Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1975
1975 is the year Vietnam ends for America — the last helicopters leave the embassy roof in April — and a country that has spent a decade watching its certainties collapse is left with the question of what comes next. The literature of this year is in some ways a response to that exhaustion. Doctorow reinvents the historical novel, weaving real figures through a fictional America in the years before the First World War, as if to ask what the country actually was before it became what it had become. Bellow publishes the novel that wins him the Pulitzer Prize and, the same year, the Nobel. Agatha Christie releases the book she wrote during the London Blitz and locked in a vault for thirty years — the novel in which Hercule Poirot dies, and the New York Times publishes his obituary on the front page. Joanna Russ publishes the feminist science fiction novel she wrote in 1970, and which no publisher would touch for five years. It is a year of reckonings, many of them long delayed.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Updated May 2026
Ragtime
The novel opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York: a comfortable white family, a Sunday afternoon, Harry Houdini swerving his car into a telephone pole outside their house. From there, Doctorow weaves three fictional families — an affluent WASP household, an immigrant Jewish peddler and his young daughter, a Harlem ragtime musician named Coalhouse Walker — through a tapestry of real historical figures: Emma Goldman, Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Evelyn Nesbit. The ragtime musician’s story — his insistence on a point of justice that the society refuses to acknowledge, and what that refusal drives him to — is the novel’s moral and political core. Ragtime reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list and was selected for the Modern Library’s hundred best novels of the twentieth century.
What Doctorow did in Ragtime — mixing real and invented characters with complete confidence, narrating American history in the present tense, treating the famous and the anonymous as equally available to fiction — was genuinely new. The novel argues, through its structure rather than its argument, that the official history and the suppressed history are always running simultaneously, and that the ragtime rhythm — syncopated, multiple, pulled against the beat — is the better metaphor for how America actually works. It is short, propulsive, and formally precise. The Tony Award-winning musical adaptation testifies to how deeply the architecture of the novel works.
Humboldt’s Gift
Charlie Citrine is a successful Chicago writer — Pulitzer Prize, Broadway hit — living through a mid-life crisis of extraordinary richness: a mob-connected acquaintance is harassing him over gambling debts, his divorce is expensive, his girlfriend is younger and more expensive, and everywhere he turns he finds evidence that the serious literary life in America has been overrun by money, celebrity, and distraction. The novel’s ghost is Von Humboldt Fleisher, a brilliant poet and mentor from Citrine’s youth, who died broke and mad. Citrine cannot stop thinking about what the artistic life costs and whether it was worth it. Humboldt’s Gift won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1976. Bellow won the Nobel Prize in Literature the same year.
Humboldt’s Gift is Bellow’s most comic novel and, at the same time, his most elegiac. It is about the difficulty of maintaining a serious inner life in a society organised entirely around surface — money, appearance, the speed of distraction. Charlie Citrine is annoying and self-aware about being annoying, which is a harder trick than it sounds. What makes the novel extraordinary is the prose — dense, funny, precise, capable of sudden elevation — and the portrait of Humboldt himself, modelled on the poet Delmore Schwartz, which is both devastating and deeply affectionate. If you want to understand why Bellow won the Nobel Prize, this is the novel that earns it most visibly.
The Female Man
Four women — Joanna, Janet, Jeannine, and Jael — are alternate versions of the same person living in four parallel realities. Janet comes from Whileaway, an all-female utopia where men died out centuries ago. Jeannine lives in a 1970s where the Depression never ended and women’s roles are more rigidly constrained. Joanna is the novel’s closest thing to a narrator, navigating the present. Jael comes from a future where men and women are at open war. The four meet. Russ uses the structure to examine gender by stripping away, one by one, the social givens that shape women’s lives — and to deliver her argument, which is not subtle, about the cost of those givens. The novel was written in 1970 and rejected by publishers for five years before Bantam accepted it.
The Female Man is the angriest novel on this list and, in important ways, the most prescient. Kim Stanley Robinson described it as the book that made him laugh hardest while slapping him in the face, which is accurate. Russ is not interested in making her argument comfortable or her characters likeable in the conventional sense — she is interested in making it impossible to ignore. The five-year delay between writing and publication is itself part of the story: the book’s refusal by a literary establishment that did not want its argument is precisely what the argument is about. It has not become a historical artefact.
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
Hercule Poirot, old and nearly immobile, summons his old friend Hastings to Styles Court — the country house where they first worked together, now a guest house — because someone there is going to commit a murder, and Poirot knows who. The novel returns Poirot and Hastings to the location of Christie’s first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), and ends with Poirot’s death. Christie wrote it in the early 1940s during the London Blitz, locked it in a bank vault, and arranged for publication only when she was near her own end. She died in January 1976, four months after publication. On August 6, 1975, the New York Times published a front-page obituary for Hercule Poirot, with a photograph.
Curtain is not Christie’s most technically accomplished mystery — it was written thirty years before it was published, and shows the seams of its era — but it is the most moving document in crime fiction. The idea that Christie planned Poirot’s death as an insurance policy for her family, then kept the completed manuscript in a vault for three decades, gives the novel a quality unlike any other: it is a gift written against the expectation of one’s own death, finally opened when that death was imminent. The New York Times obituary treated Poirot with complete seriousness. That tells you something about what he was to readers.
Heat and Dust
Two women, separated by fifty years. In the 1920s, Olivia, an Englishwoman married to a colonial administrator in India, leaves her husband for a local Nawab and vanishes into India’s interior. In the 1970s, Olivia’s granddaughter-in-law — unnamed, the narrator — travels to India to trace what happened, and finds herself drawn into similar complications. The novel moves between the two periods and the two women, asking what remains constant between them — what India does to the Europeans who come seeking it, and what they bring with them. Heat and Dust won the Booker Prize in 1975. James Ivory directed the film adaptation in 1983.
Heat and Dust is one of those novels that appears quiet and becomes permanently resonant. Jhabvala — who was Polish-born, had a German education, lived in India for twenty-four years, and later became a major film screenwriter — writes about the encounter between European and Indian culture with a precision that is neither romantic nor cynical. The double narrative is not a device but an argument: that the desire which brings Western women to India in search of something they cannot name in their own culture is persistent, structural, and carries its own costs. The Booker judges were right.
‘Salem’s Lot
Ben Mears returns to the small Maine town of Jerusalem’s Lot, where he spent part of his childhood, to write a novel about the Marsten House — the imposing, empty building on the hill that has frightened him since boyhood. A furniture dealer named Straker arrives to take a lease on the house. His business partner, Barlow, is not seen. People start disappearing. Children stop breathing and then are spotted at windows at night. King’s second novel transplants the Dracula mythology into a fully realised American small town — with all its gossip, its sexual frustration, its loneliness, and its willingness to not quite see what is happening in front of it.
Salem’s Lot is the novel that established King’s method: horror as social realism, the monster as a diagnostic tool. The vampire works here not because of its supernatural menace but because of what the town does in response — the gradual normalisation, the looking away, the ways in which a community can collectively fail to name what is destroying it. King himself has said it is the book of his that most frightens him to reread. It is also the novel that proved Carrie was not a fluke. If you want to understand where King’s fifty-year body of work comes from, this is the root.
The Dead Father
The Dead Father is not dead. He is a colossal figure — miles long, partly mechanical, still capable of speech and desire and violence — being dragged across a landscape by his children toward a place called the Hole, where he will finally be buried. He knows where he is going. The novel alternates between the procession, the conversations of the children dragging him, and an interpolated document called “A Manual for Sons” — a freestanding mock-instructional text about the experience of having a father. Barthelme was one of the most formally inventive American writers of the twentieth century; The Dead Father is considered his most sustained and ambitious work. The New York Times Book Review included it in its year-end list for 1975.
The Dead Father is the strangest novel on this list and the one most likely to divide readers. Barthelme is not interested in conventional narrative or conventional feeling; he is interested in what the patriarch-as-structure does to everyone inside the structure, and in the comic possibilities of that subject. The Freudian allegory is transparent — the children are dragging the father toward death because that is what children do — but Barthelme surrounds it with such layered irony, pastiche, and flat bureaucratic language that it becomes something else: a meditation on authority, inheritance, and what it means to keep dragging something forward that you know will eventually be buried. Difficult, funny, and genuinely unlike anything else.
Where to start
If you want the novel that most changed what historical fiction could be
→ Read Ragtime. It is short, propulsive, and formally bold — a book that mixes real and invented figures with the confidence of a writer who has completely rethought the rules. The ragtime rhythm is the argument.
If you want the finest prose of the year
→ Read Humboldt’s Gift. Bellow writing about failure, ambition, and the cost of the artistic life — dense, funny, and precise in a way that earned the Nobel Prize. It takes patience, and the patience is rewarded.
If you want the most singular object on this list
→ Read Curtain. A detective novel written during the Blitz, kept in a vault for thirty years, published months before Christie’s death, in which the most famous detective in fiction is killed. The New York Times ran a front-page obituary.
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“He was never simply sad, but rather accompanied by sadness.” — Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift
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