Best Books of 1952

Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison · 1952

An unnamed Black narrator lives in a basement in Harlem, lit by 1,369 lightbulbs powered by electricity stolen from Monopolated Light & Power. He is telling the story of how he got there — from a Southern college, through a series of encounters with white men who use him for their own purposes without seeing him, through the Communist Party, through a race riot in Harlem, to the underground. The novel is formally extraordinary: realistic, surreal, tragicomic, and constructed with the architecture of jazz improvisation. It won the National Book Award in 1953.

Invisible Man is the great American novel of the twentieth century that most people have not read. Ellison spent seven years on it and produced something that absorbs Dostoevsky, Faulkner, African American oral tradition, and jazz into a wholly original structure. The narrator’s invisibility is not metaphorical — it is the precise condition of being seen as a type rather than a person, of being legible to white America only as a projection of its own fears and needs. The novel is funny, violent, hallucinatory, and formally precise. It has no equal in American fiction for what it does.

The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway · 1952

Santiago is an old Cuban fisherman who has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. On the eighty-fifth day he hooks a great marlin and struggles with it alone for three days in the Gulf Stream. The novella was published in Life magazine in its entirety, sold five million copies in two days, and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. The Nobel Committee cited it when they awarded Hemingway the Nobel Prize in 1954. It is the last great thing he wrote.

The Old Man and the Sea is the purest distillation of what Hemingway’s style was built for — the stripped sentence, the visible effort, the dignity of doing a difficult thing alone without complaint. The marlin is not a symbol exactly, or not only a symbol: it is a fish, and the struggle is a struggle, and what Santiago wins and loses is specific rather than allegorical. Read it in one sitting. It takes about ninety minutes and you will understand, after, why Hemingway could not write fiction again.

East of Eden

John Steinbeck · 1952

Two families — the Trasks and the Hamiltons — in the Salinas Valley of California across several generations, from the Civil War to the First World War. The novel is structured around the story of Cain and Abel, retold and retold, and around the Hebrew word timshel — thou mayest — which Steinbeck argues is the key to human freedom: not that you will overcome sin, not that you must overcome it, but that you may. It was Steinbeck’s most ambitious novel and the one he considered his masterpiece.

East of Eden is one of those novels that divides readers between those who find it sprawling and sentimental and those who find it the most honest account of the human capacity for both evil and freedom in American fiction. The character of Cathy Ames — a woman who, Steinbeck argues, simply lacks the moral faculty that other humans possess — is the novel’s most controversial creation and its most interesting. The timshel argument is worth the price of entry on its own. Read it as the book Steinbeck needed to write rather than the book he should have written.

Wise Blood

Flannery O’Connor · 1952

Hazel Motes returns from the war to Taulkinham, Tennessee, determined to found the Church Without Christ — a religion of pure negation, without redemption, without the soul, without Jesus. He preaches from the hood of his rat-colored Essex and encounters a series of grotesques: a fake blind preacher, his daughter Sabbath Lily, a gorilla suit, a mummified dwarf. The novel is a dark comedy about the impossibility of escaping grace, even for someone who wants nothing more.

Wise Blood is the most theologically serious comic novel in American literature, which sounds like a contradiction and is not. O’Connor was a devout Catholic writing about Protestant fundamentalism in the American South, and what she understood — better than almost anyone — is that the hunger for God does not go away when you stop believing. Hazel Motes is driven by what he is trying to deny. The violence of the ending is earned precisely because the novel has been funny throughout. Start here with O’Connor. Then read everything she wrote.

Malone Dies

Samuel Beckett · 1951 · English translation 1956 · French original 1951

Malone is lying in a bed in a room — he does not know whose — waiting to die. He decides to tell stories to pass the time. The stories keep breaking down; Malone keeps losing track of his pencil, his exercise book, his characters; the dying keeps not happening. It is the second novel of Beckett’s trilogy, and the funniest. The prose is more compressed than Molloy, the comedy darker, and the dissolution of the self more thorough.

Malone Dies is the middle movement of Beckett’s trilogy and in some ways the most pleasurable — the comedy is more sustained than in Molloy, the philosophical stakes are clearer, and the final pages, in which the narrative simply disintegrates, are among the most technically controlled passages in twentieth-century fiction. Beckett is doing something no novelist had done before: using the dissolution of the narrative as the subject of the narrative. The dying narrator is also the dying novel. Read it as the second volume of the trilogy, not as a standalone.

The Natural

Bernard Malamud · 1952

Roy Hobbs is a phenomenally gifted baseball player who is shot by a woman in a hotel room before he can make it to the majors, disappears for sixteen years, and then arrives in the big leagues at thirty-four with a bat he calls Wonderboy. The novel is a myth — Roy is Parsifal, the Fisher King, the Grail Knight — told as American naturalism, complete with the Knights of the Round Table as a baseball team called the New York Knights. Malamud makes the overlay feel necessary rather than allegorical.

The Natural is Malamud’s first novel and the one that established the mode he would work in for the rest of his career: the mythological embedded in the ordinary, the failure that is also a kind of grace, the specifically Jewish sense that suffering is instructive and transcendence is never quite available. It is a better novel than the Robert Redford film suggests — darker, stranger, with an ending the film refuses to honor. Read it as a myth about America’s relationship to natural talent and what it does to the gifted when they fail to be what everyone needed them to be.

The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank · Dutch 1947 · English translation 1952

Anne Frank kept a diary from June 1942 until August 1944, while hiding in a concealed annex in Amsterdam with her family and four others. She was thirteen when she began it and fifteen when the Gestapo arrested them. She died in Bergen-Belsen in February 1945. Her father Otto, the only survivor, published the diary in Dutch in 1947. The English translation appeared in 1952 and brought the diary to an international readership that has never stopped growing.

The English translation of 1952 is included here because it was the moment the diary crossed into global culture — the moment a Dutch Jewish teenager’s voice became the primary document through which the Holocaust became imaginable for millions of readers who would never encounter a survivor. Anne Frank was not writing for history; she was writing for herself and for a hoped-for future reader. The gap between the writing and what we know happened is where the moral weight of the book lives. It should be read, and more than once.

The Echoing Grove

Rosamond Lehmann · 1953 · written 1952

Two sisters — Madeleine and Dinah — loved the same man, Rickie, who is now dead. The novel moves between present and past as the sisters meet for the first time since the affair and attempt to understand what happened between them and him and what it cost all three of them. Lehmann writes about desire, jealousy, and the specific damage that love does to women’s friendships with a precision that none of her contemporaries attempted. It was her last novel and her finest.

Rosamond Lehmann is one of the most seriously underread major novelists of the twentieth century — more consistently excellent than most of the women writers who eclipsed her, and technically more interesting than Daphne du Maurier, with whom she is sometimes grouped. The Echoing Grove is her masterpiece: a novel about what women do to each other in the name of a man, written with a psychological precision that Woolf would have recognized and Iris Murdoch was still learning. If you have not read her, start here.

The Power Elite

C. Wright Mills · 1956 · but White Collar · C. Wright Mills · 1951

replacing: White Collar · C. Wright Mills · 1951 · widely read 1952

Mills’s account of the new American middle class — the white-collar workers who staffed the corporations, the bureaucracies, and the service industries that postwar prosperity had created — argued that they had no genuine culture, no real power, and no authentic self. They sold their personalities as well as their labor. They had replaced the craftsman’s pride in work with the salesman’s need to be liked. They were, Mills argued, the human material of a managed society.

White Collar is the sociological companion to Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and to the fiction that the 1950s produced about corporate conformism. Mills was more political than Riesman — more Marxist, more angry — and his portrait of the white-collar worker as someone who has surrendered his autonomy so thoroughly he barely notices reads differently now than it did in 1951. The alienation he described is not specific to the 1950s. It has simply changed employers.

White Collar

C. Wright Mills · 1951 · widely read 1952

Mills’s account of the new American middle class — the white-collar workers who staffed the corporations, bureaucracies, and service industries that postwar prosperity had created — argued that they had no genuine culture, no real power, and no authentic self. They sold their personalities as well as their labor. They had replaced the craftsman’s pride in work with the salesman’s need to be liked. They were, Mills argued, the human material of a managed society.

White Collar is the sociological companion to Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and to the fiction that the 1950s produced about corporate conformism. Mills was angrier and more political than Riesman, and his portrait of the white-collar worker as someone who has surrendered his autonomy so thoroughly he barely notices reads differently now than it did in 1951. The alienation he described is not specific to its decade. It has simply changed employers.

The Adventures of Augie March

Saul Bellow · 1953 · written 1952

Augie March is a Chicago boy, born poor, Jewish, eager, who moves through a series of worlds — petty crime, labor organizing, hunting eagles in Mexico, the merchant marine during the war — without ever settling into any of them. He begins: I am an American, Chicago born — and that sentence announces a voice and a project that Bellow would spend the rest of his career working out. The novel won the National Book Award in 1954 and is the founding document of the postwar American novel.

The Adventures of Augie March changed what the American novel was allowed to sound like. The exuberance and the specificity — the density of reference, the mixing of registers, the confidence that a poor Jewish kid from Chicago could be the subject of a Dickensian picaresque — were new. It is the novel that Phillip Roth, Don DeLillo, and a generation of American writers learned from. Read the first chapter and you will read the whole book. Nobody has ever opened a novel in quite that voice again.