Writing during one of the most volatile periods in British history — a time that encompassed a worldwide economic depression, World War II, and the economic and political decline of the British Empire — the novelists featured in this volume produced some of the most memorable fiction in the history of British literature. Novelists of the period 1930-1959 held true to the path established by such writers as Austen, Dickens, Lawrence and Conrad. They displayed the particularly British characteristics of a lack of innovation, a distaste for literary abstraction, a constant interest in the interaction of individuals within their society, and a sense of historical continuity.
59 entries include: Kingsley Amis, Samuel Beckett, William Golding, Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Anthony Powell, V.S. Pritchett, Muriel Spark, J.R.R.Tolkien and Evelyn Waugh.