Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1959
1959 is the year that postwar literature found its full range. Günter Grass published The Tin Drum and showed the world what German fiction could do with its own history — not through confession or grief, but through a child’s refusal to grow up, through screaming and drumming and black comedy that cuts deeper than realism ever could. William Burroughs published Naked Lunch in Paris and dissolved the novel’s basic assumptions about sequence and causality. Philip Roth arrived with Goodbye Columbus and won the National Book Award at twenty-six. Lorraine Hansberry became the first Black woman to have a play on Broadway. It was not a quiet year for books.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction · Updated May 2026
The Tin Drum
Oskar Matzerath is three years old when he decides to stop growing. He drums on his tin drum. He can scream at a pitch that shatters glass. From his position as an eternal child — first in Danzig, then in the chaos of the Second World War, then in the rubble of postwar Germany — he narrates the entire arc of the Nazi period with the detached, pitiless clarity of someone who refused to participate in adulthood. The novel is simultaneously a war narrative, a satire, a bildungsroman inverted, and one of the founding texts of magical realism in European literature.
Grass won the Nobel Prize in 1999 largely on the strength of this book. What makes it extraordinary is not just the formal invention — Oskar’s refusal to grow as a metaphor for Germany’s refusal to acknowledge what it had done — but the tone: black comedy deployed with complete seriousness. It is one of the few novels that manages to be genuinely funny about something genuinely terrible without diminishing either. Not easy reading, but essential.
Naked Lunch
There is no plot. There is no continuous narrator. There are routines — hallucinatory, obscene, frequently very funny — cut up and reassembled according to Burroughs’ own logic of addiction and control. William Lee moves through a nightmare geography: Interzone, the city of Annexia, the operating theaters of Dr. Benway. The book was first published by Olympia Press in Paris, banned in several American states, and became the subject of one of the last major literary obscenity trials in the United States.
Naked Lunch is not a novel you read for story or character. You read it for what it does to language — for the way Burroughs uses cut-up and collage to make prose behave like addiction itself: seductive, repetitive, inescapable, degraded. It is more influential than it is pleasant, and the influence has been enormous. If On the Road is the Beat Generation’s most readable book, Naked Lunch is its most radical. Read the introduction first — it helps establish what Burroughs was doing and why.
Goodbye Columbus
Neil Klugman, a young Jewish man from Newark working at the public library, falls in love with Brenda Patimkin, whose family has recently moved from Newark to the wealthy suburb of Short Hills. The novella is about a summer, a relationship, and the class and cultural distance that makes both of them impossible to hold. Five short stories accompany it — all of them sharp, funny, and built around the same preoccupation: what happens when the world you grew up in stops being the world you live in. Roth was twenty-six when this was published. It won the National Book Award.
This is the most pleasurable read on this list — not because it is light, but because Roth’s prose is already fully formed. The intelligence is there, the ear for dialogue, the exactness about class and desire and self-deception. If you have never read Roth and want to start somewhere, start here. It takes an afternoon and gives you a complete understanding of what his work is about before you commit to the longer novels.
A Raisin in the Sun
The Younger family lives in a cramped South Side Chicago apartment. A ten-thousand-dollar life insurance cheque is coming — Walter Lee wants to invest it in a liquor store, Beneatha wants to use it for medical school, Mama wants to buy a house. The house she finds is in a white neighbourhood whose residents have already organised to keep them out. Hansberry wrote this at twenty-eight. It was the first play by a Black woman to appear on Broadway, and it ran for 530 performances.
A Raisin in the Sun is a play, not a novel, but it belongs on any serious list of 1959 because it is one of the most complete portraits of Black American life and aspiration ever put on a stage — and because it insists, without softening, on the full range of human complexity within a single family under pressure. It was radical in 1959 in ways that require context to fully appreciate; it remains one of the great American dramas regardless of context.
The Sirens of Titan
Malachi Constant is the richest man in America. He is also, it turns out, a pawn in a scheme of cosmic indifference that spans the solar system. The novel moves from Earth to Mars to Mercury to Titan, where Winston Niles Rumfoord exists as a wave phenomenon spread across space-time, and where the joke at the centre of human history is finally revealed. It is Vonnegut’s second novel and the first one where his voice — sardonic, tender, fatalistic, furious — is completely itself.
Vonnegut is on this site under his own author guide, and The Sirens of Titan is the book that established what he would spend the rest of his career doing: using science fiction as a vehicle for the darkest possible questions about free will, meaning, and the cruelty of a universe that doesn’t notice us. It is funnier and sadder than most novels that take themselves more seriously. Start here if you haven’t read him yet.
Henderson the Rain King
Eugene Henderson is a large, loud, twice-married American millionaire with an internal voice that will not stop saying “I want, I want, I want.” He goes to Africa — not any specific Africa, but Bellow’s Africa, mythic and invented — where he gets tangled up with two tribes, becomes a rain king against his will, and is forced to confront what it is he actually wants. It is Bellow’s most exuberant novel and one of the most funny, written in a rush of first-person energy that barely stops to breathe.
Henderson is the best entry point into Bellow for readers who find his more famous novels — Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift — too dense or too self-absorbed. The comedy here is physical and forward-moving in a way that his later work often isn’t. What he is writing about — the hunger for transformation in a man who has everything except meaning — is a serious subject handled with enormous wit. One of the great American comic novels.
The Mansion
The final volume of Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy — following The Hamlet (1940) and The Town (1957) — brings Flem Snopes to his end. Mink Snopes, imprisoned for thirty-eight years, is released and walks to Jefferson to settle a score that has waited his entire adult life. The novel closes out Faulkner’s long examination of ambition, corruption, and the particular violence of the American South with a patience and gravity that the earlier volumes were still building toward.
This is not the place to start with Faulkner — read The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying first. But for readers who have already spent time in Yoknapatawpha County, The Mansion is where the Snopes story earns its full weight. Mink’s long walk at the end of the novel is one of Faulkner’s finest passages: spare, slow, and devastating in a way that the first two volumes could only gesture toward.
Where to start
If you want the defining book of the year — and of postwar European literature
→ Start with The Tin Drum. It is long and demanding, but it is one of the novels that justify the form. Give it fifty pages before you decide.
If you want something short, precise, and immediately pleasurable
→ Read Goodbye Columbus. Roth at twenty-six, already completely himself. Takes an afternoon and stays with you.
If you want the most formally radical book on this list
→ Read Naked Lunch. Not for story — for what it does to language and convention. Read the introduction first.
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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times — but really, it was just Tuesday.” — Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
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.
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