Writers in TIME

SINCE 1923 TIME HAS BEEN RECOMMENDING books worth reading and giving readers interesting insight into the lives of writers. The first Best Books list explained, "The following estimates of books most in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion." This index is just a sampling of the many writers and book reviews in the TIME Archive. Use our search to find more articles about these and other writers.

Chinua Achebe
Short Notices 11/10/67
Tropical &Topical; 8/19/66

James Agee
Experiment in Communication 10/13/41
In Love & Anger 9/26/60
The Unquiet One 8/3/62

Martin Amis
One More Fat Englishman 4/11/85
Sour Grapes, Bad Teeth 5/1/95
A Good Man Goes Bad 11/3/03
Q&A; with Martin Amis 2/5/07
Special Project: TIME 100 [EM] Osama bin Laden 5/1/07

Kingsley Amis
Lucky Jim & His Pals 5/27/57
Unlucky Him 6/4/79

Sherwood Anderson
Living Woman 10/12/36
Sherwood Anderson 2/18/24

Margaret Atwood
Time Arrested 2/6/89
In the Shadow of Death 9/11/2000
Beware the Gene Genie 5/18/03

James Baldwin
Lord, Hold My Hand 5/18/53
Milk Run 6/7/68

John Barth
Lost in the Funhouse 10/8/79
Fables for People Who Can Hear with Their Eyes9/27/68

Saul Bellow
The Good Guy 9/25/64
A Laureate for Saul Bellow 11/1/76
Saul Bellow Blooms Again 4/24/00
Part Wise Man, Part Wiseguy 4/10/05

Elizabeth Bowen
The Innocent and Damned 1/30/39
Contemporary Treason 2/28/49

Paul Bowles
Sex and Sand 12/5/49
Specialist in Melancholy 8/4/67

Anthony Burgess
The Ultimate Beatnik 2/15/63
Grand Illusions 5/27/74

William Burroughs
King of the YADs 11/30/62
Short Notices 7/28/67

A.S. Byatt
Winner 11/5/90
The Division of Tongues 5/20/96

Willa Cather
Willa Cather 9/10/23
The Old Sod 8/13/73

Raymond Chandler
The Private Eye as Man off Letters 11/9/81
Private Eye, Public Conscience 12/12/88

John Cheever
Ovid in Ossining 3/27/64
View From the Big House 2/28/77

Agatha Christie
The Sweet Sleuth Gone 9/15/75
Dame Agatha: Queen of the Maze 1/26/76

Don DeLillo
Death 'N' Things 1/21/85
Reimagining Death in Dallas 8/1/88
Shadows From Beyond 1/29/01

Joan Didion
American Death Trips 8/20/79
Wisps of War 4/4/83

E.L. Doctorow
The Music of Time 7/14/75
The Nightmare and the Dream 9/22/80

John Dos Passos
Private Historian 8/10/36
The Sands of Power 3/3/61

Theodore Dreiser
Valedictory 3/25/46
Genius of the Ordinary 5/7/65

Ralph Ellison
Black & Blue 4/14/52
Invincible Man 4/25/94

William Faulkner
Nigger in a Woodpile 10/17/32
When the Dam Breaks 1/23/39

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Incorruptible Yegg 5/11/25
Sophisticates Abroad 4/16/34

E.M. Forster
Boy Meets Boy 10/18/71
Passages of a Buried Life 11/6/78

Jonathan Franzen
Great Expectations 9/10/01
Total Eclipse of the Heart 11/25/02
How Jonathan Franzen Learned To Stop Worrying (Sort Of) 8/20/06

Robert Frost
Robert Frost 3/17/23
Pawky Poet 10/9/50

Robert Graves
Roman Revival 6/18/34
The Artful Pursuit of Goddesses 2/7/83

Graham Greene
Shocker 10/29/51
A Life on the World's Edge 4/15/91

Dashiell Hammett
First Degree 1/8/34
He Was His Own Best Whodunit 7/20/81

Joseph Heller
Good Soldier Yossarian 10/27/61
Speaking About the Unspeakable 3/12/79

Ernest Hemingway
Sad Young Man 11/1/26
An American Storyteller 12/13/54
A Quarter-Century Later, The Myth Endures

Aldous Huxley
Mill Slaves 7/13/36
The Devil & the Deep Blue Huxley 8/23/48

Henry James
Memories of a Mandarin 5/7/56
What Henry James Went Through 5/3/48

James Joyce
Joyce Translated 1/5/31
A Welcome to Ulysses 12/18/33
The Writer 6/8/98

Jack Kerouac
The Ganser Syndrome 9/16/57
Sanity of Kerouac 2/23/68

Arthur Koestler
Brightest in Dungeons 5/26/41
Rootless Cosmopolitan of the Age 3/14/83

John LeCarre
Ruthless is as Ruthless Does 1/17/64
The Spy In Winter 1/12/04

Harper Lee
About Life & Little Girls 8/1/60

Doris Lessig
The Witness as Prophet 7/25/69
Hard Facts 11/21/94

C.S. Lewis
Psyche in Paradise 1/28/57
C.S. Lewis Goes Marching On 12/5/77

Bernard Malmud
The Good Grocer 4/29/57
Heroism Without Sentiment 10/17/83

Carson McCullers
The End of F. Jasmine Addams 1/1/46
The Shy & the Lonely 6/4/51

Henry Miller
Dithyrambic Sex 11/21/38
Tropic B 9/7/62

Margaret Mitchell
Backdrop for Atlanta 7/6/36
Strange Obsession 9/5/49

Toni Morrison
Something Terrible Happened 9/21/87
Paradise Found 1/19/98

Vladimir Nabokov
The Russian Box Trick 6/1/62
Prospero's Progress 5/23/69

John O'Hara
Gibbsville 8/20/34
Scheherazade's Thousandth 11/27/64

George Orwell
Where the Rainbow Ends 6/20/49
That Year Is Almost Here 11/28/83

Boris Pasternak
Innocence in Russia 9/15/58
The Passion of Yurii Zhivago 12/15/58

Thomas Pynchon
V. Squared 4/5/73
The Case For Thomas Pynchon 7/9/01
The Spores of Paranoia 1/15/90

Philip Roth
The Varnished Truths of Philip Roth 1/19/87
A Sex Novel of the Absurd 2/21/69

J.K. Rowling
The Wizard of Hogwarts 4/12/99
The Magic Of Potter 12/25/00
J.K. Rowling Hogwarts And All 7/25/05
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 7/21/07
Harry Potter Collection

Salman Rushdie
10 Questions for Salman Rushdie 8/29/05
Worlds Apart 1/23/95
Divorce and Remarriage Indian-Style 7/5/07

J.D. Salinger
With Love & 20-20 Vision 7/16/51
The Glass House Gang 2/8/63

John Steinbeck
Oakies 4/17/39
John Steinbeck, 1902-1968 12/27/68

William Styron
The Idea of Hope 10/13/67
Riddle of a Violent Century 6/11/79

J.R.R. Tolkein
The Hobbit Habit 7/15/66
Eucatastrophe 9/17/73

John Updike
Desperate Weakling 11/7/60
Perennial Promises Kept 10/18/82

Kurt Vonnegut
The Price of Survival 4/11/69
And So It Went 9/3/90
Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007 4/12/07

Evelyn Waugh
Fierce Tragedy 1/7/46
A Knife in the Jocular Vein 7/12/48

Thornton Wilder
San Luis 12/5/27
Wilder-ness 2/24/30
An Obliging Man 1/12/53

Edith Wharton
The Last Survivor 6/5/64
Popping the Stays 9/1/75

Virginia Woolf
How Time Passes 4/12/37
An Artist Vanishes 4/14/41
Mrs. Woolf's Way 5/30/27

Richard Wright
Black Boyhood 4/5/45
"Bad Nigger" 3/4/40