Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. Doris Lessing’s rebellion against middle-class values began in her early youth. Born Doris May Tayler in 1919 in ...

Doris Lessing was one of the first literary authors to venture into science fiction. She wrote about aliens and space wars at a time when the genre was still shedding its embarrassing pulp tatters.

Ms. Lessing was an uninhibited and outspoken novelist who produced dozens of novels, short stories, essays and poems, embarking on dizzying and at times stultifying literary experiments. By Helen T.