Collected Fictions
1951 · 576 pages
Borges invented a library holding every possible book and a man cursed with perfect memory. The stories run ten pages and leave the world looking like something someone made up.
★ 9.1
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1951
Showing 78 works across all media from 1951
The Catcher in the Rye
1951 · 240 pages
Holden Caulfield is thrown out of prep school and spends three days loose in New York, telling you about it. Salinger got the voice so exact that teenage fiction has echoed it since.
★ 8.4
A Streetcar Named Desire
Directed by Elia Kazan
1951
Three of its four leads won Academy Awards and the fourth was Brando: this is where screen acting stopped being theatrical and started being something else entirely.
★ 8.4
Rocket 88
1951
Kizart's amp fell off the car, Phillips stuffed the blown cone with paper, and distorted guitar entered the language.
★ 7.5
Dust My BroomElmore James
Dust My Broom
1951
Johnson's 1936 triplet figure run through an amplifier, Sonny Boy Williamson on harmonica, and a riff everybody stole.
★ 7.5
Hey Good Lookin'
1951 · From 40 Greatest Hits
Williams wrote it for Little Jimmy Dickens, recorded it first himself, and held country number one for eight weeks.
★ 7.4
Strangers on a Train
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
1951
The premise is so clean that thrillers have been borrowing it for seventy years: two men meet on a train and one of them proposes swapping murders.
★ 7.2
Speak, Memory
1951 · 316 pages
Nabokov reassembles a Russian childhood of tutors and butterfly nets, the revolution that took it, and a father shot dead in Berlin. He handles his own memory like a specimen under glass.
★ 7.1
A History of the Crusades
1951 · 336 pages
Runciman tells the Crusades from Constantinople looking west, and the men in armor come off badly. Three volumes of grand narrative build toward his verdict: one long act of intolerance in God's name.
★ 6.9
The End of the Affair
1951 · 160 pages
Jealousy narrated from the inside by a man who hates the God he does not believe in. A wartime bomb falls on the lovers, and the woman makes a promise she keeps.
★ 6.9
Minima Moralia
Reflections from Damaged Life
1951 · 272 pages
One hundred fifty-three fragments on private life inside a ruined civilization: how we give gifts, keep house, and speak to friends. Adorno's verdict is that wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
★ 6.8
Memoirs of Hadrian
1951 · 277 pages
Dying, the emperor Hadrian sets down his life for the young Marcus Aurelius. Yourcenar rebuilds a second-century mind so completely that his grief for Antinous, the lover who drowned, arrives as your own.
★ 6.8
The African Queen
Directed by John Huston
1951
Huston took the production into the Congo and almost everyone fell ill: what came back is Bogart and Hepburn on a battered steam launch, insulting each other into something like love.
★ 6.7
From Here to Eternity
1951 · 864 pages
Still the fullest American novel of army life. Private Prewitt refuses to box for his company and the army sets about breaking him, on a Hawaii post months before Pearl Harbor.
★ 6.7
Rooms by the Sea
1951 · Private collection
A door opens straight onto the water with no shore in between, and the only other thing in the picture is sunlight on a wall.
★ 6.6
Foundation
1951 · 320 pages
Hari Seldon predicts the Galactic Empire's fall and thirty thousand years of darkness, then founds a colony to cut the wait to one thousand. Paul Krugman went into economics wanting Seldon's job.
★ 6.5
Annapurna
1951 · 256 pages
Herzog and Lachenal reached Annapurna's summit in June 1950, the first men atop an eight-thousand-meter peak. Frostbite cost Herzog every finger and toe during the descent. No mountaineering book has sold like it.
★ 6.4
The True Believer
1951 · 177 pages
Mass movements are interchangeable, Hoffer argues: converts join not from conviction but to be rid of themselves. Eisenhower handed the book around, and every new wave of fanaticism sends Americans back to it.
★ 6.3
Sixty Minute ManThe Dominoes
Sixty Minute Man
1951
Bill Brown's bass voice, not McPhatter's tenor, carried fourteen weeks at R&B number one past nervous radio programmers.
★ 6.2
How High the Moon
1951
Twelve guitar parts and twelve vocals, by Paul's own count, layered in a Queens apartment studio; nine weeks at number one.
★ 6.1
An American in Paris
Directed by Vincente Minnelli
1951
It ends with a seventeen-minute ballet and no dialogue, staged against sets copied from French painters: Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli bet a whole musical on one uninterrupted dance.
★ 6.0
The Caine Mutiny
1951 · 537 pages
Missing strawberries send Captain Queeg hunting a duplicate key through his own ship, and in a typhoon his executive officer takes command. Wouk's trial asks what a crew owes a failing captain.
★ 6.0
The Origins of Totalitarianism · 1951
Building Dwelling Thinking · 1951
Ramblin' Man · 1951
Cold, Cold Heart
1951
Mitch Miller took a Hank Williams country ballad, wrapped it in Percy Faith's strings, and country crossed over.
★ 5.0
The Daughter of Time
1951 · 206 pages
Bored in a hospital bed, a Scotland Yard inspector studies a portrait of Richard III and reopens the murder of the two princes, working entirely from chronicles and documents fetched to his bedside.
★ 4.7
Too Young
1951
Sidney Lippman and Sylvia Dee handed Cole a teenage lament, and Capitol got five weeks at number one.
★ 4.6
A Place in the Sun
Directed by George Stevens
1951
George Stevens shot the close-ups so tight that Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor barely fit the frame: a poor young man takes a job at his rich uncle's factory and starts climbing.
★ 4.3
Because of You
1951
A 1940 flop revived by a film, cut with Percy Faith conducting, and ten weeks at number one.
★ 4.1
I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman's charm is 50% illusion.
A Streetcar Named Desire · 1951
The worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope.
The Origins of Totalinarianism · 1951
The Origins of Totalinarianism · 1951
1951
On Top of Old Smoky
1951
Cecil Sharp collected it in Appalachia in 1916; Seeger's arrangement and Terry Gilkyson's voice sold a million.
★ 3.5
1951
Be My LoveMario Lanza
Be My Love
1951
Cahn and Brodszky wrote it for The Toast of New Orleans; Lanza's tenor turned it into two million records.
★ 3.3
Come On-a My House
1951
Miller threatened to fire Clooney if she refused, Stan Freeman played harpsichord, and it sat six weeks at number one.
★ 2.8
IfPerry Como
If
1951
Written in 1934 and revived by a crowded field of 1950 covers; Como's held number one for eight weeks.
★ 2.3
Notes of a Native Son · 1951
Quo Vadis
Directed by Mervyn LeRoy
1951
Peter Ustinov plays Nero as a needy child with an empire, and steals the entire picture: MGM built ancient Rome at Cinecitta and the film rescued the studio's finances.
★ 1.7
The Loveliest Night of the Year
1951
A Juventino Rosas waltz from 1888, fitted with English words for The Great Caruso and sung to number three.
★ 1.3