Waiting for Godot (1952) is Samuel Beckett's best known play and shares top billing with Ionesco's The Bald Soprano as the most important works in the theater, of the absurd. It was written at about the same time but not produced until 1953.

The Chairs (1952), Ionesco's third staged anti-play, which many consider his best, also depicts a collapse into nothingness, partly through words but also through the crowding of the stage with empty chairs and invisible characters.

1984 (1949), George Orwell's dystopian study of Oceana, depicts a futuristic society gone amok. Mind control is partly achieved through Newspeak, a diminished version of English which attempts to limit proletariat thinking to government-sanctioned ideas.

Fahrenheit 541 (1953) is Ray Bradbury's science fiction novel of future society in which books, including the great classics of literature, are banned and people are spoon fed verbal and visual images by the...