Waiting for Godot
1953 · 85 pages
Two tramps wait by a tree on a country road for a man who sends word each evening that he will come tomorrow. Beckett stripped drama to this and it never went back.
★ 9.0
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1953
Showing 10 books from 1953
The Crucible
1953 · 143 pages
Salem, 1692: girls caught dancing in the woods begin naming witches, and the town learns that an accusation cannot be answered. Miller wrote it while Congress hunted Communists, and audiences understood immediately.
★ 7.0
The Adventures of Augie March
1953 · 608 pages
"I am an American, Chicago born," Augie announces, and the novel loosened its collar. He takes every job and every mentor the Depression offers him and refuses to be claimed by any.
★ 7.0
The Captive Mind
1953 · 272 pages
Milosz, a Polish poet who served the new regime and then defected, explains how intelligent people talked themselves into Stalinism. Ketman, he calls it: believing one thing and professing another.
★ 7.0
Fahrenheit 451
1953 · 256 pages
Montag burns books for a living until a neighbor's questions and a woman who chooses to burn with her library break him open. Bradbury's target is a public that stopped wanting to read.
★ 6.8
The Worldly Philosophers
1953 · 368 pages
Smith, Malthus, Marx, Veblen and Keynes written as characters, obsessions and bad ideas intact. Nearly four million copies have sold, and generations took their economics from this rather than a textbook.
★ 6.6
Go Tell It On The Mountain
1953 · 272 pages
John Grimes turns fourteen in Harlem in 1935 and spends the night on a storefront church floor, fighting for salvation. Baldwin pours the sins of three adults into that one boy's conversion.
★ 6.6
A Stillness at Appomattox
1953 · 438 pages
Grant crossed the Rapidan in May 1864 and the killing never paused. Catton follows the Union's Army of the Potomac through the Wilderness and Cold Harbor to Appomattox, writing from inside the ranks.
★ 6.5
The Man Who Planted Trees
1953 · 72 pages
In a dead Provencal valley a shepherd pushes acorns into the ground, one at a time. Thirty years and two wars later the forest holds ten thousand people who never learn his name.
★ 5.2
Junky
1953 · 197 pages
Burroughs reports his heroin years like a chemist writing up an experiment, from New York hustles to Mexico City rooms and cures that never take. There is no remorse and no lyricism.
★ 4.9