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Reading List April 13, 2019

Writing the Twentieth Century

Poets, philosophers, and playwrights.

This week marks the deaths and births of some of the most important poets, playwrights, and philosophers of the twentieth century: Primo Levi (d. April 11, 1987), Samuel Beckett (b. April 13, 1906), Seamus Heaney (b. April 13, 1939), and Jean-Paul Sartre (April 15, 1980).

Their works chronicle events such as the Holocaust and Bloody Sunday; tackle dread about life’s absurdity; and sit at the apex in which modernism became post-. Our archive is full of essays about these important figures, but we are also lucky to feature some pieces written by them for Boston ReviewWe hope you enjoy!

Diego Gambetta
“On that tragic Saturday only his body was smashed.”
Roger Boylan

A lost story shows the young writer struggling in Joyce's shadow

Ronald Aronson

Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential Marxism offers a radical philosophical foundation for today’s revitalized critiques of capitalism.

Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney on the power of T.S. Eliot
Poetry
Primo Levi
A poem by Primo Levi
Roger Boylan
Remembering Beckett twenty years after his death.

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