Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1948
In January 1948 a twenty-three-year-old Truman Capote looked out from the dust jacket of his first novel, reclining on a sofa, and the photograph caused as much comment as the prose inside. On 1 February Scribner published a first novel by a South African reformatory principal; that May his country voted in a government that went on to build apartheid, with fewer votes than the one it removed. In June Norman Mailer’s platoon reached number one on the New York Times list, and six days later The New Yorker ran a Shirley Jackson story that drew more angry mail than any fiction it had printed. George Orwell spent the year finishing a novel called Nineteen Eighty-Four, which would not come out until 1949. These seven are the books first published in 1948 that I still hand to people.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · All first published in 1948
ClickTap a spine to jump to that book below.
The shop links on this page go straight to the shop. They are not affiliate links and I earn nothing if you buy.
The Naked and the Dead
A platoon of American soldiers fights its way across Anopopei, an invented Japanese-held island in the Pacific, and the long flashbacks into each man’s life before the war turn the platoon into a cross-section of America. Mailer had served in the Philippines with the 112th Cavalry — typist, then wire lineman, then rifleman in a reconnaissance platoon — and he was twenty-five when the book came out. The first edition ran to 721 pages. It sold 200,000 copies in its first three months and first reached number one on the New York Times fiction list on 20 June 1948. What holds it together is his refusal to make the war meaningful. The men suffer, and the suffering does not instruct.
The great American war novel of its decade and a shock when it appeared, blunt about violence and about what combat does to the men who survive it. Mailer never quite wrote this well again, which makes it both his masterpiece and one of the more melancholy facts about his career.
The Heart of the Matter
Major Scobie is the deputy commissioner of police in a British colony on the West African coast during the Second World War, a man of rigid Catholic conscience who has outlasted his own happiness. When he begins an affair and finds himself caught between two women, his faith and his own incapacity for cruelty, he moves toward a catastrophe that Greene frames as a theological problem as much as a human one. Greene had worked for MI6 from 1941 to 1944 and was posted to Freetown in Sierra Leone, and the heat, the damp and the petty corruption of the colony come from there. The novel won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction that year.
Greene is often filed as a thriller writer. This is a novel about what it means to take moral categories seriously in a world that has stopped believing in them — and what happens to a person who cannot stop. Scobie is one of the most fully realised characters in mid-century English fiction.
Cry, the Beloved Country
Stephen Kumalo, a Zulu Anglican priest, takes the train from his village to Johannesburg to find his sister and his son, and finds instead a city that has broken them both. Paton wrote it on a journey he paid for himself to study prisons and reformatories in Scandinavia, Britain, Europe, Canada and the United States: he began it in Norway and finished it in San Francisco on Christmas Eve 1946. Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s saw it through to publication on 1 February 1948 — four months before the South African election of 26 May, in which D. F. Malan’s party took power with fewer votes than the government it replaced. The prose is biblical in cadence, the grief is unsparing, and the book sold more than fifteen million copies in Paton’s lifetime.
One of the most direct accounts of what a racially divided society does to ordinary lives, written from inside South Africa just before that division became law. Its central argument — that a society built on injustice destroys both the oppressed and the oppressor — has not aged, and the timing of its publication gives it a weight the writing already earns.
Intruder in the Dust
Lucas Beauchamp, a Black farmer who refuses to act humble in front of anyone, is accused of murdering a white man, and the town of Jefferson waits for a lynching. Sixteen-year-old Chick Mallison sets out to clear him, with a Black boy, Aleck Sander, and an elderly white woman, Miss Habersham, as his only allies. Faulkner started it early in 1948 as what he called a “mystery story”, putting A Fable aside, and by the time he sent it to his publisher in April it had grown to more than twice its planned length. MGM paid $50,000 for the film rights and shot the film in Oxford, Mississippi.
Read it next to Cry, the Beloved Country: two novels from the same year about the same machinery, one grieving what it has already done, the other racing to stop it before it acts. It is the closest Faulkner came to a detective story, and the most readable way into his invented county.
Other Voices, Other Rooms
Thirteen-year-old Joel Knox is sent to a decaying house in rural Louisiana to find the father he has never met, and finds instead a gothic household of secrets, eccentrics and the slow recognition of his own nature. It was Capote’s first published novel, partly autobiographical, and he was twenty-three when it came out. Harold Halma’s photograph of him reclining on the dust jacket, in the words that followed it around, caused as much comment and controversy as the prose inside. The book spent nine weeks on the New York Times list.
Capote cared about sentence-level beauty more than almost any American writer of his generation, and it shows here more purely than anywhere else in his work: lush without tipping into excess, precise about strangeness.
I Capture the Castle
“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink” is the first line, and seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain keeps writing in that journal through a year in a half-ruined English castle, where her father has not written a word since his one famous book. Then two American brothers inherit the estate next door, and the family’s poverty starts to look like an opportunity. Dodie Smith, already an established playwright, wrote this, her first novel, in America during the war while homesick for England. Little, Brown in Boston published it first, in 1948; Heinemann’s British edition followed in 1949. She later wrote The Hundred and One Dalmatians.
The one book on this list that is a pleasure from the first page: a coming-of-age novel that is funny about being poor and serious about growing up, and a welcome counterweight to the war novels around it.
The Seven Storey Mountain
On 10 December 1941, three days after Pearl Harbor, a twenty-six-year-old Columbia graduate arrived at the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. The Seven Storey Mountain is Thomas Merton’s account of how he got there, with a title taken from the mountain of purgatory in Dante. Harcourt planned a first printing of 7,500 copies; orders before publication passed 20,000, there were 100,000 copies in print by May 1949, and the book stayed on bestseller lists for nearly a year.
A memoir about wanting out of the world in the year the world was being rebuilt — and proof that readers in 1948 wanted more than war stories.
Where to begin with the best of 1948
If you want the book 1948 is remembered for
→ The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer. Seven hundred pages, and a war that is never allowed to mean anything.
If you want the most emotionally direct book of the year
→ Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. Published four months before the election that brought apartheid.
If you want two books that answer each other
→ Cry, the Beloved Country and Intruder in the Dust. The same year, two continents, the same machinery.
If you want pure pleasure
→ I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. It opens in a kitchen sink and does not let go.
If you want nonfiction
→ The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton. A young man walks into a monastery three days after Pearl Harbor.
Books first published in 1948
Twenty more books whose first publication genuinely falls in 1948, for when you want breadth rather than a recommendation.
Raintree County
MGM novel award
Ross Lockridge Jr. · Houghton Mifflin, 5 January
The 50,000-copy first printing had sold out by publication day. It was his only novel.
The City and the Pillar
Gore Vidal · E. P. Dutton, 10 January
One of the first post-war American novels with a sympathetic gay protagonist.
The Loved One
Evelyn Waugh · Horizon, February
The whole novel ran first in the February issue of Horizon, before the book editions. A satire on a Los Angeles cemetery.
The Ides of March
Thornton Wilder · Harper & Brothers, 18 February
The last days of Julius Caesar, told in letters. Number one on the New York Times list that April.
The Gathering Storm
Winston Churchill · Houghton Mifflin, 21 June
Volume one of The Second World War. The American edition came first; Cassell’s British edition followed.
The Young Lions
Irwin Shaw · Random House, 1 October
Three soldiers — a German Nazi, a Jewish American and a WASP American — converge on the same war.
Guard of Honor
Pulitzer Prize 1949
James Gould Cozzens · Harcourt, Brace
About forty-eight hours in 1943 at an Army Air Forces base in Florida.
The Big Fisherman
Top fiction bestseller of 1948
Lloyd C. Douglas · Houghton Mifflin
The life of Simon Peter. Number one on the New York Times list from 19 December 1948 to 3 April 1949.
Walden Two
B. F. Skinner · Macmillan
A behaviourist’s utopian novel, written by the psychologist himself.
Cybernetics
Norbert Wiener · Hermann & Cie and MIT Press
The book that named and founded the field.
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
Alfred Kinsey and colleagues · W. B. Saunders
A first printing of 5,000; more than 265,000 copies sold in America by 1953.
The White Goddess
Robert Graves · Faber & Faber
A book-length argument for a single goddess of birth, love and death behind European myth.
Crusade in Europe
Dwight D. Eisenhower · Doubleday
His war memoir. Number one on the New York Times nonfiction list on 26 December 1948.
Remembrance Rock
Carl Sandburg · Harcourt, Brace
Sandburg’s only novel.
The Road Through the Wall
Shirley Jackson · Farrar, Straus
Her first novel, from the same year as “The Lottery”.
Cheaper by the Dozen
Frank B. Gilbreth Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey · Thomas Y. Crowell
Two of the twelve children on growing up in an efficiency expert’s house.
My Father’s Dragon
Newbery Honor
Ruth Stiles Gannett · Random House
A boy sails to Wild Island to rescue a baby dragon. Her first book.
No Longer Human
Osamu Dazai · Chikuma Shobō
Published in Japan weeks after Dazai’s death at thirty-eight. In Japanese; the English translation came later.
Tarry Flynn
Patrick Kavanagh · The Pilot Press
A young farmer in County Monaghan. Banned by the Irish Censorship Board, and the ban was later lifted.
Les Grandes Familles
Prix Goncourt
Maurice Druon · 1948
A Paris dynasty between the wars. In French; it came out in English in 1952.
First books published in 1948
Seven writers whose first book or first novel came out in 1948 — and the difference between the two, which is where most lists go wrong.
The Naked and the Dead
Norman Mailer
His first book. He had published short stories before it, in magazines.
Other Voices, Other Rooms
Truman Capote
His first novel. His stories, “Miriam” among them, had appeared only in magazines.
Raintree County
Ross Lockridge Jr.
His first and only book. He died on 6 March 1948, two months after it came out.
Cry, the Beloved Country
Alan Paton
His first novel.
I Capture the Castle
Dodie Smith
Her first novel, not her first work: she was already an established playwright.
The Road Through the Wall
Shirley Jackson
Her first novel.
My Father’s Dragon
Ruth Stiles Gannett
Her first book.
Often filed under 1948, published another year
Books that turn up on lists of 1948 all the time. They are worth reading, but they belong to other years.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell · Secker & Warburg, 8 June 1949
He finished the second draft in November 1948. The book belongs to 1949.
The Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt · 1951
Three years after this list.
The Concept of Mind
Gilbert Ryle · 1949
The book that gave us “the ghost in the machine”, a year after this list.
Tales of the South Pacific
Pulitzer Prize 1948
James A. Michener · Macmillan, 28 January 1947
It won the fiction Pulitzer handed out in 1948, for a book of 1947.
1948 in books, in short
- Nobel Prize
- T. S. Eliot, announced on 4 November 1948, “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry”
- Pulitzer, fiction
- Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener — a book of 1947. 1948 was also the year the prize was renamed from Novel to Fiction
- Pulitzer for a 1948 book
- Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens, awarded in 1949
- National Book Award
- None. The American Booksellers Association had created the award in 1936; it lapsed during the war and was not re-established until 1950
- Prix Goncourt
- Les Grandes Familles, Maurice Druon
- Best seller
- The Big Fisherman by Lloyd C. Douglas was the year’s top fiction bestseller. The Naked and the Dead first reached number one on 20 June and spent sixty-two weeks on the New York Times list
- One story
- “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, in The New Yorker of 26 June 1948. It drew more mail than any fiction the magazine had printed, readers cancelled subscriptions, and by one count only thirteen of some three hundred letters Jackson received were kind
- And one report
- The Kinsey report on men started with a printing of 5,000 and reached number one on the New York Times nonfiction list on 23 May 1948
- Also that year
- Weidenfeld & Nicolson was founded in London, and the Holy See published the twentieth and last edition of its Index of Forbidden Books
The prize year is not the publication year, and 1948 is easy to get wrong in both directions. The fiction Pulitzer handed out in 1948 went to a book of 1947; the one handed out in 1949 went to Guard of Honor, a book of 1948, which is why it is in the list above. And the book most often filed under 1948, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was finished that year and published on 8 June 1949.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1948
Is there a book called 1948?
Yes, two. 1948 by Yoram Kaniuk is an autobiographical novel about fighting in the Palmach at seventeen in the war of 1948; the Hebrew original came out in 2010 and won the Sapir Prize, and New York Review Books published Anthony Berris’s English translation in November 2012. 1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War by the historian Benny Morris was published by Yale University Press in 2008. Many people searching for “the book 1948” are thinking of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he finished in 1948 and which was published in 1949.
Was Nineteen Eighty-Four published in 1948?
No. George Orwell finished the second draft in November 1948, and Secker & Warburg published the novel on 8 June 1949, so it belongs to 1949. His other famous political novel, Animal Farm, came out on 17 August 1945.
What were the best books published in 1948?
The most enduring books first published in 1948 include The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner, Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith and The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton. This list covers the titles that, in my reading, best reward the time spent with them now.
What was the best-selling book of 1948?
The Big Fisherman by Lloyd C. Douglas, a novel about Simon Peter, was the top fiction bestseller of the year. The Naked and the Dead is the book 1948 is remembered for: it first reached number one on the New York Times fiction list on 20 June 1948 and spent sixty-two weeks on the list.
Who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948?
T. S. Eliot. The prize was announced on 4 November 1948, “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry”. William Faulkner, whose Intruder in the Dust is on this list, received the 1949 prize, which was held over and announced on 10 November 1950.
Were The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Concept of Mind published in 1948?
No. Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951 and Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind in 1949. Both often turn up on lists of 1948, as does Saul Bellow’s The Victim, which is from 1947. An earlier version of this page made the same mistake.
Which writers published their first book in 1948?
Norman Mailer, with The Naked and the Dead, Ross Lockridge Jr., with Raintree County, his only book, and Ruth Stiles Gannett, with My Father’s Dragon. Truman Capote, Alan Paton and Shirley Jackson published their first novels. Dodie Smith published her first novel, I Capture the Castle, but she was already an established playwright.
What was happening in the world in 1948?
Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January. Truman signed the Marshall Plan into law on 3 April. Israel declared independence on 14 May. South Africa voted on 26 May in the election that brought apartheid. The Berlin Blockade began on 24 June, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in Paris on 10 December. The books on this list were written and read in full knowledge of all of this.
Footnotes
The Naked and the Dead 5 facts
Rinehart published it on 6 May 1948.
This page said Mailer was twenty-five when he wrote it. He was twenty-five when it came out; he wrote it in the two years before. It was his first novel, and it sold 200,000 copies in its first three months.correction
Mailer served in the Philippines with the 112th Cavalry, as a typist, a wire lineman and then a rifleman in a reconnaissance platoon.
The island is the invented Anopopei, and the first edition ran to 721 pages.
It first reached number one on the New York Times fiction list on 20 June 1948 and spent sixty-two weeks on the list.
List of The New York Times number-one books of 1948 — Wikipedia
The Heart of the Matter 2 facts
Major Scobie is the deputy commissioner of police in a British colony on the West African coast during the Second World War. The novel won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1948.
Greene worked for MI6 from 1941 to 1944 and was posted to Sierra Leone.
Cry, the Beloved Country 5 facts
This page used to tag the book as memoir and history. It is a novel, and Paton’s first.correction
Stephen Kumalo is a Zulu Anglican priest.
Cry, the Beloved Country: analysis of major characters — EBSCO Research Starters
Paton was then the principal of Diepkloof Reformatory in Johannesburg. He wrote the novel on a journey at his own expense to study prisons and reformatories abroad, beginning in Norway and finishing in San Francisco on Christmas Eve 1946. Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s saw it through to publication.
This page said Paton wrote it “while apartheid was still being codified into law”. In 1946 it had not been: the election that brought it in was held on 26 May 1948, when D. F. Malan’s Herenigde Nasionale Party took power with fewer votes than Smuts’s United Party.correction
It sold more than fifteen million copies before Paton’s death.
Intruder in the Dust 4 facts
Random House published it on 27 September 1948. Lucas Beauchamp is accused of murdering a white man; MGM paid $50,000 for the film rights and shot the film in Oxford, Mississippi.
Chick Mallison is sixteen, and his allies are Aleck Sander and Miss Habersham.
Chick Mallison — Digital Yoknapatawpha, University of Virginia
Faulkner began it early in 1948 as a “mystery story”, setting aside A Fable, and sent it to his publisher in April at more than twice its planned length.
Intruder in the Dust — Digital Yoknapatawpha, University of Virginia
His Nobel Prize for 1949 was held over and announced on 10 November 1950.
Other Voices, Other Rooms 2 facts
Random House published it in January 1948. Joel Knox is thirteen; Harold Halma’s jacket photograph “caused as much comment and controversy as the prose inside”; the book spent nine weeks on the New York Times list.
Capote was born on 30 September 1924, so he was twenty-three when it came out.
I Capture the Castle 4 facts
The first line is “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”
Cassandra Mortmain is seventeen.
Little, Brown in Boston published it first, in 1948; Heinemann’s British edition followed in 1949.
I Capture the Castle, Little, Brown 1948 — Burnside Rare Books
It was her first novel, written in America during the war while she was homesick for England. Sources disagree on the state — California or Pennsylvania — so this page says only America. She later wrote The Hundred and One Dalmatians.
The Seven Storey Mountain 2 facts
Harcourt, Brace published it on 11 October 1948. The title refers to the mountain of purgatory in Dante. Orders before publication passed 20,000 against a planned first printing of 7,500, and there were 100,000 copies in print by May 1949.
Merton arrived at Gethsemani on 10 December 1941. Born on 31 January 1915, he was twenty-six, and he had graduated from Columbia in 1938.
Often filed under 1948 6 facts
This page used to list The Origins of Totalitarianism as a book of 1948, with its research “completed 1948”. It was published in 1951.correction
It also listed The Concept of Mind as a book of 1948. It was published in 1949.correction
And The Victim, as “1947, widely read 1948”. It is a book of 1947, published by Vanguard Press, and has moved to the list of books from other years.correction
Nineteen Eighty-Four: second draft finished in November 1948, published by Secker & Warburg on 8 June 1949. This page also said the title was an inversion of the year; no source supports that as fact, so it is gone.correction
Animal Farm was published on 17 August 1945.
Tales of the South Pacific was published on 28 January 1947 and won the Pulitzer awarded in 1948.
1948 in books 11 facts
T. S. Eliot’s Nobel Prize was announced on 4 November 1948.
The citation, as the Nobel Foundation gives it: “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry”.
The 1948 fiction Pulitzer went to Tales of the South Pacific, and 1948 was the year the category became Fiction.
The 1949 fiction Pulitzer went to Guard of Honor, a book of 1948.
Maurice Druon won the 1948 Prix Goncourt for Les Grandes Familles.
The Big Fisherman was the top fiction bestseller of 1948.
Here are the biggest fiction bestsellers of the last 100 years — Literary Hub
It was number one on the New York Times list from 19 December 1948 to 3 April 1949.
“The Lottery” ran on 26 June 1948 and drew the most mail the magazine had received for a work of fiction.
The Kinsey report started with 5,000 copies and sold more than 265,000 in America by 1953.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson was founded in 1948, and the last edition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum appeared.
The National Book Award was created in 1936, lapsed during the war and was re-established in 1950.
A book called 1948 3 facts
Kaniuk joined the Palmach in 1947 at seventeen; the Hebrew original of 1948 came out in 2010 and won the Sapir Prize in 2011.
New York Review Books published Anthony Berris’s translation on 27 November 2012.
Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War, Yale University Press, 2008.
The world in 1948 5 facts
Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January 1948.
Truman signed the Economic Cooperation Act on 3 April 1948.
Israel declared independence on 14 May 1948.
The Berlin Blockade began on 24 June 1948.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted on 10 December 1948.
Last verified 25 September 2026. Everything marked “correction” above is a place where this page said something different before. The ones that mattered: three of the seven books on the earlier version of this page were not books of 1948 at all — Arendt is from 1951, Ryle from 1949 and Bellow from 1947 — and they have been replaced by Intruder in the Dust, I Capture the Castle and The Seven Storey Mountain. Apartheid was not being codified in 1946, and Cry, the Beloved Country is a novel, not a memoir. Where a source contradicts the version that circulates, the source wins. Anything I could not source to a named publisher, prize body, archive, library record, newspaper or reference work is not on this page. Where a Wikipedia article is the source, that is what the footnote says.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.
Where to go next
Pages on this site that pick up where 1948 leaves off.
By year
Best Books of 1947
The year of reckoning — Levi, Camus, Anne Frank, and a world trying to understand what had just happened.
Overview
Best Books by Year
Browse all the reading lists, year by year.
Reading list
Holocaust Survivor Books
First-person accounts from survivors who wrote so we would not forget.
On my shelf
My Bookshelf
The books I keep and why, one page each.
From the book of the year
“Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear.” — Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country
If this list resonated with you, you’ll find more books like these on my personal bookshelf — hand-picked for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendationsMore to read
