Posted by: Mary Ellen
The announcement of the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn took me back to my college days, when reading his books seemed to be part of a student’s introduction to the wider world. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich still shows up on school reading lists, but I wonder how his longer novels such as The First Circle and Cancer Ward would work in book groups. Though Solzhenitsyn got crankier in his later years, it’s hard to think of any other twentieth-century writer who had such a profound influence.
