Birth Year Project: 1963
[revised]
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.
Note: Had another request for 1963, upgraded the first one. This one’s spiffier.
The Well-Known/Popular Books:
The Feminine Mystique [social chronicle/manifesto], Betty Friedan1
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John LeCarré2
The Group, Mary McCarthy3
A Rich Year for Novels That Became Films of the Same Title:
The Planet of the Apes, Pierre Boulle [film: 1968]
The Collector, John Fowles [film: 1965]4
On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Ian Fleming [film: 1969]5
The Sand Pebbles, Richard McKenna [film: 1966 ]
Ice Station Zebra, Alastair MacLean [film: 1968]
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, Yukio Mishima [film: 1976]
The Grifters, Jim Thompson [film: 1990]
The Graduate, Charles Webb [film: 1967]6
Seven Works of World Literature:
The Clown, Heinrich Böll7 [West Germany/Germany]
Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar8 [Argentina/France]
Gladi, Oskar Davičo9 [Serbia/Yugoslavia]
The General of the Dead Army, Ismail Kadare10 [Albania]
Dog Years, Günter Grass [trans. from the German by Ralph Manheim (1965)11 [West Germany/Germany]
The Time of the Hero, Mario Vargas Llosa [original title La ciudad y los perros, “The City and the Dogs”]12 [Peru]
Der geteilte Himmel, Christa Wolf [trans. from the German by Luise von Flotow as They Divided the Sky (2013)]13 [East Germany/Germany]
Special Mention:
The Fire Next Time [essays], James Baldwin14
That Summer in Paris [memoir], Morley Callaghan15
Up the Junction [stories], Nell Dunn16
Letter from Birmingham Jail [treatise], Martin Luther King, Jr.17
City of Night, John Rechy18
My List:
Instead of a Letter [memoir], Diana Athill19
Leaving Cheyenne, Larry McMurtry20
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath21
V., Thomas Pynchon22
Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters, J. D. Salinger23
The Girls of Slender Means, Muriel Spark24
Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.25
The Tenants of Moonbloom, Edward Lewis Wallant26
The Feminine Mystique: A landmark text in 20th century feminism. Read about it here;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feminine_Mystique
John Le Carré: This was his third novel, a prequel to his first [Call For the Dead (1961)], which introduced one of his best-known spies, George Smiley.
The Group:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Group_(novel)
The Collector: Fowles was a major British novelist during the second half of the 20th century. This was his first published novel, though the post-modern/metafictional book, The Magus (1965), was the first written [he later revised The Magus and republished it in 1977]. His most well-known work is The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)—the film of the same title appeared in 1981 (with Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons).
Fleming: The 11th Bond novel, the 6th to be filmed (with George Lazenby, his only turn as 007).
The Graduate: Webb lived a genuinely off-beat life. Read about him here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Webb_(author)Böll: Have not read this one, but I recommend Billiards at Half-Past Nine (1962) and The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1974).
Cortazar: A major force in the Latin American Boom. Hopscotch is an experiment in narrative form: Read the chapters in order, stop as instructed (skipping the remaining chapters), and it’s one story. Read according to a list of chapter numbers (that includes the skipped ones), and it’s an alternate version. A worthy effort, but basically a one-off. The ethos of the 60s spawned other experiments in form, but (IMHO) the linearity of writing makes alternate schemes much harder to pull off (compared to, for instance, the visual arts). Cortazar is also remembered for having written the short story that inspired (very obliquely) Antonioni's classic film, Blow-Up (1966).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_Boom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio_Cort%C3%A1zarOskar Davičo: A poet and novelist—wrote about the prison life of Yugoslavian Communists in the years between the World Wars, then beyond. Read about him:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Davi%C4%8DoIsmail Kadare: Novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright. This was his first novel. He went on to be awarded most major European writing honors, including the Man Booker International Prize. Survived Albania’s Communist period, finally defecting to Paris in 1990. A national figure in Albania comparable in popularity perhaps to Mark Twain in the United States, according the New York Times: “. . . there is hardly an Albanian household without a Kadare book." Often seen as a prime candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Günter Grass: Last volume of his Danzig Trilogy, the others being The Tin Drum (1959) and Cat and Mouse (1961). A Nobel Laureate in Literature (1999).
Vargas Llosa: The 2010 Nobel Laureate, a prolific literary writer and political figure since the 1960s (like Cortazar, above, part of the Latin American Boom). Other major works:
The Feast of the Goat, (2000)
Death in the Andes (1996)
In Praise of the Stepmother (1990)
The War at the End of the World (1984)
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1982)
Wolf: Possibly the most significant writer to emerge from East Germany. This work was not widely known in the West. I’ve read and recommend two others: The Quest For Christa T. (1968) [trans. by Christopher Middleton (1970)] and In the Flesh (2002) [trans. by John Smith Barrett (2005).
James Baldwin: Two essays, first published in The Progressive and The New Yorker. This work came between his third and fourth novels Another Country (1962 ) and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_BaldwinCallaghan: A too-often overlooked Canadian novelist [A Fine and Private Place (1975)]. Belongs with other books documenting the ex-pat writers in Paris during the 1920s: A Moveable Feast (Hemingway), Shakespeare and Company (Sylvia Beach), An Exile’s Return (Malcolm Cowley), and many others. And if you want a great short story capturing the “party’s over” feeling that followed the high times, read Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited.”
Dunn: Scenes from London’s underclass. I’m including it here to call attention to Dunn’s first novel, Poor Cow (1967); she also wrote the screenplay for Ken Loach’s film of the same title.
MLK, Jr. This has long been considered a seminal work in the civil rights movement.
City of Night: Rechy’s debut novel, the story of a gay hustler in the 1950s. Published by Grove Press, known for supporting non-mainstream literary writers. Gus Van Sant claims it was City of Night that inspired him to write his screenplay, My Private Idaho (1991).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_NightAthill: A prolific British editor and novelist. I was quite moved by this very candid account of a long-term affair. Read about her:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_AthillMcMurtry: I came to Larry McMurtry by way of the film, The Last Picture Show (1971), which he and Peter Bogdonovich adapted from McMurtry's novel of the same name (1966).
Leaving Cheyenne is an early work, relatively short, a portrait of a life-long, three-sided love affair. I always loved its structure: each character [Gideon, Johnny, Molly] tells a third of the story.
The Bell Jar: Has become a classic, along with Ariel [poems] (1965). Plath should be remembered for those books, but her personal history casts a heavy shadow across her legacy—her difficult marriage to British poet, Ted Hughes, and her clinical depression (she died by suicide at age thirty in 1963). The Bell Jar was originally published under the pseudonym, Victoria Lucas.
Pynchon: I was enthralled by Pynchon when I was young—this novel and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and a little later Gravity's Rainbow (1973). He had an aura of mystery (he was never photographed); one of his persistent themes was the arcane, pockets of knowledge known by the few. I never read his later work—Mason and Dixon (1997), say—but I did read all 1100-something pp. of Against the Day (2006). He threw a bunch of balls in the air and I read on, hot to see the grand scheme revealed, how he’d pull it all together . . . except he never did—he'd just been messing about all that time. Thus endeth my own involvement with Pynchon.
PS: Mason and Dixon: Have you heard Mark Knopfler’s song “Sailing To Philadelphia”? It’s about those two, and it’s just flat-out beautiful. The version I heard first was a duet with James Taylor. My first taste of Knopfler was his soundtrack for the film, Cal (based on Bernard MacLaverty’s novel of 1983). Later, like all guitar players, I was gobsmacked by “Sultans of Swing”—the part with the 16th notes, toward the end? You know the one. Anyway, “Sailing To Philadelphia." I am Jeremiah Dixon, I am a Geordie boy . . . Was going to link you to YouTube, but you’d have to sit through a nasty promo about belly fat. Sigh.
But here’s the poop on Cal, the film:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal_(1984_film)
Salinger: Salinger was a writer we all read when I was young, not so much The Catcher in the Rye (1951), but the stories—this work and the earlier, Nine Stories (1953) and Franny and Zooey (1961). A complicated, not entirely admirable man, who led a complicated and private life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._D._SalingerSpark: Most readers know Spark from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), which is an excellent entry point, but she wrote twenty-two novels altogether (as well as short fiction and nonfiction). Girls of Slender Means is a group portrait of a boarding house for working women just after WWII, with a wonderfully snarky black humor denouement.
Cat’s Cradle: My first Vonnegut. Then I read the earlier books—Player Piano (1952), Sirens of Titan (1959), etc. Cat's Cradle had a cult following in the 60s. It's my second favorite, after Slaughter-House Five (1969). Vonnegut published some weak stuff, but his best work is a brilliant mix of social satire, acerbic black humor, flights of imagination, profound pessimism laced here and there with sparkles of hope. I hope he never stops being read.
Moonbloom: A prime example of New York Review of Books Press resurrecting a worthy neglected/forgotten text. Wallant is known for having written The Pawnbroker (1961), the story of a concentration camp survivor in NYC, rendered in film by Sidney Lumet (starring Rod Steiger). Wallant died of an aneurysm at age 36; I can only wonder what else he'd have given us. But The Tenants of Moonbloom (published posthumously) is a lovely work—Moonbloom, who collects the rents in his uncle's apartment building, is gradually transformed from sad-sack slacker to would-be savior of the building's cohort of troubled souls.
Great post, professor. I love your take on Vonnegut. I myself am partial to "Sirens" and its brilliantly terse bit of Tralfamadorian dialogue: (spoiler alert) "Greetings."
I was reading The Feminine Mystique before my 7:30 am drawing class, winter of 1971. The prof yelled at me, insisted the book ruined his best friend's marriage. I liked it a lot. I don't mean the yelling, of course.