Best Books of 1954

Lord of the Flies

William Golding · 1954

A group of British schoolboys are stranded on an uninhabited island after their plane is shot down. They attempt to govern themselves. Within weeks, the order they create has collapsed into violence and murder. The novel was rejected by every major publisher before Faber & Faber accepted it, and went on to become one of the most widely read novels in the English language — required reading in schools across the world for seventy years. Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983, with the committee citing this novel above all others.

Lord of the Flies is a novel that everyone has read and that fewer people than you think have actually understood. It is not about what children are like without adults — it is about what civilization is and what holds it together, and the answer Golding gives is: not much, and not for long. The book was written in the shadow of the Second World War by a man who had served at D-Day and had watched what men were capable of. The choir boys singing as they arrive on the island are the last note of the world that made them.

The Fellowship of the Ring

J.R.R. Tolkien · 1954

The first volume of The Lord of the Rings. Frodo Baggins inherits the One Ring from his uncle Bilbo and sets out from the Shire with three companions, pursued by the Nazgûl, to find safety in Rivendell. There he joins the Fellowship — nine walkers against the nine Riders — and the quest begins. Tolkien spent twelve years writing the book and drew on Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Finnish, and Welsh mythology to build a secondary world with its own languages, histories, and cosmology.

The Fellowship of the Ring is listed here rather than the whole trilogy because it is where you have to start and because its opening movement — from the Shire through the Old Forest and Weathertop to Rivendell — is the finest sustained piece of world-building in English fiction. Tolkien invented the genre of the secondary-world fantasy and did it with a scholarly thoroughness that nobody who came after him has fully matched. Whether you have read it or not, the world you inhabit has been shaped by this book in ways that are still not fully calculated.

Lucky Jim

Kingsley Amis · 1954

Jim Dixon is a junior lecturer in medieval history at a provincial English university who does not believe in medieval history and is not sure he believes in universities. He is incompetent at the things his career requires, truthful when he should be diplomatic, and surrounded by people who have absorbed the pretensions of English cultural life without any of its substance. The novel won the Somerset Maugham Award and established Amis as the voice of postwar English comedy.

Lucky Jim is the funniest English novel of the postwar period and the one that most precisely diagnosed what the Welfare State had done to the English class system — which is to say, not enough, and in the wrong direction. Jim Dixon is the first English literary hero who is authentically lower-middle-class and proud of nothing in particular, and the novel's target is the cultural performance of educated English life. Read it after Evelyn Waugh and before David Lodge to see the tradition it belongs to and what it changed.

Under the Net

Iris Murdoch · 1954

Jake Donaghue is a translator and occasional writer living in London without a fixed address, moving between flats and friendships, chasing a woman named Anna across the city and a philosopher named Hugo whose ideas he may have stolen and whose attention he needs. It is Murdoch's debut novel, published the same year as her first work of philosophy, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, and the two books illuminate each other — the novel is doing philosophically what the philosophy is arguing for.

Under the Net is the English debut novel that most resembles a Parisian intellectual exercise — plotted with enormous comic energy, shot through with genuine philosophical argument, and built on the idea that language is always a net thrown over experience that captures something and loses the rest. Murdoch would go on to write twenty-five more novels, several of them greater, but this is the one in which the voice arrives fully formed. Read it alongside Sartre's Nausea to understand what she was arguing with.

The Doors of Perception

Aldous Huxley · 1954

Huxley's account of taking mescaline under medical supervision in May 1953 — what he saw, what he understood, what the experience suggested about the nature of perception and consciousness. The book is part memoir, part philosophical essay, and part manifesto for the idea that ordinary consciousness is a reducing valve filtering out most of reality in order to make daily life possible. It became one of the founding texts of the psychedelic movement and gave a band its name.

The Doors of Perception is a small book that has had enormous cultural consequences. Huxley was a serious philosopher and a serious writer, and his account of the mescaline experience is not advocacy but analysis: he is trying to understand what the drug revealed about the relationship between the brain and consciousness, about beauty and the capacity to see it, about the difference between what we perceive and what is there. Read it as philosophy rather than as a drug memoir. It holds up as both.

Casino Royale

Ian Fleming · 1953 · US publication and wide readership 1954

James Bond is sent to a casino in northern France to defeat a Soviet paymaster named Le Chiffre at baccarat. Fleming wrote it in six weeks at his house in Jamaica in 1952, drawing on his wartime Naval Intelligence experience. The novel was published in the UK in 1953 and reached its wide readership with the US publication in 1954. It introduced Bond — his habits, his tastes, his specific combination of competence and damage — in a form that seventy years of sequels and films have not quite replaced.

Casino Royale is a better novel than the franchise it spawned allows people to see. Fleming was a serious writer with a precise prose style and a genuine understanding of the psychology of the Cold War operative — the man who does ugly things in service of a civilization he is not sure deserves them. Bond's conversation with Mathis near the end, about whether good and evil are distinguishable in the field, is the serious question underneath the style and the gadgets. Read it as the thing it is before seeing it as the thing it became.

The Fellowship of the Ring

see above — replacing: The Unvanquished · William Faulkner · reissue 1954

replacing with: Bonjour Tristesse · Françoise Sagan · 1954

Cécile is eighteen, spending the summer on the Riviera with her father Raymond and his mistress Elsa. When Raymond invites a sophisticated older woman named Anne Larsen to join them, and it becomes clear he intends to marry her, Cécile engineers a plan to break them apart. The novel was written by Sagan in six weeks when she was eighteen years old, won the Prix Critiques, and sold over a million copies in France in its first year. It shocked a generation and made Sagan famous overnight.

Bonjour Tristesse is on this list because it is one of the most precise accounts of adolescent amorality ever written — Cécile is not evil, she is simply young enough that the consequences of her actions do not feel real to her until they are. Sagan was eighteen when she wrote it and the voice is completely without self-pity or excuse. The novel is short and devastating and still, seventy years later, one of the best things anyone has written about the specific cruelty of the young. Read it in a sitting.

Bonjour Tristesse

Françoise Sagan · 1954

Cécile is eighteen, spending the summer on the French Riviera with her charming, feckless father Raymond and his mistress Elsa. When Raymond invites a sophisticated older woman named Anne to join them — and it becomes clear he intends to marry her — Cécile engineers a plan to break them apart. The novel was written in six weeks when Sagan was eighteen years old, won the Prix des Critiques, and sold over a million copies in France in its first year. It made its author famous and its subject — adolescent desire and its consequences — newly speakable.

Bonjour Tristesse is one of the most precise accounts of adolescent amorality ever written — not because Cécile is cruel but because she is young enough that the real consequences of her actions do not register until it is too late. Sagan was eighteen writing about an eighteen-year-old and the voice has a quality of complete self-knowledge combined with complete moral obliviousness that no older writer could have manufactured. The novel is short, devastating, and still the best thing ever written about the specific cruelty of the young who do not yet know they are being cruel.

A Stillness at Appomattox

Bruce Catton · 1953 · Pulitzer Prize 1954

The third volume of Catton's Army of the Potomac trilogy, covering the final year of the Civil War — Grant's grinding Overland Campaign, the siege of Petersburg, and Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Catton won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1954. He writes military history as if it were lived experience — from the ground up, through the men who fought rather than the commanders who directed — and the result is the most humane account of the war's final year ever written.

Catton belongs on this list as the writer who established what popular military history could be — serious, precise, rooted in primary sources and in the experience of ordinary soldiers rather than in the decisions of generals. A Stillness at Appomattox is his best volume and the one that earned his reputation. It reads like a novel and is true. Read all three volumes if you can; this is the culmination, but the weight of what happens at Appomattox is earned by everything that came before it.

The Recognitions

William Gaddis · 1955 · written 1954

Wyatt Gwyon is a failed painter who becomes a master forger of Flemish masterworks. The novel — nearly a thousand pages, with dozens of characters — follows the circulation of counterfeit and authentic objects through postwar America and Europe, asking at every level what the difference is between the real thing and a perfect copy, between genuine belief and performed faith, between art and forgery. It was Gaddis's first novel and took seven years to write. It sold poorly on publication and is now considered one of the great American novels.

The Recognitions is the most demanding novel on this list and one of the most rewarding. Gaddis is asking whether authenticity exists — in art, in religion, in relationships, in the self — and he answers by building a world in which everything is a copy of something else, and the only question is whether anyone can tell the difference. The prose is dense and the cast is enormous, but the sections involving Wyatt and his forgeries are as serious and beautiful as anything written in the period. Read it as the American counterpart to Beckett's trilogy.

The Quiet American

Graham Greene · 1955 · written and widely discussed 1954

Thomas Fowler is a British journalist in Vietnam in 1952, watching the French colonial war and trying not to take sides. Alden Pyle is a young American CIA operative with a theory — a Third Force between the Communists and the French — that he is implementing with the cheerful certainty of a man who has read too many books and seen too little. The novel predicted American involvement in Vietnam a decade before it happened and was read at the time as anti-American propaganda.

The Quiet American is Greene's most prophetic novel and, in hindsight, one of the most accurate political predictions ever made in fiction. Pyle — convinced of his own good intentions, ignorant of the world he is acting in, causing destruction with the serene confidence of someone who has never been wrong — is the figure that the next twenty years of American foreign policy would vindicate. The novel was published in 1955 but belongs to 1954, when Greene completed it and the arguments about it began. Read it as the novel that understood American innocence before America did.