Reading List · Lisanne Swart
The Best Books of 1963
1963 was a year in which several books appeared that named things the culture had not previously been able to name. Betty Friedan identified a dissatisfaction that millions of educated American women had felt for years but never seen articulated. James Baldwin described what America refused to know about itself with such precision and such force that Time magazine put him on its cover. Sylvia Plath published a novel about depression under a pseudonym and died one month later. John le Carré published the novel that established what a spy story could actually be. Julio Cortázar invented a new form of novel in Spanish. Mary McCarthy wrote the most commercially successful literary novel of the year. It was a year with no clear centre — which is what made it remarkable.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Published 1963
The Bell Jar
Esther Greenwood is twenty years old in the summer of 1953, and she has won a prestigious internship at a New York fashion magazine. She is talented, ambitious, and starting to come apart. The novel follows her descent — through the surface pleasures of the New York summer, through the first signs of something wrong, through breakdown, hospitalisation, electroconvulsive therapy, suicide attempts, and the incomplete recovery that ends the book. Plath published it in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, partly to protect her mother, partly because she was not sure it was finished. She died by suicide on 11 February 1963, one month after publication. It was not published under her own name until 1967 in the United Kingdom and 1971 in the United States, after a legal dispute with her mother. It is now considered one of the most important works of twentieth-century American fiction.
The Bell Jar is not primarily a book about suicide. It is a book about what it is like to be a highly intelligent young woman in a society that has decided what you are for, and the particular damage that causes. Esther is not passive — she is observant, funny, and full of desires that the world around her cannot accommodate. The bell jar of the title is the sense of suffocation that accompanies depression: the world continues outside, visible but unreachable, while you live inside glass. Plath wrote this with a precision that comes from having been inside it herself, and the novel does not prettify any of it.
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
Alec Leamas is a British intelligence officer who has spent years running agents in East Germany and watching them be eliminated one by one. His network is broken. He is brought back to London and offered what appears to be a final operation: to defect to the East, feed disinformation to East German intelligence, and discredit a senior official named Mundt. Leamas is tired, cynical, and willing. He goes. The novel follows the operation and its ending — which is nothing like what Leamas was told it would be. Le Carré had worked for MI5 and MI6. Graham Greene called The Spy Who Came In from the Cold the best spy novel he had ever read. It spent months at the top of bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic and changed the genre irrevocably.
Le Carré’s great insight was that the Cold War was not a conflict between good and evil but between two systems that operated by identical logic: lie, manipulate, sacrifice individuals for institutional objectives, maintain the fiction of moral difference. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is the novel in which this argument arrives fully formed. It is structured as a betrayal — you understand what has been done to Leamas at the same moment he does — and the ending lands with a precision that takes your breath away. Le Carré never needed to write another novel to earn his place in the canon. He wrote twenty more anyway.
The Fire Next Time
The Fire Next Time consists of two pieces. The first — “My Dungeon Shook” — is a short letter to Baldwin’s fourteen-year-old nephew, James, on the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation: a letter about what America has done to Black men and what the nephew should understand about the white people who have done it. The second — “Down at the Cross” — is a long, autobiographical essay about Baldwin’s encounter with the Nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammad, and his argument about what America refuses to know about itself: that white identity has been constructed on the destruction of Black humanity, and that this cannot go on without catastrophe. It was first published in the New Yorker in 1962 and collected in book form in 1963. It spent forty-one weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Time magazine put Baldwin on its cover.
Baldwin’s essays are the most important prose writing about race in America in the twentieth century. The Fire Next Time is the best of them — not because of its argument, which he had been making for years, but because of its form: the letter to his nephew is one of the most devastating pieces of short prose ever written, and the long essay that follows it moves like a novel, driven by the energy of a person who has understood something and will not allow you to look away from it. He refuses easy consolation and he refuses the comfort of rage — what he offers instead is something more difficult: the truth about what would actually be required for things to change.
The Feminine Mystique
Betty Friedan had a question she kept encountering at the fifteen-year reunion of her Smith College class: why were so many of her classmates — educated, married, suburban, outwardly comfortable — unhappy? She called it “the problem that has no name” and spent five years researching its sources. The Feminine Mystique is the result: an argument that American women had been sold a version of femininity that required them to find complete fulfilment in domesticity and motherhood, and that millions of women had internalised this ideal while feeling its inadequacy as a personal failure rather than a structural problem. Friedan drew on interviews, surveys, psychology, and sociology. The book was published in February 1963. It sold over a million copies in its first year and is credited with helping to launch the second wave of American feminism.
The book has legitimate criticisms: Friedan focused almost entirely on white, middle-class, educated women and largely ignored the women — Black women, working-class women — for whom the domestic ideal was not even available. She was also, it later emerged, more politically radical than the book suggested. None of this diminishes what the book actually did: it named something that had been experienced as private shame and made it a political problem. That is one of the things books can do that almost nothing else can.
Hopscotch
Horacio Oliveira is an Argentine intellectual living in Paris, in a relationship with a woman called La Maga, in a circle of friends who call themselves the Club. He is searching for something he cannot name — a way of being in the world that the forms of European culture have not provided him. Hopscotch comes with instructions: it can be read as a conventional novel, proceeding from chapter one to chapter fifty-six; or it can be read in a reader-directed sequence, jumping between chapters according to a table of contents that produces a different narrative path. The “expendable chapters” — the material that does not appear in the conventional reading — include fragments of a fictional writer named Morelli who theorises the kind of novel Cortázar is writing. It was published in Buenos Aires in 1963 and became one of the central texts of the Latin American literary boom. The English translation by Gregory Rabassa appeared in 1966 and won the first National Book Award given to a translator.
Cortázar was asking a question that Borges had approached from a different angle: what is a novel for, and does the form we have inherited actually do what we need it to do? Hopscotch proposes that reading is an active rather than passive act — that the reader should make choices, double back, discover things in different orders. The conventional reading works as a novel; the alternative reading works as something else; and the gap between them is where the book’s real meaning lives. It is one of the indispensable novels of the twentieth century and one of the most joyful, despite its philosophical weight.
The Group
Eight women graduate from Vassar College in June 1933, full of ideals about how their lives will be different from their mothers’. The Group follows them from that graduation to 1940 — through marriages that disappoint, jobs that don’t, affairs, miscarriages, mental illness, birth control (explicit enough to be considered scandalous), and the political events of the decade accumulating in the background. McCarthy gives each of the eight a section that enters her perspective; the effect is cumulative — you watch the gap between what these women expected and what actually happens to them, year by year. It was the bestselling novel of 1963 in the United States, which surprised many critics who had dismissed it as too explicitly feminist and too sexually frank for popular success.
McCarthy had been writing biting, intelligent fiction since the 1940s but The Group is the book that found her widest audience — and the discrepancy between its critical reception and its popular success is itself a document. Male critics called it shallow and gossipy; female readers recognised something true about their own experience. McCarthy was writing about the collision between education and expectation in women’s lives two decades before it became a mainstream feminist subject. The novel is also very funny, which McCarthy’s critics tended not to mention.
How to navigate this list
If you want the most important nonfiction book
→ Read The Feminine Mystique or The Fire Next Time — both named something the culture had not previously been able to say. Either one is a good place to start; which you read first depends on where you are.
If you want the most precise novel about depression
→ Read The Bell Jar. Plath wrote it from the inside and it shows.
If you want the best thriller on the list
→ Read The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Graham Greene called it the best spy novel ever written. He was right.
If you want the most formally inventive novel
→ Hopscotch — read it in both sequences. The gap between them is where the book lives.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1963
What books were published in 1963?
1963 was a year of remarkable range in fiction and nonfiction. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath appeared in January under a pseudonym. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold established John le Carré as the definitive writer of Cold War espionage fiction. The Fire Next Time put James Baldwin on the cover of Time magazine and changed what it was possible to say about race in America. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan named a dissatisfaction that millions of women had felt but never seen articulated. Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar arrived in Spanish and changed what a novel was allowed to be. And Mary McCarthy’s The Group became the year’s most commercially successful literary novel.
What is The Bell Jar about?
The Bell Jar follows Esther Greenwood, a talented young woman who wins a prestigious internship at a New York magazine in the summer of 1953. The novel follows her gradual mental breakdown, her hospitalisation, her suicide attempts, and her incomplete recovery. Plath published it in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. She died by suicide one month later. It was not published under her own name in the United States until 1971. The novel is considered one of the most important works of twentieth-century American fiction and one of the most accurate literary accounts of depression ever written.
What is The Spy Who Came In from the Cold about?
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold follows Alec Leamas, a British intelligence officer who has been running agents in East Germany and watched them be eliminated one by one. He is sent on what appears to be a final operation: to defect to the East and feed disinformation that will discredit a senior East German intelligence official. The novel’s genius is in the ending, which reveals that everything Leamas was told about his mission was a lie — and that the moral logic of the Cold War is indistinguishable on either side. Graham Greene called it the best spy novel he had ever read.
What is The Fire Next Time about?
The Fire Next Time consists of two pieces. The first is a short letter to Baldwin’s fourteen-year-old nephew on the occasion of the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation. The second, much longer essay is an account of Baldwin’s encounter with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, and an argument about what America refuses to know about itself — about the way white Americans have constructed their identity on the negation of Black humanity, and what it would cost to change that. It was published in The New Yorker in 1962 and collected in book form in 1963. It spent forty-one weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
What is The Feminine Mystique about?
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan identified what she called “the problem that has no name” — the widespread dissatisfaction of educated, middle-class American women who had been told that fulfilment lay in domesticity and found that it did not. Friedan based the book on surveys of her Smith College classmates and interviews with women across the country. It was published in February 1963 and became an immediate bestseller, selling over a million copies in its first year. It is credited with helping to launch the second wave of American feminism.
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