How do I research an author's literary contemporaries?

Question

One of the summer projects at my high school was to read three books and fill out a journal entry about each. One of the things I need to write about is who each author's literary contemporaries were. A literary contemporary is an writer publishing at the same time. I have no idea what search terms to use to find this information, especially since a few of the authors wrote over several decades. For instance, John Steinbeck was publishing from the 1930s until the late 1960s, at least. Anyone know how I should go about this?

Answer 1

I'm a high school English teacher and I have to say that question is unfair and not realistic.  Plus, I question what is the point of the question.  A better question would be to ask about their social contemporaries-- like important people in their time period who were philosphers, politicians, artists, etc....

But that being said, here's what I know about literary contemporaries:

For Kingsolver, try Jane Smiley, a female author who is of a similar age, popularity, and even subject matter.

For Steinbeck, you could try Ed Ricketts, he wrote about marine biology and Steinbeck based a couple of characters on him.  You could also try Betty Smith who wrote A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a wonderful novel about a poor family surviving during the early 19th century.  She might be a little older than him, but I think you could get away with it.

For Elie Wiesel, you could try Primo Levi who also wrote an autobiographical novel about surviving the concentration camps.

To do more research, try going to Amazon and type in those books and then see what other customers bought or what amazon suggests as "similar."

Good luck.