Author: Constantine FitzGibbon
Date: 1965
Genre: Biography
Country: USA
A comprehensive 1965 biography of the Welsh poet, written by a friend who used private papers for the first full-scale account. The book details Thomas’s tumultuous life, including his career, personal struggles with debt and drink, and his eventual death in America, presenting a candid look at the poet’s life and work.
Author: Dylan Thomas
Date: 1968
Genre: Short Studies, Essays
Country: UK
Many of the 25 short stories, autobiographical sketches and essays in Quite Early One Morning, a volume planned by Thomas shortly before his death, were read by him on such occasions. They are alive with his verbal magic, his intense perception of life, his gargantuan humor and with the very ring of his voice. Included in this collection of prose pieces are such favorites as the hilarious “A Visit to America,” the account of a small boy’s marvelous day’s outing––”A Story,” and the memorable “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” which has been called ’the twentieth century Christmas Carol.’ Other pieces show Thomas’s power as a sensitive critic of poetry and as an exponent of his own intent as a poet.
Author: John Berryman
Date: 1965
Genre: Poetry
Country: USA
John Berryman was hardly unknown when he published 77 Dream Songs, but the volume was, nevertheless, a shock and a revelation. A “spooky” collection in the words of Robert Lowell-“a maddening work of genius.”
As Henri Cole notes in his elegant, perceptive introduction, Berryman had discovered “a looser style that mixed high and low dictions with a strange syntax.” Berryman had also discovered his most enduring alter ego, a paranoid, passionate, depressed, drunk, irrepressible antihero named Henry or, sometimes, Mr. Bones: “We touch at certain points,” Berryman claimed, of Henry, “But I am an actual human being.”
Author: Malcolm X with Alex Haley
Date: 1965
Genre: Autobiography
Country: USA
An autobiography written by Muslim American minister and activist Malcolm X in collaboration with American journalist Alex Haley. It was released posthumously on October 29, 1965, nine months after his assassination. Haley coauthored the book based on a series of in-depth interviews he conducted between 1963 and 1965. The Autobiography is a religious conversion narrative which outlines Malcolm X’s philosophy of Black pride, Black nationalism, and pan-Africanism. After Malcolm X was killed, Haley wrote the book’s epilogue,[a] which describes their collaborative process and the events at the end of Malcolm’s life.
Author: James Baldwin
Date: 1962
Genre:
Country: USA
The novel is primarily set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France in the late 1950s. It portrayed many themes that were taboo at the time of its release, including homosexuality, bisexuality, interracial couples, and extramarital affairs.
Author: Jack Kerouac
Date: 1965
Genre: Semi-Autobiographical Novel
Country: USA
The events described in the novel take place from 1956-1957. Much of the psychological struggle which the novel’s protagonist, Jack Duluoz, undergoes in the novel reflects Kerouac’s own increasing disenchantment with the Buddhist philosophy. Throughout the novel, Kerouac discusses his disenchantment with fame, and complicated feelings towards the Beat Generation. He also discusses his relationship with his mother and his friends (and prominent Beat figures) such as Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Lucienn Carr and William S. Burroughs. The novel is also notable for being a relatively positive portrayal of homosexuality and homosexual characters, despite its use of words that were at the time considered homophobic slurs.
Author: Robert Bolt
Date: 1960
Genre: Play
Country: UK
The plot is based on the historical events leading up to the execution of Thomas More, the 16th-century Lord Chancellor of England, who refused to endorse Henry VIII’s wish to divorce his wife Catherine of Aragon, who did not bear him a surviving son, so that he could marry Anne Boleyn.
Author: Eugène Ionesco
Date: 1965
Genre: Absurdist, Play
Country: France
A Stroll in the Air concerns Monsieur Berenger who is the hero of many of Ionesco’s plays, including Rhinoceros. What happens to Berenger, his wife and daughter — a French family living for unstated reasons in England — is the source and substance of the play, for Berenger discovers one day he has the miraculous gift of freeing himself from the law of gravity. How the English react to this oddity also reveals Ionesco’s feelings about the insular people with whom he has been fascinated since his earliest plays.
Author: Kenzaburō Ōe
Date: 1964
Genre: Semi-autobiographical
Country: Japan
It tells the story of a young father who must come to terms with the fact that his newborn son is severely mentally disabled.
Author: Arthur Miller
Date: 1964
Genre: Play
Country: USA
A thinly veiled personal critique centered on Miller’s recent divorce from Marilyn Monroe: the plot takes place inside the mind of Quentin, a New York City Jewish intellectual who decides to reexamine his life, in order to determine whether or not he should marry his most recent love, Holga.
Author: Flannery O’Connor
Date: 1960
Genre: Short Stories
Country: USA
It includes all three of O’Connor’s O. Henry Award-winning stories: “Greenleaf” (1957), “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1963), and “Revelation” (1965). In addition, it contains two stories that were published for the first time via the collection: “Parker’s Back” and “Judgement Day”.
Author: Flannery O’Connor
Date: 1960
Genre: Southern Gothic
Country: USA
The novel tells the story of Francis Marion Tarwater, a fourteen-year-old boy who is trying to escape the destiny his uncle has prescribed for him: the life of a prophet. Like most of O’Connor’s stories, the novel is filled with Catholic themes and dark images, making it a classic example of Southern Gothic literature.
Author: John Fowles
Date: 1965
Genre: Postmodern
Country: UK
The novel is a psychological drama that follows a young Englishman, Nicholas Urfe, who takes a teaching post on a remote Greek island to escape his dull life and a failed relationship. There, he meets a wealthy, mysterious man who introduces him to psychological games that blend myth, reality, and illusion. As Nicholas falls deeper into these manipulative scenarios, he begins to question his own sanity and reality. The story is filled with existential themes, exploring the nature of personal freedom, love, and the blurred line between reality and fantasy.
Author: Heinrich Böll
Date: 1963
Genre:
Country: Germany
A post-WWII German novel following Hans Schnier, a disillusioned, alcohol-dependent professional clown, who falls into despair and poverty after his lover, Marie, leaves him for a strict Catholic official. The book is a biting critique of German society’s hypocrisy, religious rigidity, and failure to confront its Nazi past.
Author: Flann O’Brien
Date: 1967
Genre: Comedy, Absurdist, Philosophical Novel
Country: Ireland
A surreal, dark comic novel following an unnamed narrator who murders a man for money to fund his study of a bizarre philosopher, de Selby. After the crime, he enters a nightmarish, dreamlike world where he interacts with eccentric policemen, encounters a “bicycle-human” theory, and discovers he is already dead.
Author: Thomas Pynchon
Date: 1963
Genre: Postmodern, Metafiction, Satire
Country: USA
It describes the exploits of a discharged U.S. Navy sailor named Benny Profane, his reconnection in New York with a group of pseudo-bohemian artists and hangers-on known as the Whole Sick Crew, and the quest of an aging traveler named Herbert Stencil to identify and locate the mysterious entity he knows only as “V.”
Author: Robert A. Heinlein
Date: 1961
Genre: Science Fiction
Country: USA
It tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars and raised by Martians, and explores his interaction with and eventual transformation of Terran culture.
Author: Maya Angelou
Date: 1969
Genre: Autobiography
Country: USA
A 1969 autobiography describing the young and early years of American writer and poet Maya Angelou. The first in a seven-volume series, it is a coming-of-age story that illustrates how strength of character and a love of literature can help overcome racism and trauma.
Author: Sylvia Plath
Date: 1963
Genre: Roman à clef
Country: USA
It follows protagonist Esther Greenwood as she navigates societal pressures and a profound identity crisis during a summer internship in 1950s New York, leading to a breakdown and institutionalization. The book is a classic of American literature, known for its raw, darkly humorous, and intense exploration of depression, female ambition, and the suffocating expectations placed on women.
Author: Shirley Jackson
Date: 1962
Genre: Psychological Horror
Country: USA
Living in the Blackwood family home with only her sister Constance and her Uncle Julian for company, Merricat just wants to preserve their delicate way of life. But ever since Constance was acquitted of murdering the rest of the family, the world isn’t leaving the Blackwoods alone. And when Cousin Charles arrives, armed with overtures of friendship and a desperate need to get into the safe, Merricat must do everything in her power to protect the remaining family.
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Date: 1969
Genre: Science Fiction
Country: USA
Written in mischievous and magically flowing prose, Ada or Ardor is a romance that follows Ada from her first childhood meeting with Van Veen on his uncle’s country estate, in a ‘dream-bright’ America, through eighty years of rapture, as they cross continents, are continually parted and reunited, come to learn the strange truth about their singular relationship and, decades later, put their extraordinary experiences into words.
Author: John Steinbeck
Date: 1961
Genre:
Country: USA
Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of Steinbeck’s last novel, works as a clerk in a grocery store that his family once owned. With Ethan no longer a member of Long Island’s aristocratic class, his wife is restless, and his teenage children are hungry for the tantalizing material comforts he cannot provide. Then one day, in a moment of moral crisis, Ethan decides to take a holiday from his own scrupulous standards. Set in Steinbeck’s contemporary 1960 America, the novel explores the tenuous line between private and public honesty, and today ranks alongside his most acclaimed works of penetrating insight into the American condition.
Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Date: 1962
Genre: Magical Realism, Fantasy, Metafiction, Surrealism
Country: UK
Although his work has been restricted to the short story, the essay, and poetry, Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina is recognized all over the world as one of the most original and significant figures in modern literature. In his preface, Andre Maurois writes: “Borges is a great writer who has composed only little essays or short narratives. Yet they suffice for us to call him great because of their wonderful intelligence, their wealth of invention, and their tight, almost mathematical style.”
Author: Doris Lessing
Date: 1962
Genre:
Country: UK
Two women talk, and what they say is explosive. One woman writes, and each part of her becomes a fragment set down in a different notebook. Torn apart by marriage, love affairs, children, and a neurotic society, the one woman, Anna, is going to pieces, breaking down–and finally coming to terms with herself as a total, complete human being…a woman who truly understands herself.
Author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Date: 1962
Genre: Historical Fiction
Country: Russia
This crisp, shattering glimpse of the fate of millions of Russians under Stalin shook Russia and shocked the world when it first appeared. Khrushchev himself, during the Russian thaw, is said to have authorized the publication of this spare, stark description of life in a Siberian labour camp.
Author: Julio Cortázar
Date: 1963
Genre: Stream of Consciousness, Avant Garde
Country: Argentina
This avant-garde novel invites readers into a non-linear narrative that can be read in two different orders, following the life of Horacio Oliveira, an Argentine intellectual living in Paris with his lover, La Maga. The story explores philosophical and metaphysical themes, delving into the nature of reality and the human condition, while also examining the struggles of intellectual and emotional life. The second part of the novel takes place in Buenos Aires, where Horacio returns after La Maga disappears, and where he grapples with his past, his identity, and his place in the world.