Tag: 1970s Literature

Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Date: 1972
Genre: 
Country: USA

The short novel tells the story of Hugh Person, an American literary editor and proofreader, and his four trips to and from Switzerland over the course of almost two decades.

Author: Flannery O’Connor
Date: 1972
Genre: Short Stories
Country: USA

In these sly, laconic, and fiercely observed works, O’Connor does nothing less than elaborate a unique and new way of seeing the world. Contorting her sharply drawn characters through her Southern Gothic prism, she produces a panorama unequaled in its vision of the interplays of faith, evil, humor, violence, and compassion that embody American life.

These thirty-one chronologically ordered stories include twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O’Connor put together in her short lifetime―Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

Taken together, these stories reveal O’Connor’s abiding and visionary gift―one that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century.

Author: Hermann Hesse
Date: 1978
Genre: Essays
Country: German

One of the most astonishing aspects of Hesse’s genius is the clear-sightedness of his political views and hid passionate espousal of pacifism from World War I to the end of his life. This superb collection of essays is charged with emotion. World War II was a shock to Hesse, and his writings from that time are filled with personal anguish and his antagonism to racism, nationalism and war.

Author: Robertson Davies
Date: 1970-1975
Genre: Trilogy of Novels
Country: Canada

The trilogy consists of Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972), and World of Wonders (1975). The series revolves around a precipitating event: a young boy throws a snowball at another, hitting a pregnant woman instead, who goes into premature labor. It explores the longterm effects of these events on numerous characters.

Author: Georges Perec
Date: 1978
Genre: Postmodern
Country: France

The novel explores the lives of the inhabitants of a Parisian apartment block through a complex, multi-layered narrative. It delves into the interconnected stories of the building’s residents, revealing their secrets, desires, and disappointments. The narrative is structured like a puzzle, with the author employing a variety of literary styles and devices, making it a complex and intriguing exploration of human life.

Author: William Gaddis
Date: 1975
Genre: 
Country: USA

J R Vansant is an 11-year-old schoolboy who obscures his identity through payphone calls and postal money orders in order to parlay penny stock holdings into a fortune on paper. The novel broadly satirizes what Gaddis called “the American dream turned inside out”. One critic called it “the greatest satirical novel in American literature.”

Author: Milan Kundera
Date: 1979
Genre: 
Country: France

It is composed of seven separate narratives united by some common themes. The book considers the nature of forgetting as it occurs in history, politics, and life in general. The stories also contain elements found in the genre of magic realism.

Author: Toni Morrison
Date: 1973
Genre: African American
Country: USA

The novel tells the story of two girls, Sula and Nel, and their friendship and coming of age in a black community in Ohio.

Author: Toni Morrison
Date: 1970
Genre: African American
Country: USA

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author’s girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves’ garden do not bloom. Pecola’s life does change—in painful, devastating ways.

Author: Toni Morrison
Date: 1977
Genre: African American
Country: USA

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.

Author: Italo Calvino
Date: 1979
Genre: Postmodern
Country: Italy

The postmodernist narrative, in the form of a frame story, is about the reader trying to read a book called If on a winter’s night a traveler. Each chapter is divided into two sections. The first section of each chapter is in second person, and describes the process the reader goes through to attempt to read the next chapter of the book they are reading. The second half is the first part of a new book that the reader (“you”) finds. The second half is always about something different from the previous ones.

Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Date: 1974
Genre: Fictional Autobiography
Country: USA

‘Look at the harlequins … Play! Invent the world! Invent reality’. This is the childhood advice given by an aunt to Russian born writer Vadim Vadimovich, who emigrates to England, then Paris, then Germany and then the US, and, now dying, reconstructs his past. He remembers Iris his first wife, Annette his long-necked typist and Bel his daughter, as well as his own bizarre ‘numerical nimbus syndrome’.

Author: J. G. Ballard
Date: 1970
Genre: Science Fiction, Experimental
Country: UK

The Atrocity Exhibition is an experimental novel of linked stories or “condensed novels” by British writer J. G. Ballard.

Author: Thomas Pynchon
Date: 1973
Genre: Postmodern, Satire, Science Fiction, Historical Fiction
Country: USA

The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military. In particular, it features the quest undertaken by several characters to uncover the secret of a mysterious device, the Schwarzgerät (‘black device’), which is slated to be installed in a rocket with the serial number “00000”.