The first three this blog has well-expounded on and their influences via 1984 (1948), Brave New World (1932), and “The Waste Land” (1922). All three men and their works exerted an amazingly prescient influence in predicting what we’ve been going through the past 6 years.
I’d be remiss, too, if I didn’t mention Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and its significance relative to unfolding events for women of late thanks to the insane reversal of Roe v. Wade.
But I’ll also add filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard (who just passed away) and his masterpieces Weekend and Pierrot le Fou as parallel social commentaries and critiques on the collapse of Western civilization we’ve been witnessing all over again (as first noted by Eliot after WW1).
Godard is/was the ultimate ’60s clever, absurdist filmmaker who mind-boggled world audiences with his nonlinear work and incredible, funny juxtapositions rendering his films as absurdist.
You could pick either one of his nihilistic classics mentioned above to see and experience what I mean. More and more, I find that he speaks to me all over again and captures the battered, confuted, alienated, uncentered spirit of modern times.
To say nothing of Yeats’ “The Second Coming” (1919) which predated all of these:
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity”.
And Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent, the first and last word on absurd terrorists and anarchy being loosed upon Western civilization.