November 22 marks the death dates of a number of eminent writers, including that of English-American novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley and Irish-English novelist, theologian and medieval scholar C.S. Lewis, both of whom died in 1963, the same day as the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy. British novelist Anthony Burgess died exactly 30 years later.
The date also marks the birth of the great British novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), in 1819.
Recommended reading from these authors include:
- Silas Marner (1861), a short and brilliant novel by George Eliot. Her most generally esteemed classic is the much longer Middlemarch (1872).
- Earthly Powers (1980), a massive novel about life in the 20th century, by the ever-iconoclastic and hard-to-pin-down Anthony Burgess. His most famous novel is undoubtedly A Clockwork Orange (1963).
- “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment” (1949) and Till We Have Faces (1956), the former being C.S. Lewis’s thoughtful essay on the nature of modern tyranny, and the latter being what some regard his best fiction effort, a retelling of the Psyche myth. He is most famously known for The Screwtape Letters (1942) and The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956).
- Brave New World (1931) and Brave New World Revisited (1958), the former is Aldous Huxley’s classic dystopian satire on technological tyranny-by-hedonism, and the latter is the author’s survey of the issues raised by — and the degrees to which reality conforms to — his earlier fictional prophecy. The two books have been printed under one cover as well as separately.
Voting is the engine that drives our democracy. It needs a 21st Century update. We need to move past partisanship and start to see the humanity in people.
