Identifier Great modern writers

Know your Steinbeck from your Salinger? Our handy guide will help put you on the right page

JD Salinger

Holden Caulfield’s 1951 debut gave voice to the teenager. He revealed what they’d suspected all along – the adults are all phonies anyway.

Margaret Atwood

Atwood’s speculative fiction, The Handmaid’s Tale explores when, “you’re just ahead of reality, but sometimes reality is just ahead of you”.

George Orwell

With his prescient understanding of the dangers of ‘newspeak’ and ‘doublethink’, it’s like Orwell wrote about 2017, rather than 1984.

Virginia Woolf

Thank heavens Woolf could afford a room of her own. This modernist was a pioneer in stream of consciousness and many feminist matters, too.

Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway makes it look so easy. His secret? “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Philip K Dick

His gloomy views on technology’s impact feel up to date – not least because of the Bladerunner sequel (the original is based on one of his books).

John Steinbeck

In 1939 The Grapes of Wrath shocked with its “earthy” language and was widely banned and burned. It’s a masterpiece of the depression era.

James Joyce

Ulysses (1922) charts Leopold Bloom’s day in Dublin on 16 June 1904 – or so we’ve been told. We’ve never quite managed to finish it.

F Scott Fitzgerald

Drink and despair, flappers and failure: Fitzgerald shaped how we see his post WW1 generation: The Beautiful and Damned.