Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing was a Nobel Prize-winning British novelist, short-story writer, dramatist, and memoirist. Through The Tunnel is her compact coming-of-age story about a boy testing his independence during a seaside holiday, and Penguin Random House includes it among the representative stories gathered in its 2008 volume Stories. African Laughter records four return visits to Zimbabwe, the country where Lessing grew up after her family moved there in 1925. The Nobel bibliography sets that book within writing that ranged from African social realism and political fiction to the Canopus in Argos sequence, autobiography, essays, and drama. Across this short story and travel memoir, personal memory and individual change remain closely connected to place and history.