War II France, explores cross-cultural misunderstandings when a newly wedded American couple spend two weeks in post-World War II France.

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So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) depicts an elderly man using his memory and imagination to understand events in his boyhood that culminated in a murder that destroyed his friendship with another youth.

 

For additional information, see:

Elizabeth Taylor

Not well known in the United States, and not to be confused with the 20th-century Hollywood star, British author Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975) was a talented novelist and short story writer.  A 2012 feature article in The Guardian calls her “one of the best English novelists of the 20th century” and in 2021 The New York Times considers, “Was Elizabeth Taylor the Best British Novelist in the Post-War Era?”  Her penultimate novel, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize and made into a feature film in 2005, while a film version of her novel Angel was released in 2018.  The BBC also broadcast readings of some of her short stories in 2012-14.

 

Born into a middle-class family in Reading, England, her birthname was Dorothy Betty Coles.  She was an avid and wide-ranging reader in childhood and youth, particularly influenced by Jane Austen, and by age 17 aspired to be a novelist.  

 

In the early 1930s, Taylor began using the name Elizabeth and joined a local theatrical club in Buckinghamshire.  Her theatrical experience seems to have influenced her ability to write memorable scenes. “I write in scenes, rather than in narrative, which I find boring. I am pleased if the look of a page is interesting, broken by paragraphs or dialogue, not just one dense slab of print.”  Artists also play important roles in several of her novels.


In 1936, she married John Taylor, another troupe member.  She was briefly a member of the Communist Party because of their anti-Fascist stance before switching to the Labour Party.  While her husband was serving in the Royal Air Force during World War Two, she published her first short story, “For Thine is the Power” (Tribune, March 31, 1944) and her first novel, At Mrs. Lippincote’s (1945).

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Novels

  • At Mrs. Lippincote’s (1945)

  • Palladian (1946)

  • A View of the Harbour (1947)

  • A Wreath of Roses (1949)

  • A Game of Hide and Seek (1951)

  • The Sleeping Beauty (1953)

  • Angel (1957)

  • In a Summer Season (1961)

  • The Soul of Kindness (1964)

  • Mossy Trotter (1967; her only children’s book)

  • The Wedding Group (1968)

  • Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1971)

  • Blaming (1976; posthumous)

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Short Story Favorites​

  • “Hester Lilly” 

  • “The Idea of Age” [beautiful to read aloud]

  • “Perhaps a Family Failing”

  • “You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There”

  • “Vron and Willie”

  • “The Voices”

  • “The Devastating Boys”

  • “Tall Boy”

  • “In and Out the Houses”

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Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark (1918-2006) was a writer of satirical novels, short stories, poetry, biography, and literary criticism.  Born in Scotland to an English-Anglican mother and Scottish-Jewish father, she later converted to Catholicism.  During World War II, she was a writer for British military intelligence, then after the war served for two years as editor of Poetry Review (1947-49).  She lived in London, Rhodesia (now, Zimbabwe), New York, and Rome before settling in Tuscany.  

 

Spark’s first novel, The Comforters, was published in 1957.  She was the recipient of many literary awards and was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1993.  Her novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was made into a play and movie starring Maggie Smith as an eccentric teacher at a girls’ school whose students give her cult-like allegiance. It is one of my favorites of her books, along with The Abbess of Crewe, her spoof of Watergate set in a convent.

 

To mark the centenary of Spark’s birth in 2018, Polygon Press (UK) published her 22 novels in affordable, nicely designed hardcover.  Having previously read all except The Mandelbaum Gate and The Hothouse by the East River, I am planning to read each in publication order.

 

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  • The Comforters (1957)

  • Memento Mori (1958)

  • Robinson (1958)

  • The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)

  • The Bachelors (1960)

  • The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)

  • The Girls of Slender Means (1963)

  • The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)

  • The Public Image (1968)

  • The Driver's Seat (1970)

  • Not to Disturb (1971)

  • The Hothouse by the East River (1973)

  • The Abbess of Crewe (1974)

  • The Takeover (1976)

  • Territorial Rights (1979)

  • Loitering with Intent (1981)

  • The Only Problem (1984)

  • A Far Cry from Kensington (1988)

  • Symposium (1990)

  • Reality and Dreams (1996)

  • Aiding and Abetting (2000)

  • The Finishing School (2004)

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