Berger, John (Vol. 19) - Introduction

Berger, John 1926–

Berger is an English novelist, essayist, art critic, poet, screen-writer, translator, and editor. G is his best known novel, winning for him the Booker Prize in 1972. This tale of a twentieth-century Don Juan is, according to Arnold Kettle, "one of the few serious attempts of our time to do for the novel what Brecht did for drama; to reshape it in the light of 20th-century experience and theory other than the purely subjective or self-analytical." The author of The Success and Failure of Picasso and Toward Reality: Essays in Seeing, Berger is generally considered to be the most important living Marxist art critic. (See also CLC, Vol. 2, and Contemporary Authors, Vols. 81-84.)