Birth Year Project:
You supply your birth year, I respond with a short list of books published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I'd recommend. If your year's already been done, I'll do an update. So far, we’ve done 13 years altogether, between 1946 and 1978.
Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you're unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I'll aggregate and post.
1980 was a year of novels by writers with recognizable names—Kingsley Amis, Isaac Asimov, Anthony Burgess, Frank Herbert, Farley Mowat, Patrick O’Brian, and others . . . but not the titles they’re known for.1
Still (as always), a little digging turns up interesting stuff, especially among the non-English language works.
Sample of Well-Known/Bestsellers:
Bang the Drum Slowly, Mark Harris2
Andersonville, MacKinlay Kantor3
Peyton Place, Grace Metalious4
The Last Hurrah, Edwin O'Connor5
Seven Works of World Literature:
Malone Dies, Samuel Beckett6 [Ireland/France]
Ficciones [stories], Jorge Luis Borges [Argentina]
The Fall (La Chute), Albert Camus [France]
Les Racines du ciel [English version: The Roots of Heaven (1957)], Romain Gary.7 [France]
Palace Walk [first vol. of the Cairo Trilogy], Naguib Mahfouz [Egypt]
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima [Japan]8
The Lonely Londoners, Samuel Selvon [Trinidad]9
Novels That Later Became Well-Known:
A Walk on the Wild Side, Nelson Algren10
Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin11
Seize the Day, Saul Bellow12
The Towers of Trebizond, Rose Macaulay13
A Pair of Satires Worth Remembering:
Special Mention:
Howl and Other Poems, Allen Ginsberg16
Long Day's Journey into Night [play], Eugene O'Neill
Look Back in Anger [play], John Osborne
My List:
Kind of an odd year: Four of the five books I’d have listed down here were already mentioned above—Baldwin, Beckett, Borges, O’Connor. Which leaves only:
Chocolates for Breakfast, Pamela Moore17
For the record, here’s the cream of the work of these writers:
Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim (1954)
Isaac Asimov: I, Robot (1950), Foundation (1951)
Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1962)
Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)
Farley Mowat: Never Cry Wolf (1963)
Patrick O’Brian: The Aubrey-Maturin series (1969-1999)
Mary Renault: The King Must Die (1958)
Françoise Sagan: Bonjour Tristesse (1954)
Irwin Shaw: Rich Man, Poor Man (1969)
Bang the Drum: One of a quartet of baseball books Harris wrote, this one narrated by Henry "Author" Wiggen, pitcher for the “New York Mammoths.” Long considered a classic of baseball lit. Adapted for TV and film several times. Not that you asked, but the title comes from a dying cowboys’s lament in “The Streets of Laredo”: "Oh bang the drum slowly and play the fife lowly, and play the dead march as you carry me along . . ."
If Substack let me footnote a footnote, I’d tell you that a poem Richard Hugo wrote while sabbaticalizing on the Isle of Skye [“The Right Madness on Skye”] likewise has the dead talk—to us and to the guy hauling him to the boneyard. Definite echo of dying cowboy, except cheekier, with more wit and bluster.
Andersonville: Turns out the copyright is actually 1955—it was awarded the 1956 Pulitzer Prize. I’m going to leave it in here because it’s a book you should know about, and also because [lowers voice] the boss stepped out a moment ago and I feel like perpetrating a small mischief this morning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andersonville_Prison
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andersonville_(novel)
Peyton Place: A publishing sensation in its day: “the dark secrets of a small New England town.” Despite the carping of critics, Peyton Place was on the NYT Bestseller List for over a year. Metalious responded: “If I’m a lousy writer, then an awful lot of people have lousy taste.” The novel spawned a film and a successful TV adaptation (I can remember watching in my formative years). Finally read the novel a few years ago, and found it a good bit less salacious than I’d hoped for. Drat.
Metalious did not have a happy life—she grew up poor in New Hampshire, married as a teen, had a child, got divorced, later remarried the ex-husband; they separated again, she married someone else; they divorced. She died at age 39 (cirrhosis, heavy drinking).
Hurrah: O’Connor’s second novel: the last act of an old-school politician's public life (inspired, it’s said, by Boston mayor, James M. Curley). A classic, mid-century read. A few years later he’d win the Pulitzer Prize for The Edge of Sadness (1961).
Beckett: This is Book Two of his trilogy, the others being Molloy (1951) and The Unnamable (1953). Though an Irishman, he wrote many of his mature works in French (for its purity of expression), then translated them into English. I imagine a zillion dissertions have been written about Beckett. If he’d written nothing but Waiting For Godot (first performed 1953), he’d still be famous.
He was prolific in both theatre and prose (and poetry—who knew?). The other plays I’d recommend: Endgame (1957) and Krapp’s Last Tape (1958). His prose became highly experimental as he aged. Stripped-down, cryptic—and just the language: Beckett tried to subtract basic elements of storytelling—he seemed to be asking how far you can go before there’s only silence left.
He led a fascinating, complex life—for instance, he worked in the French Resistance during WWII. And as a young man he was a scribe for James Joyce. Spend a little time with his Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett
Here’s a little chunk of an essay I wrote some years ago:
“Before launching into his three linked novels . . . I thought, based on photos of his hawkish face, and abandonment of English, that Beckett would read like Sartre—that is, having the peculiar pallor of 40s and 50s Existentialism. Thus, I began Molloy with my guard up. We find the narrator at his mother’s, quite confused. How did he get there? He’s not sure. Then there’s this (we’re still on the first page):
The truth is I don’t know much. For example, my mother’s death. Was she already dead when I came? Or did she die later? I mean enough to bury.
Enough to bury?? I’m sorry, this put me in hysterics. I had him all wrong. Forget French. This was the black, self-lacerating humor of Irish pub stories, of wakes. If you don’t hear the undercurrent of fierce comedy in Beckett, he makes no sense at all.”
Romain Gary: A concentration camp survivor goes to Africa to stop the slaughter of elephants. It was a massive bestseller and won France’s premier literary award, the Prix Goncourt.
Mishima:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Temple_of_the_Golden_Pavilion
Londoners:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lonely_Londoners
Nelson Algren: Chicago/gritty. Well-known writer in his day . . . lover of Simone de Beauvoir (she wrote about him in her 1947 novel, The Mandarins), winner of National Book Award for his 1949 novel, The Man With the Golden Arm (a film noir classic directed by Otto Preminger, 1955). Walk on the Wild Side was also filmed (1962)—brothel/New Orleans. Interesting side note: The screenplay was written by John Fante whose 1956 novel, Ask the Dust (the story of Arturo Bandini, a young writer trying to make his way during the Depression). I haven’t read Wild Side, but The Man With the Golden Arm is a good period read.
James Baldwin: On BBC’s list of 100 Most Inspiring Novels (2019). This was his second novel, the story of an gay ex-pat American in Paris. Baldwin grew into a major literary figure—novelist, essayist, social activist.
Here’s a quote from Baldwin I had on my fridge for years:
You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had been alive.
Bellow: The 1976 Nobel Laureate, winner of every award you can think of, so embedded in Chicago it might come as a surprise that he was born in Quebec and had to be naturalized.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Bellow
This is a novella, three stories, and a play, his next work after The Adventures of Augie March (1953)—a candidate for the Great American Novel. If you haven’t read Bellow, start elsewhere—Herzog (1964) or Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), which both won the National Book Award), or Humboldt's Gift (1975), winner of the 1976 Pulitzer Prize.
My personal opinion: Bellow couldn’t plot, but his novels were rich in ideas, comedy, and terrific sentences (dialog and description in particular). Here’s a taste (from Herzog):
The whole family took the street car to the Grand Trunk Station with a basket (frail, splintering wood) of pears, overripe, a bargain bought by Jonah Herzog at the Rachel Street Market, the fruit spotty, ready for wasps, just about to decay, but marvelously fragrant. And inside the train on the worn green bristle of the seats, Father Herzog sat peeling the fruit with his Russian pearl-handled knife. He peeled and twirled and cut with European efficiency. Meanwhile, the locomotive and the iron-studded cars began to move. . . . By the factory walls the grimy weeds grew. A smell of malt came from the breweries.
And finally, Bellow is the source of a truth at the heart of my thoughts on writing:
A writer is a reader moved to emulation.
Trebizond: From the Amazon blurb:
. . . The Towers of Trebizond tells the gleefully absurd story of Aunt Dot, Father Chantry-Pigg, Aunt Dot's deranged camel, and our narrator, Laurie, who are traveling from Istanbul to legendary Trebizond on a convoluted mission. Along the way they will encounter spies, a Greek sorcerer, a precocious ape, and Billy Graham with a busload of evangelists. Part travelogue, part comedy, it is also a meditation on love, faith, doubt, and the difficulties, moral and intellectual, of being a Christian in the modern world.
Haven’t gotten to this myself—I’m including it because Nancy Pearl, Seattle librarian extraordinaire loves it. Reprinted in 2003 by New York Review of Books Press, with a new introduction by Jan Morris.
Rum Doodle: A send-up of the pompous climbing expedition books popular at the time. Don’t know how it reads, but Bill Bryson wrote the intro to a new edition and, after all, he’s an authority of woefully ill-prepared trekkers [A Walk in the Woods (1998)]. Bowman’s other published book is The Cruise of the Talking Fish (1957), which parodies Thor Heyerdahl’s account of the Kon-Tiki’s voyage. Mr. Bowman was, otherwise, a civil engineer.
Anglo-Saxon: Wiki tells me, “[Wilson] was one of England's first openly gay authors.” And it’s Sir Angus—he was knighted for his service to literature. Novelist, reviewer, professor; worked for the British Museum, broke code at Bletchley Circle during WWII. Readers of the recent reprint by NYRB Press still find it a hoot:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_Attitudes
Howl: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked . . . and so on.
Wiki has a long, detailed piece on the title poem—the story of its writing, its publication by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Press, Ferlinghetti’s subsequent arrest for obscenity, and much more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howl_(poem)
And here’s Ginsberg reading the poem:
https://www.openculture.com/2012/06/allen_ginsberg_reads_his_beat_classic_poem_howl.html
Chocolates for Breakfast: She wrote this when she was 18, and drew comparisons to the other teen phenom, Françoise Sagan [see note 1, above]. Did not have a happy life (died by suicide at age 26). Piece on Moore and the novel in Marie Claire:
https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/a18133/pamela-moore-chocolates-for-breakfast/