Doris Lessing

When Doris Lessing was confronted by a bunch of reporters outside her home in London one day in 2007, and was told she'd just won the Nobel Prize, she retorted, "Oh, Christ!...  I couldn't care less." The outspoken, independent, and sometimes irascible author reinvented herself over the course of novels, short stories, essays and poems, whether drawing upon her childhood spent in the Central African bush, or imagining a dystopian future.  It was The Golden Notebook, her 1962 novel, though, that brought her the most acclaim. She died recently at the age of 94.  You can hear her distinctive voice in an interview with Leonard from 2003 below.