Laurence Leamer's new book, Warhol's Muses, paints a group portrait of 10 women who inspired artist Andy Warhol. Below, Leamer, who is also the author of the best-sellers Capote's Women and The Kennedy Women, names six favorite books that took courage to write.
'Life and Fate' by Vasily Grossman (1980)
Set during World War II in Stalingrad, Grossman's novel is a paean to Russian courage as well as a devastating portrait of Communist totalitarianism. Grossman had the courage to write his opus while living in the Soviet Union. It is a daring work on so many levels, the 20th-century Russian counterpart to Tolstoy's 19th-century masterpiece War and Peace. Buy it here.
'The Age of Innocence' by Edith Wharton (1920)
Wharton came from an aristocratic New York family. She wrote a series of brilliant novels exposing the hypocrisy and deceit of the world in which she was born. The Age of Innocence is a savage portrait of the elite world that was her home, and is no less savage for being written in such a subtle manner. Buy it here.
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'The Right Stuff' by Tom Wolfe (1979)
Wolfe was a conservative in a liberal intellectual age, and he often stood alone. But nobody wrote about his era better than he did. I chose the book he wrote about astronauts. I could have picked almost anything he wrote. Buy it here.
'1984' by George Orwell (1949)
An obvious choice but an inevitable one. Is there any other modern book of such prescience with such relevance to our time? Great writers are daring writers, and book after book, Orwell showed the way. Buy it here.
'The Executioner's Song' by Norman Mailer (1979)
Much of Mailer's writing is over-wrought. Not this time. He steps back and lets the story tell itself. With the most sensitive, intimate details, he writes about the murderer Gary Gilmore, whose execution in 1977 was the first in the U.S. in almost a decade. Mailer doesn't judge Gilmore's terrible childhood a reason to exonerate. Nor does he caricature him as a creature of pure evil. He understands him. Buy it here.
'In Cold Blood' by Truman Capote (1966)
Capote was a slight, queer, Southern-born New Yorker who knew nothing about the people of Kansas. But he went there and wrote a masterpiece about the two killers who wiped out a farm family. In Cold Blood created a whole new kind of nonfiction as well as the true crime genre. Buy it here.
