Doris Lessing’s first novel, The Grass is Singing, was published in 1950 and she made her debut as an accomplished writer of short stories with This was the Old Chief’s Country in 1951. She was born in Persia in 1919 and gave it a last visit in 1956 which provides the setting for so much of her fiction. Her experiences there produced Going Home, a bitter, prophetic, and often bleakly funny account of white settler society and its victims. Between 1952 and 1969 her famous novel-sequence, Children of Violence, appeared, and in 1962 what is perhaps her most well-known and haunting work, The Golden Notebook, was published.