The Guide to Modern World Literature is a reference book by Martin Seymour-Smith in which he set out to describe every important 20th-century author (as of 1985), in all languages, in an encyclopedic presentation. It was first published in 1973 with a completely revised and updated version in 1985 called The New Guide to Modern World Literature.
The book is over 1450 pages long. Daringly individualistic, it has been found to be eccentric and occasionally frustrating but always readable and highly stimulating. As Cyril Connolly summarised of the first (1973) edition: "I'm very much afraid he will prove indispensable!" And many judgments previously thought eccentric have proved sound. For instance, his criticism of Lawrence Durrell singled out his poetry as his real achievement; John Fowles, Muriel Spark, C. P. Snow, Malcolm Bradbury and even Ted Hughes first felt the chilling of their reputations in these covers. The stature of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-76) as the greatest fictional post-war achievement was asserted: a view endorsed by Kingsley Amis, Hilary Spurling and an increasing number of readers since. And Seymour-Smith's prediction that T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets would not survive as a great poem by 2000, has been arguably vindicated.
The polyglot Seymour-Smith further used the book to champion writers he regarded as underrated, such as James Hanley, Laura Riding, Cesar Vallejo, Pio Baroja, Rayner Heppenstall and Jose Maria Arguedas, while attacking those he felt were overvalued, such as George Bernard Shaw, W. H. Auden and as mentioned above, T. S. Eliot. Seymour-Smith also disparaged John le Carré, Harold Pinter, Margaret Atwood[1], and Tom Stoppard who he thought were overrated.