literary airs

There are towering literary classics among us.
And rightful heirs.
Those who picked up a torch, and cast its light upon corners that were as yet undiscovered by those titans who came before (or even discovered how to use that torch more efficiently).
I offer three such pairings - books that changed the world, plus the books those authors might have written had they lived in a later decade or century. Perhaps you know the classic, but not the descendant. Perhaps you gravitate toward newer publications, and don't know the wellspring that birthed a beloved literary friend. Either way, these are six books every thinking citizen of the world should know.
THE SECOND SEX, by Simone de Beauvoir, 1949
&
THE WAR AGAINST WOMEN, by Marilyn French, 1992
Simone's deconstruction of the history of women in a patriarchal world is enormous, in every way imaginable. Breathtakingly incisive...and humblingly so, coming from a member of a gender that had been systematically dehumanized for millenia. There are other worthy successors (Susan Faludi's "Backlash", Carol Tavris' "The Mismeasure of Woman"), but French's analysis of how the patriarchy has reacted to the initial steps of women's liberation in the second half of the twentieth century, and the ways seen and unseen in which life is still a bloody ticket to hell for womankind, is spot-on. More analytical than Simone's sweeping prose, but no less important.
THE JUNGLE, by Upton Sinclair, 1906
&
FAST FOOD NATION, by Eric Schlosser, 2001
The first book, an expose on horrific conditions in the U.S. meatpacking industry, was a literary lightning strike - a novel that literally changed a nation almost overnight. Congress enacted food safety legislation, and the lot of packinghouse workers slowly improved...until all american meatpackers were gobbled up by a handful of price-fixing monopolies in the second half of the century, and conditions in the slaughterhouses descended into a level of hellishness that even outdid the old days (and largely remains so today). Schlosser's book has a wider scope than Sinclair's, as he reveals how the assembly line paradigm and profit-at-all-cost mentality have affected what a nation eats. If your compromised stomach isn't weak now, it will be when you're done reading.
WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN, by Betrand Russell, 1929
&
GOD IS NOT GREAT, by Christopher Hitchens, 2007
The former (named as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century by the New York Public Library) is the product of one of the keenest analytical minds of his time. Russell takes the religious impulse apart on the conceptual/psychological level, with withering precision. In a new century, contrarian/anti-totalitarian firebrand Hitchens penned a book that focuses on the societal effects of ignoring Russell's clear thinking.