Another artist who satirised William Randolph Hearst was Aldous Huxley in his novel After Many A Summer. Everything Huxley writes is worth reading (it is the "fusion of poetry and science" that I find so appealing). Some of his work, such as his essays, is out of print and only available second hand, which seems a national disgrace (Ivy Compton-Burnett is also largely out of print, which is equally a disgrace).
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In the eighties I debated the keeping of a set of Ivy C-B's novels, in the dear old yellow Gollancz jackets, that had sat on the library shelves for 10 years without being borrowed. They eventually bit the dust as it was decided to keep one set only in some distant bookstore. Six months later she had a revival via some TV dramatisation and we had a dozen or so requests for her stuff - Sod's Law.
Brave New World is one of my all time favourites. Huxely is a wonderful writer...rather a visionary.
Manjusha, have you read Huxley's "Island" - it is the positive vision of the future (as opposed to the negative vision in Brave New World).
Anna, I almost never go into a library now, but I am still shocked that libraries should get rid of books. It has its compensations though - about six or seven years ago I found in a second hand bookshop (since closed) a complete set of Bulwer-Lytton novels, wonderfully bound and dating from the 1890s. They were on sale for £1 each and I bought four (I wish now I had bought them all). They were from a school library (name plate inside the cover), and when I got them home and looked at them the pages were uncut (!!!) so they had never been read.
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