Reading List · Lisanne Swart
The Best Books of 1964
1964 was the year an intellectual in crisis wrote unsent letters to the dead, and a young writer remembered Paris. Saul Bellow published Herzog and won the National Book Award; Hemingway’s Paris memoir appeared three years after his suicide and became one of the most influential books ever written about the writing life. John Cheever returned to the Wapshot family and found them undone by the modern world. Hubert Selby Jr. published Last Exit to Brooklyn to immediate prosecution for obscenity and lasting literary consequence. It was a year in which American fiction was doing something urgent — trying to account for what had happened to the promises of the postwar decades, and finding the account very difficult to make.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Published 1964
Herzog
Moses Herzog is a middle-aged academic whose second marriage has just collapsed — his wife has left him for his best friend — and who responds by writing letters. Not letters he sends: letters to friends, philosophers, politicians, historical figures, the living and the dead, in which he attempts to work out what has happened to him and what it means. The novel follows him across several weeks in New York and Chicago, moving between the past and a chaotic present, as the letters accumulate and the crisis either resolves or doesn’t. Bellow published Herzog in 1964; it spent forty-two weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, won the National Book Award in 1965, and is generally considered his finest novel. It is also, depending on how you read it, either a very funny book about self-pity or a very serious book about the difficulty of living with a mind that won’t stop.
What Bellow is doing in Herzog is harder than it looks. He is writing a novel whose entire substance is interior — Moses’s intelligence, his evasions, his genuine anguish, his tendency to explain his own suffering in terms grand enough to make it bearable — without ever losing the reader’s sympathy for a character who is, objectively, a disaster. The unsent-letter device is the key: it allows Bellow to show Herzog’s mind at full stretch, arguing with Nietzsche, Hegel, his ex-wife, his analyst, God — and to make that argument feel both comic and serious simultaneously. It is one of the great performances in American fiction.
A Moveable Feast
Hemingway wrote these sketches of his years in Paris in the 1920s during the late 1950s, working from notebooks and memory. He died by suicide in 1961; the book was published by his wife Mary three years later. It covers the cafés and horse races, the cheap apartments, the early work, the literary friendships — with Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and, most extensively, F. Scott Fitzgerald — and his first marriage to Hadley, which ended when he left her for Pauline Pfeiffer. The book’s tone is elegiac and, in places, self-serving: Hemingway is settling scores with people who could no longer answer back, and his portrait of Fitzgerald, whom he clearly loved and clearly could not stop diminishing, is the most complicated thing in it. It is also one of the most beautiful books ever written about what Paris was, and what it is like to be young and poor and working.
A Moveable Feast became the book every young writer read to understand what serious literary work required. Its descriptions of Hemingway’s working method — writing one true sentence, stopping when you still know what comes next, never talking about work in progress — were taken as instructions by a generation. Whether the instructions are actually good is a separate question. What the book does, unquestionably, is make the 1920s Paris of the Lost Generation feel available and real in a way that no other account of that moment does. It is also, beneath the clean surface, a book about guilt — about what Hemingway cost Hadley, and whether he knew it.
The Wapshot Scandal
The sequel to The Wapshot Chronicle follows the Wapshot family of St. Botolphs, a fictional New England village, as they move into a world that has left their values and their way of life entirely behind. Coverly Wapshot works at a missile research facility. His brother Moses is undone by alcoholism and an unfaithful wife. Their ancient aunt Honora, who has never paid income tax on principle, is pursued by the IRS and eventually flees to Italy. The novel moves between comedy and desolation, ending in a Christmas reunion scene that is one of the most devastating passages Cheever ever wrote. It won the Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Cheever is writing about the same thing in The Wapshot Scandal that he writes about in all his suburban fiction: the gap between the surfaces of American middle-class life and what is happening underneath them. What makes this novel darker than his stories is scale — the Wapshots are watched over decades, and the damage accumulates. The missile base where Coverly works is a brilliant device: a place of enormous destructive power staffed by people who have no way of thinking about what they are doing. Cheever connects the decay of a family to something larger and more frightening, and does it without abandoning the elegance and wit that make him readable.
Last Exit to Brooklyn
A collection of linked stories set in the Red Hook neighbourhood of Brooklyn in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Selby’s characters include Georgette, a young man who identifies as a woman and is brutalised for it; Harry Black, a labour union official who uses strike funds to pursue a destructive affair; the members of a street gang who commit a rape; and Tralala, a prostitute whose story ends in a gang rape of extraordinary brutality. Selby’s prose runs clauses together without conventional punctuation, creating a rhythm that mirrors the violence and desperation of the world he is describing. The book was published by Grove Press in 1964, immediately prosecuted for obscenity in the United Kingdom, and defended in court by writers including Anthony Burgess. It is now considered a landmark of American literature.
Last Exit to Brooklyn is not a book you read for pleasure in any conventional sense. It is a book that forces you to stay in the company of people the culture has discarded, written in a prose style that refuses the distance that would make them safe to read about. Selby had been hospitalised with tuberculosis for years and almost died; the book comes out of an intimate knowledge of suffering and a refusal to prettify it. The obscenity prosecution was, predictably, about sex; what the book is actually doing is making an argument about class, violence, and the specific cruelties of mid-century American life. It is one of the essential American novels of the postwar period.
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
Hofstadter published the title essay in Harper’s Magazine in November 1964, in the weeks before the presidential election in which Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater. The essay argues that a particular style of political thought — characterised by suspicion, conspiratorial thinking, and the sense that the world is being run by a hidden enemy — runs throughout American political history, from the anti-Masonic movements of the 1820s through McCarthyism to the far right of the 1960s. Hofstadter was careful to say that he was describing a style, not a pathology: the paranoid style is not the province of any single party or ideology, and the people who employ it are not necessarily mentally ill. The essay was collected in a book of the same name in 1965.
The essay is included here because it is the most durable piece of American political analysis published in this year, and because it has become more relevant, not less, in the decades since. Hofstadter was writing about something specific to his moment — the Goldwater movement, the John Birch Society — but what he described turned out to be a permanent feature of American political life rather than a temporary aberration. The argument that conspiratorial thinking is a style — a way of organising political reality — rather than simply a mistake is one of the most useful things anyone has written about how democratic politics can go wrong.
The Words
Sartre’s autobiography of his childhood, covering his first ten years: his father’s death before he could remember him, his upbringing by his mother and his grandfather Charles Schweitzer (uncle of Albert Schweitzer), his discovery of books, and his decision, at the age of nine, that he would be a writer. Sartre uses this material to analyse the bad faith of the child — the ways in which he performed himself for the adults around him and mistook that performance for genuine identity — and, by extension, to dissect his own philosophical development. It is both a memoir and a sustained act of self-criticism. Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964 and refused it. He is the only person to have voluntarily declined the prize.
The Words is Sartre at his most readable — which is to say, considerably more readable than his philosophical writing — and one of the more honest accounts ever written of why a person decides to become a writer. His argument is that the decision was made in bad faith: that he was performing the role of the future writer for his grandfather’s approval, and that understanding this does not make the writing less real but does require him to stop pretending it was a vocation rather than a choice. It is also, in its portrait of his grandfather and mother, a very funny book. The decision to refuse the Nobel — on the grounds that accepting it would compromise his independence as a writer — made global news in the same year.
How to navigate this list
If you want the greatest American novel on the list
→ Read Herzog. Bellow at full stretch — comic, serious, and formally unlike anything that came before it.
If you want the book about the writing life
→ A Moveable Feast. Every young writer reads it. Read it knowing it is also a book about guilt.
If you want the most difficult book on the list
→ Last Exit to Brooklyn. It was prosecuted for obscenity. Read it as a book about class, not sex.
If you want the most useful political essay
→ Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Written in 1964. Has not aged a day.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1964
What books were published in 1964?
1964 produced some of the most important American writing of the postwar decades. Herzog by Saul Bellow won the National Book Award and spent forty-two weeks on the bestseller list. A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s posthumous Paris memoir, was published three years after his death and became one of the most read books about the writing life. Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. arrived to immediate prosecution for obscenity in the UK. John Cheever published The Wapshot Scandal. Richard Hofstadter’s essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” appeared in Harper’s. And Sartre published his childhood memoir The Words in the same year he refused the Nobel Prize.
What is Herzog about?
Herzog follows Moses Herzog, a middle-aged academic whose second marriage has collapsed after his wife left him for his best friend. In the weeks after the separation, Herzog composes a series of unsent letters — to friends, enemies, philosophers, politicians, the dead, the living — in which he attempts to work out what has happened to him and what it means. Bellow uses this device to make Herzog’s interior life completely visible: his brilliance, his self-pity, his genuine philosophical curiosity, and his inability to stop thinking long enough to act. It won the National Book Award in 1965 and is considered one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century.
What is A Moveable Feast about?
A Moveable Feast is Hemingway’s memoir of his years in Paris in the 1920s, when he was young, poor, and writing the work that would make him famous. It covers his friendships and falling-outs with Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and others; his marriage to Hadley; his working methods; and the cafés, races, and cheap hotels of the period. Hemingway wrote it in the late 1950s and it was published in 1964, three years after his death. It is the most influential book ever written about what it is like to be a young writer, and also, in its portrait of Fitzgerald especially, one of the most complicated.
What is Last Exit to Brooklyn about?
Last Exit to Brooklyn is a collection of linked stories set in the Brooklyn waterfront neighbourhood of Red Hook in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Selby’s characters include a transvestite named Georgette, a labour union official having an affair, a street gang, and a prostitute. The prose is deliberately rough — Selby punctuates by running clauses together, creating a rhythmic intensity that mirrors the violence and desperation of the world he is describing. It was published in 1964 and immediately prosecuted for obscenity in the UK. It is now considered a landmark of American literature.
Why did Sartre refuse the Nobel Prize in 1964?
Sartre declined the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1964, making him the only person to have voluntarily refused it. He gave two reasons: that he had always refused official distinctions, and that accepting the prize would compromise his independence as a writer by associating him with the Western bloc during the Cold War. He also expressed concern that the prize was awarded disproportionately to writers from the West and from certain political traditions. The refusal was announced in the same year as the publication of The Words, his memoir of childhood.
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