Writers did not doubt the shadow it would cast over future generations. Mary McCarthy called the nuclear bomb “a hole in human history”; William Faulkner, in his 1950 Nobel Prize speech, wondered: “When will I be blown up?”; Doris Lessing’s heroine in The Golden Notebook says to her psychoanalyst, “I don’t want to be told when I wake up, terrified by a dream of total annihilation, because of the H-bomb exploding, that people felt that way about the cross-bow.
