Also 100 This Year: James T. Farrell
(just thought I'd mention it)

Norman Lebrecht compares Isaac Bashevis Singer and Graham Greene, both of whom were born in 1904.

What united them was a tradition that knows no borders. Singer said he owed his narrative style to Dickens and Dostoievsky: 'There was a man. He lived in such a place. One day something happened.' Greene cited Dickens and Conrad - 'a disastrous influence ... I had to stop reading him.' Neither had much time for modern writers who developed character ahead of plot. Singer snorted at the mention of Saul Bellow, who translated Gimpel the Fool in 1953, Singer's first appearance in English. Greene scowled when I asked about John Updike: 'a perfumed writer.'