One Hundred Years of Solitude
1967 · 417 pages
Seven generations of one family in Macondo, where insomnia comes as a plague and the rain lasts four years. García Márquez reports the impossible as plain fact.
★ 9.5
Browse by time · decade
1960s
1960 – 1969
Showing 106 books from the 1960s
The Master and Margarita
1967 · 411 pages
The devil arrives in Stalin's Moscow with a retinue that includes an enormous talking cat, and the literary bureaucrats never recover. Threaded through it runs a stark short novel about Pontius Pilate.
★ 8.7
Catch-22
1961 · 524 pages
Trying to get grounded for insanity, a bombardier learns that asking to be grounded proves he is sane. Heller runs that loop through a whole war until the deaths stop being funny.
★ 8.7
The Collected Poems
1963 · 296 pages
Frost's New England of stone walls and deep snow arrives in plain talk held to strict meter, with something much colder underneath. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening offers no comfort.
★ 8.6
To Kill a Mockingbird
1960 · 376 pages
Scout Finch's father, a lawyer in a small Alabama town, defends a Black man accused of raping a white woman. The trial reaches you through a child who understands less than you do.
★ 8.6
Pale Fire
1962 · 315 pages
A dead poet's 999 lines arrive wrapped in footnotes by a neighbor certain the poem is about his own lost northern kingdom. The ingenuity is total and the grief underneath is real.
★ 8.4
Slaughterhouse Five
1969 · 215 pages
Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time, between a Dresden meat locker during the firebombing and a zoo on another planet. Vonnegut was in that cellar, and writes "So it goes" after every death.
★ 8.4
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
1962 · 217 pages
Science does not creep forward by adding facts, Kuhn argues. It works inside one framework until the anomalies pile up and the whole picture flips. Paradigm shift is his phrase and his idea.
★ 8.3
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X and Alex Haley
1965 · 528 pages
Malcolm X was a Michigan boy, then a Harlem hustler, then a convict copying the dictionary, then a speaker no one in America could ignore. He was still changing when he was murdered.
★ 8.3
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
1961 · 458 pages
Jacobs watched her Greenwich Village street and argued that crowded sidewalks, short blocks, and eyes on the street are what keep a city alive. After this, bulldozing a neighborhood stopped looking like progress.
★ 8.3
In Cold Blood
1966 · 343 pages
In 1959 two ex-convicts murdered a Kansas farm family of four they had never met. Capote spent years with the killers and turned reporting into a novel, patient and entirely without comfort.
★ 8.0
The Making of the English Working Class
1963 · 848 pages
Thompson follows English weavers, artisans, and radicals from the 1780s to the 1830s and shows them making themselves into a class. He wrote to rescue them from the enormous condescension of posterity.
★ 7.9
The Wretched of the Earth
1961 · 336 pages
Fanon was a psychiatrist from Martinique who joined the Algerian revolution and died at thirty-six. Colonialism deforms the mind of the colonized, he argues, and violence undoes it. Revolutionaries read him as instructions.
★ 7.9
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
1962 · 208 pages
Reveille to lights out in a Soviet labor camp, where the prisoner Shukhov scrounges an extra crust and lays bricks well in the cold. He counts it almost a happy day.
★ 7.9
Eichmann in Jerusalem
1963 · 312 pages
Reporting from the Jerusalem trial of the Nazi official who organized the deportations, Arendt found not a monster but a careerist who never thought. Her phrase, the banality of evil, still starts fights.
★ 7.9
Silent Spring
1962 · 378 pages
Carson opens on a town where the birds have stopped singing, then lays out what pesticides do to water, soil, and human bodies. The chemical industry attacked her and the law changed.
★ 7.9
The Fire Next Time
1963 · 106 pages
Writing to his teenage nephew, Baldwin remembers preaching in Harlem and dining with the leader of the Nation of Islam. He spares white America nothing and refuses to hate it.
★ 7.8
A House for Mr. Biswas
1961 · 564 pages
Mohun Biswas is born unlucky in rural Trinidad, marries into a large domineering family, and spends his life trying to own a house. Naipaul makes those small defeats as large as any tragedy.
★ 7.8
Herzog
1964 · 371 pages
Moses Herzog, a professor whose wife left him for his closest friend, comes apart and writes furious unsent letters to philosophers, ex-wives, and the dead. Bellow makes a breakdown enormous fun.
★ 7.8
Stoner
1965 · 278 pages
Sent to study agriculture, a Missouri farm boy falls for English literature instead and never leaves the university. Williams makes an unremarkable life, badly used by everyone in it, hold you completely.
★ 7.8
The Complete Poems
1966 · 908 pages
Waiting outside a Leningrad prison with a parcel for her son, Akhmatova was asked whether she could describe this. Requiem was the answer. Her love lyrics have the same merciless exactness.
★ 7.1
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
1968 · 256 pages
Didion went into Haight-Ashbury in 1967 and came back with a five-year-old on acid and children improvising a society in a vacuum. She rebuilt American nonfiction prose around the sound of her sentences.
★ 7.0
The Golden Notebook
1962 · 672 pages
Anna Wulf keeps four notebooks: Africa, the Communist Party, fiction drawn from her love affair, and a private diary. Lessing made a woman's inner life the whole subject of a serious novel.
★ 7.0
Where the Wild Things Are
1963 · 48 pages
Sent to bed without supper, Max sails to an island of monsters, tames them by staring, and is crowned their king. Sendak gave children's books permission to take a child's rage seriously.
★ 6.9
Conversation in The Cathedral
1969 · 601 pages
At what moment did Peru screw itself up? A newspaperman and his father's chauffeur drink through an afternoon in a Lima bar called the Cathedral, and their talk rebuilds a country under dictatorship.
★ 6.9
Hopscotch
1963 · 564 pages
You can read it straight through to chapter 56 or take Cortazar's table of instructions through nearly all 155. Either way an Argentine exile drifts through Paris after a woman called La Maga.
★ 6.9
Desert Solitaire
1968 · 269 pages
Two seasons as a ranger at Arches in Utah, and Abbey renders the red rock with a naturalist's precision and turns his fury on the paved roads bringing cars into the parks.
★ 6.9
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
1963 · 240 pages
Alec Leamas takes one last assignment in East Germany, posing as a burnt-out defector, never told what his own service wants. Graham Greene called it the best spy story he had read.
★ 6.8
One-Dimensional Man
1964 · 260 pages
Marcuse argues that rich societies control people by satisfying them. The needs advertising invents get met, dissent gets absorbed and sold back, and the capacity to imagine a different arrangement quietly withers away.
★ 6.8
Against Interpretation
And Other Essays
1966 · 312 pages
Sontag's charge against criticism: pulling meaning out of a work is a way of not experiencing it. She wants attention paid to surface and speed, and asks for an erotics of art instead.
★ 6.8
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society
1962 · 301 pages
Public opinion has a history, and Habermas locates its birth in the coffeehouses, salons, and newspapers where private men first argued about power. Advertising and mass media turned that argument back into spectacle.
★ 6.8
The Left Hand of Darkness
1969 · 304 pages
Le Guin removed gender from a civilization and followed every consequence. Her envoy lands on an ice planet where nobody has a fixed sex and survives by crossing a glacier with one ally.
★ 6.8
A Moveable Feast
1964 · 256 pages
Paris in the 1920s, where a young writer works in cafes, borrows books from the bookseller Sylvia Beach, and takes the measure of Gertrude Stein and Scott Fitzgerald. Hunger sharpens everything he sees.
★ 6.8
Dune
1965 · 528 pages
Arrakis is a desert planet of sandworms, holding the only supply of the spice that makes interstellar travel possible. Paul Atreides arrives as a duke's son and the Fremen call him messiah.
★ 6.8
Rabbit, Run
1960 · 325 pages
Harry Angstrom peaked at eighteen on a basketball court and now demonstrates kitchen gadgets. He leaves his pregnant wife and drives south. Updike gave the American suburb prose nobody thought it deserved.
★ 6.8
Revolutionary Road
1961 · 337 pages
Frank and April Wheeler tell themselves they are too fine for Connecticut and plan an escape to Paris. Yates tracks every evasion and self-flattering lie until the marriage has nothing underneath it.
★ 6.8
The Crying of Lot 49
1966 · 183 pages
Named executor of an ex-lover's estate, Oedipa Maas keeps finding a muted post horn on bathroom walls. Either a secret postal system has run under America for centuries or she is unraveling.
★ 6.8
Between Past and Future
1961 · 298 pages
Tradition stopped telling anyone what authority or freedom means, and Arendt refuses to invent a substitute. She reopens each concept instead, arguing that education fails when adults stop taking responsibility for the world.
★ 6.8
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
1967 · 432 pages
Colonists rebelled because they believed London was conspiring to destroy their liberty. Reading hundreds of pamphlets, Bailyn showed that ideas made the Revolution. A generation of historians rewrote the founding on his terms.
★ 6.7
The Burden of Southern History
1960 · 304 pages
Americans tell themselves a story of innocence, abundance, and invincibility. The South knew defeat, poverty, and the guilt of slavery, and Woodward offers that history as the corrective a superpower needs.
★ 6.7