On Not Winning the Nobel Prize

Abstract

Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 nobel Prize in Literature, was born in 1919 to British parents in Persia. seeking better prospects, the family moved to a farm in southern rhodesia. Lessing ended her formal education at fourteen, schooling herself through avid reading. she moved to London in 1949. Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing (1950), recounts the relation between a white farmer’s wife and her black servant in Africa. Lessing became widely known for The Golden Notebook (1962), a formally complex exploration of a woman’s life. Her fiction takes a range of forms, including the bildungsroman (the series Children of Violence [1952–69]), investigations of the psyche (Briefing for a Descent into Hell [1971]), apocalyptic science fiction (the series Canopus in Argos: Archives [1979–83]), and political satire (The Good Terrorist [1985]). she has written two autobiographical volumes, Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997). i Am stAnDing in A DoorwAy Looking tHrougH CLouDs of BLow-