Events on October 22, 2007:

Author Birthday: Doris Lessing, 1919

Today is the birthday of Doris Lessing.  1919

Born in Persia (now Iran) to British parents, Doris moved with her family to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to a rough settlement on 1,000 acres of bush. 

Like other South African writers, (Olive Schereiner and Nadine Gordimer) Doris did not graduate from high school, but made herself into a self-educated intellectual. Another example of a well read woman excaping her childhood through books and writing Lessing's early reading included: Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, Kipling and later D.H. Lawrence, Tendhal, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. 

Her first novel, "The Grass is Singing" was published in London in 1949.  Her fiction is deeply autobiographical, emerging out of her experiences in Africa drawing upon childhood memories.  Her themes are social injustice, racial inequality and the individual's inner struggle of conscience and development of a collective good.  Her later science fiction novels apparently discredited her with the Nobel Prize committee who do not take the genre seriously.

The Grass is Singing

Children of Violence

The Golden Notebook

Briefing for a Descent into Hell

Memoirs of a Survivor

Canopus in Argos: Archives

The Good Terroist (1985)

The Fifth Child  (1988)

Walking in the Shade Vol 1 and II(1997) Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography/autobiography category. 

Love Again (1997)

Mara and Dann (1999)

Ben, in the World (2000)

The Sweetest Dream (2001)

Her portrait, by Leonard McComb is in the National Portratit Gallery along with many excellent b/w photographs of her.