Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1971
1971 is the year America's confidence broke. The Vietnam War had no end in sight. Nixon was in the White House. The counterculture that had promised transformation was collapsing into disillusionment and drugs. The books of this year absorb all of it — the dread, the confusion, the reckoning. The Exorcist spent fifty-seven weeks on the bestseller list, which says something about what people needed from fiction. The Day of the Jackal invented the modern thriller almost fully formed. E.M. Forster's suppressed novel about a gay man in Edwardian England finally appeared, a year after his death, fifty-seven years after he wrote it. Dee Brown retold the history of the American West from the point of view of those it destroyed. This is not a year of triumphant literature — it is a year of disturbance.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Updated May 2026
The Exorcist
Regan MacNeil is eleven years old, the daughter of a film actress living in Washington D.C., and she is possessed. The novel follows two priests — one a psychiatrist, one an old exorcist nearly destroyed by a previous case — as they attempt to understand and then confront what has happened to her. Blatty was a serious Catholic and the novel is, underneath the horror, a serious theological argument about the nature of evil, doubt, and faith. It spent fifty-seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, seventeen of them consecutively at number one. The 1973 film adaptation garnered ten Academy Award nominations.
The Exorcist is routinely reduced to its reputation as the novel that became the terrifying film, but it is more structurally interesting than that reputation suggests. Blatty builds the horror through accumulation — small wrongnesses that compound — and the theological scaffolding underneath is not incidental: the priests' crisis of faith is the actual subject. What makes the novel genuinely disturbing is not the possession but the question the possession forces: whether the supernatural, if real, changes anything about how a person should live. That question is not resolved neatly, and the novel is better for it.
The Day of the Jackal
A professional assassin — known only as the Jackal — is contracted by the OAS, a French paramilitary organisation, to kill Charles de Gaulle. The novel runs on two parallel tracks: the Jackal's meticulous, cold-blooded preparation, and the detective work of a French police inspector who is trying to find and stop him before he can act. Forsyth had been a journalist, and the novel operates with the procedural precision of reportage — the forgery of documents, the sourcing of a custom rifle, the construction of a false identity. It won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1972 and invented, more or less, the contemporary thriller as a form.
What separates The Day of the Jackal from the genre it helped create is the completeness of its construction. Forsyth does not cheat with either character — the Jackal is competent and without sentiment, the inspector equally methodical — and the tension comes entirely from craft rather than manipulation. We know de Gaulle survived; the novel generates suspense anyway, which is a remarkable structural achievement. If you want to understand why certain thrillers feel so much more serious than others, this is the template.
Rabbit Redux
Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is thirty-six, working as a typesetter in a small Pennsylvania city, and his wife has left him for another man. The second novel in Updike's four-part series picks Rabbit up a decade after Rabbit, Run — now middle-aged, static, vaguely patriotic, watching the moon landing on television while the America he recognises is dissolving around him. A Black Vietnam veteran named Skeeter and a runaway teenager named Jill move into his house, bringing the decade's upheavals directly into his domestic life. The Guardian named it one of the hundred best novels in the English language.
Rabbit Redux is the most political of the four Rabbit novels and the one most directly shaped by its moment — Vietnam, the counterculture, the civil rights movement, the first cracks in the postwar American consensus. Updike uses Rabbit's passivity and incomprehension as a lens rather than a limitation. Rabbit is not a fool exactly; he is a man whose world is changing faster than his capacity to understand it, which is an accurate description of millions of people in 1971. The prose is Updike at his most controlled, and the novel is the right place to start with the series if you have not read it.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Dee Brown's account of the systematic destruction of Native American peoples and cultures across the American West in the second half of the nineteenth century retells that history entirely from the Indigenous perspective — using council records, first-hand interviews, and tribal accounts to reconstruct events that American history had narrated from the other side. It covers the period from the Long Walk of the Navajo in 1860 to the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. Published at the height of the Vietnam War, it entered the New York Times bestseller list and has sold over five million copies. It remains in print.
What Brown did — and what made this book a landmark — was not simply to reverse the perspective but to make the reversal feel inevitable: once you have read the history this way, the other version seems incomplete in a way that cannot be undone. The book was reviewed in 1971 as timely because Vietnam had opened Americans to the idea of national guilt; what is more striking is how permanent its reframing has proven. If you have been taught American westward expansion as progress, this is the corrective. It is not comfortable reading, and it is not meant to be.
Maurice
E.M. Forster wrote this novel in 1913 and 1914, revised it twice more over the following decades, and then kept it in a drawer for fifty-seven years. It was published posthumously in 1971, a year after his death, because he knew it could not appear in his lifetime: it is a love story between men, and it ends happily. Maurice Hall is a Cambridge student who slowly, painfully comes to understand his homosexuality — first through an intellectual friendship with a fellow student, then through a physical relationship with a gamekeeper. Forster asked that it not be published until homosexuality was no longer a criminal offence in England. That happened in 1967. He died in 1970.
Maurice is the novel Forster most needed to write and could not publish, which gives it an unusual quality: the seriousness of something that mattered enormously to the person writing it. It is not as architecturally perfect as A Passage to India or as elegant as A Room with a View, and Forster knew this — he described it with some ambivalence. But it is the only one of his novels in which the emotional stakes are entirely personal, and that directness is its own kind of achievement. The happy ending, which Forster refused to revise away despite pressure, is itself an act of defiance that took sixty years to make public.
Our Bodies, Ourselves
A group of women in Boston began meeting in 1969, frustrated by the condescension of medical professionals and the absence of accessible information about their own bodies. What started as a set of course notes became a self-published pamphlet in 1970, then this full book in 1971. It covered anatomy, sexuality, contraception, pregnancy, childbirth, menopause, and health care — written in plain language, from a feminist perspective, for women who had been consistently excluded from or patronised by medical institutions. It has sold over four million copies and been translated into thirty-four languages.
Our Bodies, Ourselves belongs on this list not because it is literary fiction but because it is one of the books that most directly changed the lives of the people who read it — which is a different but equally serious form of importance. The idea that women should have access to accurate, non-condescending information about their own health was not radical in principle but was radical in practice in 1971. The book made that information available at scale, and its influence on how medicine and health information is communicated to women has been enormous and largely unacknowledged.
The Lathe of Heaven
George Orr's dreams come true — literally. When he dreams something, reality reshapes itself around it, and only he remembers the world as it was before. His psychiatrist, William Haber, discovers this ability and begins using it: guiding Orr's dreams to fix humanity's problems, eliminate racism, end war, solve overpopulation. Each solution creates new and worse problems. The novel is written against the grain of the era's confidence in social engineering — Le Guin was reading Taoism carefully, and the book is in part a philosophical argument about the limits of the will to improve, and the costs of forcing the world into a desired shape.
The Lathe of Heaven is Le Guin at her most compressed — shorter and stranger than the Hainish novels, and more direct in its philosophical argument. The novel asks what happens when the human drive to fix things meets the complexity of what needs to be fixed, and whether the desire to improve the world is separable from the desire to control it. That question is not sci-fi window dressing; it is the actual subject, and Le Guin earns it. If you have not read Le Guin, this is a good entry point precisely because it is so compact — though The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) is the place to go next.
Where to start
If you want the novel that best captures 1971 itself
→ Read Rabbit Redux. Updike uses one passive man in Pennsylvania to map the entire disintegration of postwar American certainty — Vietnam, race, the counterculture — with a precision that has not aged.
If you want something that changed the world directly
→ Read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. It permanently altered how American history is taught and told, and it remains as disturbing as it was in 1971.
If you want the most quietly extraordinary novel
→ Read Maurice. Forster kept it in a drawer for fifty-seven years. The fact that it finally appeared matters as much as what it contains.
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