[This entry was updated by Paul Schlueter from his entry in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 228-254.]

Doris Lessing burst upon the British literary scene in 1950 with her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, and she has remained at the top ever since. In the past three decades, her work has had a profound and lasting influence on both women and men, and the critical acclaim enjoyed by her books has grown to the point where she has been prominently nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature for each of the last several years. In her work she has spoken out courageously for the humanist vision she associates with the major nineteenth-century writers and, more recently, for inner psychic phenomena and for mysticism. Her writing has been uniformly alert to the necessity for the split, fragmented individual to achieve wholeness, and her more recent...