From Supermarket to Schoolroom: Doris Lessing in the United States

Abstract

Doris Lessing has been a figure in the intellectual landscape of the United States since 1962, when the New York Times greeted The Golden Notebook as a ‘coruscating literary event’ (Buckler). Though she had by that time written five novels, three collections of short stories, two autobiographical narratives, a book of poems and a play, only four of these books had been published in the United States: The Grass Is Singing, This Was the Old Chiefs Country, The Habit of Loving and In Pursuit of the English. American reviewers of This Was the Old Chiefs Country presented Lessing as ‘one of the most talented younger British writers of the last decade’ (Peden, 1952), whose ‘further development … should be watched for’ (Fitzgerald). Her second volume of short stories, The Habit of Loving was seen as ‘a first-class achievement by one of England’s very best contemporary writers’ (Peden, 1958), a woman who had ‘slipped into the uneasy circle of England’s Angry Young Men’ (Peden, 1958).