The Best Books of 1955

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov  ·  1955

Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged man with an obsession he cannot suppress and a gift for language that allows him to construct justifications for everything he does. Dolores Haze is twelve years old. Nabokov wrote one of the most controversial and technically accomplished novels of the twentieth century — a book that is beautiful in its prose and devastating in what that beauty is used to conceal. First published by Olympia Press in Paris in 1955 after being rejected by four American publishers who feared obscenity charges, it became one of the most discussed books of the century.

The difficulty with Lolita is that it requires you to read against its narrator. Humbert Humbert is charming, self-aware, and brilliant — and he uses all three qualities to obscure what he is doing to Dolores. The novel works when you see through him rather than with him, when you notice what his prose carefully avoids saying about her experience. Read that way, Lolita is not a love story. It is one of the most precise accounts in fiction of how abusers construct a version of events that places them at the centre and erases their victims.

Read my full recommendation →

The Quiet American

Graham Greene  ·  1955

Thomas Fowler is a British journalist in Saigon in the early 1950s who has been there long enough to have no illusions left. Alden Pyle is a young American who has arrived with a theory about saving Vietnam from communism and the absolute certainty that he knows how to apply it. The novel follows their rivalry over a woman and their collision over a political act whose consequences Pyle cannot see coming and Fowler cannot prevent. It was published in 1955 and read, in America, as an insult. It was read, later, as prophecy.

Greene wrote this nine years before the Gulf of Tonkin incident and twelve years before the Tet Offensive. He understood something about American foreign policy that most Americans would not admit for another two decades: that idealism deployed without knowledge of the place it is being deployed in produces its own kind of catastrophe. Pyle is not a villain. He is something more troubling — a person who causes devastation while believing entirely in his own good intentions.

Bonjour Tristesse

Françoise Sagan  ·  1954 (English translation 1955)

Cécile is seventeen and spending the summer on the French Riviera with her widowed father and his younger girlfriend. When her father invites a woman called Anne — composed, intelligent, a genuine threat to the freedom they have built together — Cécile sets out to destroy the relationship. Sagan wrote this when she was eighteen. It won the Prix des Critiques and made her famous throughout Europe. It is a novel about the particular cruelty that is possible when someone is too young to understand the full consequences of what they are doing.

The English translation appeared in 1955 and it was read as a scandal — a teenage girl who feels no guilt, who describes her manipulation of the adults around her with a lucidity that makes the reader uncomfortable. What makes it last is that Sagan understood something about adolescence that most adult writers miss: that young people are capable of real damage not because they are malicious but because they have not yet learned to imagine other people’s interiors. Cécile is not a villain. She is seventeen.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Flannery O’Connor  ·  1955

Ten stories set in the American South, most of them ending in violence, none of them ending in comfort. O’Connor’s characters are grotesque, provincial, and convinced of their own righteousness — and the stories exist to demonstrate, in the most direct terms possible, the gap between who they think they are and what they actually are. The title story involves a family road trip, a grandmother, and a criminal called the Misfit. It is one of the finest short stories in the American tradition.

O’Connor is the writer I recommend when someone wants to understand what short fiction can do that a novel cannot. She has maybe fifteen pages to get where she is going and she wastes none of them. The violence in her work is not gratuitous — it is theological, in the specific sense that her characters are forced into a confrontation with reality that their ordinary lives have allowed them to avoid. The comedy is very dark and the darkness is very precise.

The Recognitions

William Gaddis  ·  1955

Wyatt Gwyon is a painter who abandons his original work and becomes a forger of Flemish masters — making perfect copies of paintings that never existed, authenticated and sold as genuine discoveries. Around this central plot, Gaddis constructs a 956-page novel about authenticity, originality, and the impossibility of the genuine in modern life. When it was published in 1955, reviewers were almost uniformly hostile. It is now considered one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century and a foundation text of postmodern fiction.

This is not a book for every reader. It is long, deliberately difficult, and dense with allusion. But if you want to understand where American literary fiction went after the Second World War — the ambition, the scale, the suspicion of easy meaning — The Recognitions is the place to start. Gaddis was asking a question in 1955 that has only become more pressing: in a world built on reproduction and simulation, what does it mean to make something real?

The Return of the King

J.R.R. Tolkien  ·  1955

The third and final volume of The Lord of the Rings was published in October 1955, completing the trilogy that began with The Fellowship of the Ring in July 1954. It follows the destruction of the One Ring and the end of the Third Age of Middle-earth. Tolkien spent twelve years writing the trilogy, drawing on his expertise in linguistics, mythology, and medieval literature to construct a secondary world of unprecedented depth. The appendices alone — languages, calendars, genealogies, histories — run to over a hundred pages.

Whatever you think of fantasy as a genre, The Lord of the Rings is an achievement of a different order. Tolkien did not write a novel — he built a world, with its own languages, histories, and internal logic, that has shaped how every subsequent writer of fantasy understands what the genre can do. The Return of the King earns its ending because Tolkien never cheats: the cost of the victory is real, and the Shire that Frodo returns to is not the one he left.