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1952

Showing 61 works across all media from 1952

Fiction · African American

Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison
1952 · 581 pages

Thrown out of college, then used by a Harlem political movement, a nameless Black man ends up living in a cellar on stolen light. Ellison writes American rage with jazz timing.

★ 9.0
Drama

Ikiru

Directed by Akira Kurosawa
1952 · Japan

Kurosawa's answer to how a life should be spent: a bureaucrat gets one piece of terrible news and starts spending what is left deliberately, which will change how you see your job.

★ 8.5
Fiction · Children's book

Charlotte's Web

E.B. White
1952 · 184 pages

Wilbur is a runt pig bound for slaughter, saved by a barn spider writing words in her web. Eudora Welty called it just about perfect, and it is where children first meet death.

★ 7.8
Western

High Noon

Directed by Fred Zinnemann
1952

Written as an allegory about the blacklist by a man about to be blacklisted: a marshal has eighty-five minutes before the noon train, and the film runs them in step.

★ 7.5
Nonfiction

The Decisive Moment

Henri Cartier-Bresson
1952 · 160 pages

Photography is the simultaneous recognition of an event's significance and of the precise arrangement of forms expressing it, Cartier-Bresson wrote. The 126 pictures that follow taught the century how to look.

★ 7.1
Fiction · Epic

East of Eden

John Steinbeck
1952 · 602 pages

Two generations of a Salinas Valley family repeat Cain and Abel, and Steinbeck stakes everything on one Hebrew word: timshel, thou mayest, which leaves a man free to choose against his blood.

★ 6.7
Fiction · Southern gothic

Wise Blood

Flannery O'Connor
1952 · 236 pages

Back from the war, Hazel Motes preaches the Church Without Christ from the hood of a rat-colored car, insisting there was no Fall and nothing needing redemption. O'Connor makes blasphemy sound like faith.

★ 6.5
Fiction

Thousand Cranes

Yasunari Kawabata
1952 · 147 pages

At a tea ceremony in postwar Japan, a young man is steered toward a bride and finds his dead father's mistresses waiting. Kawabata routes the affair entirely through inherited tea bowls.

★ 6.5
Nonfiction · Religion

Mere Christianity

C.S. Lewis
1952 · 227 pages

Broadcasting to a Britain at war, Lewis started from one claim: everyone appeals to a standard of right nobody invented. The talks became the book that does most of modern Christianity's arguing.

★ 6.4
Romantic drama · Comedy drama

The Quiet Man

Directed by John Ford
1952

Ford spent twenty years trying to make it and shot Ireland in Technicolor so green it looks invented: an American boxer goes home to Mayo and runs straight into everyone else's customs.

★ 5.6
Children's literature

What do you mean, less than nothing? I don't think there is any such thing as less than nothing. Nothing is absolutely the limit of nothingness. It's the lowest you can go. It's the end of the line. How can something be less than nothing? If there were something that was less than nothing, then nothing would not be nothing, it would be something-even though it's just a very little bit of something. But if nothing is nothing, then nothing has nothing that is less than it is.

E.B. White
Charlotte's Web · 1952
★ 5.3
Fiction · Mystery

The Tiger in the Smoke

Margery Allingham
1952 · 288 pages

A war widow receives photographs of the husband she buried. The trail runs into a London fog where the killer Jack Havoc is loose, and Allingham makes the thriller an argument about evil.

★ 4.6
Speech

That community is already in process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where nonconformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denuciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose.

★ 3.5
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