Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1973
1973 is the year Watergate unravels, the Vietnam War ends for Americans, and what little remained of postwar confidence in institutions finishes cracking. The literature absorbs all of it — but not in simple ways. Pynchon publishes the most technically ambitious American novel since Ulysses, set in the rubble of the Second World War, and the Pulitzer advisory board refuses to award it. Erica Jong writes what women actually think about sex and is met with a kind of scandalised attention that only confirms how necessary the book was. Solzhenitsyn publishes the first volume of his account of Soviet terror in Paris in Russian, and is promptly expelled from the USSR. Vonnegut draws himself into his own novel and asks what fiction is for. It is a year of enormous ambition and enormous argument about what literature is allowed to do.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Updated May 2026
Gravity's Rainbow
Set in Europe at the end of the Second World War, Gravity's Rainbow follows an American lieutenant named Tyrone Slothrop whose erections appear to predict the landing sites of incoming V-2 rockets. Around this improbable premise, Pynchon builds a seven-hundred-page novel that encompasses rocket science, Pavlovian conditioning, colonialism, jazz, paranoia, and the question of whether history is shaped by human agency or by systems too large to perceive. The Pulitzer Prize jury unanimously recommended it for the prize. The advisory board refused, calling it unreadable and obscene. It won the National Book Award for fiction instead, which Pynchon accepted via comedian Professor Irwin Corey — who was interrupted by a streaker.
Gravity's Rainbow is the novel that most tests the word "important." It is genuinely, consistently difficult — not because it withholds but because it assembles, and the assembly requires patience. What it is doing, underneath all the technical apparatus, is asking how modern systems of control — military, corporate, psychological — shape the people inside them without those people knowing it. That question has not aged. It is a long commitment. The Crying of Lot 49 is the right Pynchon entry point if you want to arrive here prepared rather than overwhelmed.
Fear of Flying
Isadora Wing is twenty-nine, a poet, travelling to Vienna with her second husband for a psychoanalysts' conference. On the trip she meets an Englishman and begins pursuing what she calls a zipless fuck — a sexual encounter free of guilt, obligation, or morning-after consequence. The novel is written in the first person, with a frankness about female desire that was genuinely unprecedented in 1973. Henry Miller praised it. John Updike praised it. Many others were scandalized. It has sold over twenty million copies and remains one of the most influential novels of the second-wave feminist era.
The important thing about Fear of Flying is not just what it says about sex but how it says it — from inside a woman's head, without the apologetic frame that female sexuality had always been required to carry in fiction up to that point. Jong writes the way Philip Roth or Henry Miller wrote: with appetite, comedy, and no apparent interest in being likeable. That the novel caused such a reaction tells you more about 1973 than about the book. It is also genuinely funny, which is sometimes forgotten in the discussion of its politics.
Breakfast of Champions
Two men are converging on the same small Ohio city: Dwayne Hoover, a Pontiac dealer slowly going mad, and Kilgore Trout, a prolific science fiction writer entirely unknown outside prison libraries. When Dwayne reads one of Trout's stories — a novel in which every other human being is a robot and one man is the only real person — he takes it literally, with violent consequences. Vonnegut interrupts the narrative throughout to draw his own crude illustrations and to discuss his own life, his own characters, and his relationship to the story he is telling. It reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list in July 1973.
Breakfast of Champions is Vonnegut more raw and more self-lacerating than in Slaughterhouse-Five — the metafictional apparatus is not a device but a genuine reckoning with what it means to make stories about suffering. He is wrestling with whether fiction does any good, whether it changes anything, whether a writer is responsible for how their words are used. The novel does not resolve these questions, which is the right answer. If you have not read Vonnegut, start with Slaughterhouse-Five; if you have, this is the natural second step.
The Princess Bride
The novel presents itself as William Goldman's abridgment of a longer work by the fictional Florinese author S. Morgenstern — "the good parts version," Goldman calls it, trimmed of Morgenstern's lengthy digressions on Florinese history and hat fashion. What remains is a swashbuckling fairy tale: Westley and Buttercup, the Dread Pirate Roberts, a six-fingered man, a giant, a Spaniard on a thirty-year quest for revenge, and a Sicilian criminal genius. The frame is not incidental — Goldman's commentary on what he has cut and why is part of what the novel is doing. The 1987 film, which Goldman also wrote, is the reason most people know it.
The Princess Bride works as a novel in ways the film cannot quite replicate. The metafictional frame — the fiction of an abridgment, Goldman's invented family history, his commentary on the "real" Morgenstern — gives the adventure story a layer of self-awareness that is neither ironic nor cynical but genuinely affectionate. It knows it is a fairy tale and loves fairy tales anyway, which is a harder trick than it looks. Goldman was primarily a screenwriter; this is the novel that reveals what he could do when he had space to breathe.
Sula
Sula Peace and Nel Wright grow up together in the Bottom, a Black neighbourhood in the fictional town of Medallion, Ohio, and remain bound to each other across decades of divergence. Nel marries, settles, conforms. Sula leaves, returns twenty years later, and lives entirely by her own rules — an act the community reads as a kind of evil. The novel is structured around their friendship and its fracture, and around Morrison's larger question: what does a community do with a person it cannot assimilate? Morrison was thirty-two when she published her first novel, thirty-two when she published Sula, two years later. It is her most compressed and formally daring early work.
Sula is the Morrison novel that most rewards close attention to craft. The sentences are extraordinary — dense without being difficult — and the structure is precise in a way that is easy to miss on a first reading. What it is doing with the question of female friendship is unlike anything written before it: Sula and Nel are not foils but two versions of the same possibility, and Morrison refuses to choose between them. If you have not read Morrison, start here or with Beloved. If you have, this is the one that shows what she was building toward.
The Gulag Archipelago
Written in secret between 1958 and 1968, the first volume of Solzhenitsyn's three-part account of the Soviet forced labour camp system was published in Paris in December 1973 after the KGB seized one of the only surviving copies of the manuscript and interrogated the typist who had helped produce it. The book is part memoir, part history, part legal brief — an attempt to document, through testimony and Solzhenitsyn's own experience, the full machinery of Soviet political repression from the Bolshevik Revolution through Stalin. The Soviet Union expelled Solzhenitsyn in February 1974. The English translation appeared the same year.
The Gulag Archipelago is not an easy book to categorise, which is part of its power. It reads like testimony, like polemic, like literature — because Solzhenitsyn understood that dry documentation would be ignorable. What the book did when it reached Western readers was make denial impossible: here was a survivor's account, built from hundreds of testimonies, of a system that the Soviet Union and its apologists had spent decades explaining away. Its political impact was immediate. Its literary achievement — the sheer moral ambition of building that kind of account — is what makes it last.
The Honorary Consul
In a small city in northern Argentina near the Paraguayan border, a group of left-wing guerrillas kidnap the wrong man. They intended to take the American Ambassador; they have taken Charley Fortnum, the Honorary Consul — a minor British official, essentially ceremonial, with no value as a bargaining chip. Around this mistake, Greene builds a novel about guilt, complicity, love under constraint, and the relationship between political violence and Catholic faith. Eduardo Plarr, a doctor with a Paraguayan dissident father, becomes the go-between. Greene said it was one of his own favourites of his novels.
The Honorary Consul is Greene at his most morally precise — the kind of novel in which everyone is implicated and no one is simply innocent or guilty. The political situation is specific (Paraguay under Stroessner, the reach of American Cold War influence in South America) but the ethical questions are not. What do you owe a regime you live inside? What do you owe the people it destroys? What can love between individuals accomplish when systems operate at a different scale? If you want to read Greene, this or The Power and the Glory are where to begin.
Where to start
If you want the novel that changed what women were allowed to say in fiction
→ Read Fear of Flying. It is short, funny, and still shocking in exactly the right way — not for the sex but for the freedom with which Jong writes about a woman's interior life.
If you want the finest prose on this list
→ Read Sula. Morrison's second novel is more compressed and more formally perfect than almost anything written that year. It earns its brevity.
If you want to understand 1973 as a political moment
→ Read The Gulag Archipelago. The first volume alone is sufficient to understand why its publication was an event. Start with the abridged single-volume edition if the full three volumes feel too large.
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