Doris Lessing was born in 1919 in Persia - modern-day Iran - to British parents, moving as a child with her family to southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where she stayed in school only to the age of 14.

Doris Lessing, photographed in 1990. Credit: Schiffer-Fuchs/ullstein bild via Getty. In the 1920s, growing up on a poor farm in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) Doris Lessing received impromptu ...

Author Doris Lessing died Sunday at the age of 94. Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature for a life's work which included around 40 books and collections of essays and memoirs. Her book ...

Harriet, the protagonist of Doris Lessing’s 1988 novel, “The Fifth Child,” has a terrible feeling about her youngest son. Even in the womb, Ben’s movements seem to her less like signs of ...

Lessing was said to have left her first two children behind in her home country, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), in 1949, when she went to London with the manuscript of her first novel.

Doris Lessing’s “The Sweetest Dream” (HarperCollins; $26.95), which is her twenty-fourth novel and something like her fiftieth book, is about the nineteen-sixties and their aftermath.

Lessing was a clear, cordial, devout Theist. His “Nathan der Weise ” was his confession of faith. We may say more than this. We may call it the confession of faith of the modern Theist.

Lessing said the book had been partly inspired by her own experience of giving birth at 19 and the woman in the next bed, already a mother of two girls, harshly rejecting the son she had just had.

Lessing, he writes, "is making a continuum all her own somewhere between John Milton and L. Ron Hubbard." So was she praised and lampooned by the audience that once esteemed her.

Lessing is neither, but her parochialism is disturbing. The landscapes and societies of Zones Three, Four and Five (and most tantalizingly, Two) are sketched, not detailed. One cannot live in ...