Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1967
1967 is one of the most concentrated years in literary history. One Hundred Years of Solitude was published. So was The Master and Margarita — a novel written in secret over decades and released only after its author had been dead for twenty-six years. Tom Stoppard upended what a play could do. S.E. Hinton published The Outsiders at seventeen. It was a year when literature kept pace with the world falling apart around it — and in some cases, outran it entirely.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 books · Fiction · Nonfiction · Updated June 2026
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The founding novel of magic realism and one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. García Márquez traces seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo — a world where the miraculous and the mundane coexist without explanation, where the dead return and the living vanish, and where history repeats itself with the persistence of a curse. It was published in Buenos Aires in June 1967 and sold out within days. García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, with the committee citing this novel above all others.
There is no book quite like this one. It does not ask you to believe what happens — it simply tells you, in the tone of someone reporting facts, and the effect is total. Reading it for the first time is an experience that cannot be repeated, which is reason enough to read it now if you haven’t.
The Master and Margarita
Bulgakov began writing this novel in 1930 and worked on it in secret until his death in 1940, knowing it could never be published in Stalin’s Soviet Union. It appeared in a censored Russian literary magazine in 1966–67 and in full in 1973. The novel operates on two planes simultaneously: the Devil arrives in Moscow with a retinue of supernatural assistants and exposes the corruption and cowardice of Soviet society; and in ancient Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate sentences a wandering philosopher named Yeshua Ha-Nozri to death. The two stories are connected by a manuscript — the Master’s novel — which, as Woland observes, cannot be destroyed.
Bulgakov wrote this under impossible conditions about impossible things, and the result is a book that feels genuinely free — funny, devastating, and formally unlike anything else. The scene with Berlioz at Patriarch’s Ponds is one of the great openings in fiction.
The Outsiders
S.E. Hinton was sixteen when she began writing The Outsiders and seventeen when it was published. The novel follows Ponyboy Curtis, a working-class teenager in Tulsa who belongs to the Greasers — a gang defined by their poverty and their distance from the privileged Socs who run the school. What begins as a story about class and loyalty becomes something more urgent when violence erupts and Ponyboy is forced to ask what it costs to stay who you are. It has sold more than 14 million copies and has never been out of print.
The Outsiders works because Hinton was the age of her characters when she wrote it, and she had not yet learned to flinch. The emotion is unfiltered and the observation is exact. Nothing about it feels like a book written for teenagers — it feels like a book written by one, which is entirely different.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Tom Stoppard takes two minor characters from Hamlet — the hapless courtiers summoned to spy on the prince and dispatched to their deaths — and makes them the protagonists of their own play. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern wait in the wings while Hamlet’s story unfolds around them, uncertain of what is happening or why, unable to leave, unable to act. The play premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1966 and opened on the West End in 1967, winning the Tony Award for Best Play. It is now one of the canonical texts of postmodern theatre.
Stoppard’s formal joke — two men waiting for a story they are not in — is also a serious philosophical argument about agency, knowledge, and death. The fact that it is also very funny is what makes it endure. You can read it knowing nothing about Hamlet and everything about Hamlet; it works either way.
Rosemary’s Baby
Rosemary Woodhouse and her husband Guy move into a grand old apartment building in New York City. Their neighbours are friendly, perhaps unusually so. Rosemary becomes pregnant. What follows is one of the most controlled psychological horror novels ever written — a book that works not through spectacle but through the slow erosion of a woman’s trust in everyone around her, including herself. Roman Polanski adapted it for film in 1968, but the novel came first, and the novel is better: Levin keeps everything inside Rosemary’s head, and that interiority is where the horror lives.
Rosemary’s Baby is on this list because it is a masterclass in unreliable dread — the kind that makes you question whether what you are reading is happening or imagined. It is also a precise account of what it felt like to be a woman whose perception of reality was systematically dismissed. That second reading has only become more relevant.
The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron’s novel imagines the inner life of Nat Turner, the enslaved man who led the bloodiest slave rebellion in American history in Virginia in 1831. Told in the first person, it attempts to reconstruct Turner’s psychology, faith, and fury from the historical record and from Styron’s own imagination. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1968 and was a major literary event — and also a highly contested one: ten Black writers published a counter-essay collection the following year challenging Styron’s portrayal. Both the novel and the controversy remain essential reading.
Whatever the arguments about who has the right to inhabit a historical consciousness not their own — and those arguments are serious — the novel itself is a serious work: formally ambitious, morally uncomfortable, and unwilling to let either its narrator or its reader rest easy. Read it with the controversy in mind.
The Fixer
Based on the real case of Menahem Mendel Beilis — a Jewish factory worker falsely accused of ritual murder in Tsarist Russia in 1911 — The Fixer follows Yakov Bok, a handyman who finds himself imprisoned without trial, subjected to systematic degradation, and forced to decide what he believes in and what he is willing to endure for it. The novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1967. Malamud’s prose is stripped and exact, and the book’s moral weight comes not from argument but from accumulation: one small injustice after another until the whole structure is visible.
The Fixer is the least-read great novel on this list and the one most likely to stay with you. Bok’s refusal — quiet, stubborn, almost irrational — is one of the most moving acts of resistance in American fiction. It asks a simple question with no easy answer: what does a person owe to themselves when the world has decided they are nothing?
The Medium is the Massage
Marshall McLuhan’s most accessible work — designed by Quentin Fiore as a visual-verbal experience rather than a conventional book — argues that the medium through which a message is delivered shapes human perception more profoundly than any content the medium carries. Television does not merely broadcast; it restructures how we see. Print does not merely inform; it reconfigures how we think. McLuhan was writing about broadcast media, but the argument has proved so prescient about digital life that the book reads now like something written last year. The title is a deliberate pun on McLuhan’s most famous phrase.
This book belongs on a reading list about 1967 because it is the year’s most direct diagnosis of what was happening — not politically or culturally, but neurologically. McLuhan understood that the real revolution was not in what was being said but in how it was being transmitted, and that insight has not dated by a single day.
Not sure where to start?
If you have never read García Márquez
→ Start with One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is the book of this year and one of the books of the century. Nothing else on this list requires it as a prerequisite, but everything else benefits from being read in its shadow.
If you want the most formally surprising book on the list
→ Read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Stoppard does in a play what most novelists spend careers attempting: he makes a formal constraint into an emotional argument.
If you want the most unjustly overlooked book on the list
→ Read The Fixer by Bernard Malamud. It won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award in the same year and has since been largely forgotten. That is a mistake worth correcting.
If you want the book most relevant to the present moment
→ Read The Medium is the Massage. McLuhan was writing about television. He was describing your phone.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1967
From the bookshelf
“It is enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.” — Gabriel García Márquez
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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