From the archives: Doris Lessing’s unfinished business with ‘Ben, in the World’

Ray Suarez talks to writer Doris Lessing about her novel, “Ben in the World.” This interview first aired in 2000. Video by PBS NewsHour.

In 2000, Ray Suarez interviewed Doris Lessing about “Ben, in the World,” a science fiction novel that continued the story of a young man striking out on his own path, even though he is incapable of coping with the modern world. As the sequel to her 1988 novel, “The Fifth Child,” Lessing told Suarez what made her take up Ben’s story again, more than a decade after the first book.

Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 and perhaps most well-known for her 1962 novel, “The Golden Notebook,” died on Sunday in London at the age of 94.

Lessing talked about how she came to write her first book, “The Grass is Singing,” on a video posted on her site.