Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination

In these thought-provoking essays, Shatz (Prophets Outcast), the U.S. editor of the London Review of Books, examines how the “lived experiences of writers” influenced their works and philosophies. He studies what the biographies of such intellectuals as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edward Said, and Jean-Paul Sartre reveal about their writings, suggesting that Richard Wright’s chagrin at the sentimental reception to his Uncle Tom’s Children (Wright lamented that “even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about” the story collection) led him to write the deliberately provocative Native Son. Analyzing intellectual historian Fouad Ajami’s oeuvre, Shatz contends that the Lebanese emigrant’s desire to assimilate undergirded his transformation from a “judicious critic both of Arab society and of the West” into a hawkish supporter of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Other chapters discuss how Roland Barthes’s anxiety over his inadequacy as a fiction writer inadvertently led him to invent autofiction and how expat William Gardner Smith’s disenchantment with France, his adopted home, and the Algerian War inspired his autobiographical 1963 novel The Stone Face. The smart profiles offer revealing insight into how biography shapes ideology and art, though there is a conspicuous lack of women among the writers profiled (Egyptian feminist Arwa Salih is the sole woman). The result is a smart if limited look at how the political commitments of writers form. (May)