Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1942
1942 is the worst year of the war. The Germans are at Stalingrad. The Japanese have taken Singapore. The Holocaust is moving toward its industrial phase. It is the year Anne Frank begins her diary in a hidden annex in Amsterdam. It is the year Stefan Zweig — one of the most widely read European writers of the century, a Jew in exile in Brazil — finishes his final novella, writes his farewell, and takes his life with his wife on February 22nd. In Paris, under the German occupation, a twenty-eight-year-old Algerian named Albert Camus publishes simultaneously a novel and a philosophical essay that together constitute one of the most extraordinary debuts in the history of French literature — and that will define how an entire generation understands the relationship between human life and the absence of meaning. In London, a don at Oxford publishes a satirical novel in the form of letters from a senior devil to a junior one, and becomes famous overnight. What the literature of 1942 shares is that it was written inside a catastrophe, and that its best work did not flinch from the catastrophe but tried to understand what it meant to be human inside it.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction, Essay & Nonfiction · Updated June 2026
The Stranger
Meursault is a French Algerian clerk who, at the novel’s opening, receives news that his mother has died. He goes to the funeral. He does not cry. The day after, he begins a relationship with a woman named Marie. Shortly after that, through a sequence of events that the novel refuses to make feel necessary, he shoots an Arab on a beach and kills him. The second half of the novel is his trial and his execution. Camus published it in July 1942 under the German occupation of France, through Gallimard. It is now one of the most widely read novels of the twentieth century, with tens of millions of copies in print. Camus won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. He was killed in a car accident in 1960, at forty-six.
The Stranger is on every list of the most important novels of the century because it does something that very few novels manage: it dramatises a philosophical position — the absurdist position that the universe is indifferent to human life and human meaning — through a character rather than through argument. Meursault is not a nihilist or a sociopath in the clinical sense; he is a man who simply cannot perform the emotional responses that society requires, and the novel is about what society does to people who will not perform. The opening sentence — “Today, Maman died. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know” — is the most famous opening in twentieth-century French literature. Read it alongside The Myth of Sisyphus, which is the philosophical argument Meursault embodies.
The Myth of Sisyphus
Camus opens with the claim that there is only one truly serious philosophical question: whether life is worth living. From there, he develops his account of the absurd — the gap between the human need for meaning and clarity and the universe’s complete silence on the subject — and argues that the correct response to the absurd is neither suicide nor a leap of faith, but revolt: the conscious, defiant continuation of life in full awareness of its meaninglessness. The essay concludes with the image of Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to roll his rock up the hill forever, watching it fall back, and beginning again — and Camus’s claim that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Published simultaneously with The Stranger in 1942 under the occupation.
The Myth of Sisyphus is the philosophical companion piece to The Stranger — the argument that the novel dramatises. Read together, they constitute one of the most complete statements of an intellectual and moral position that twentieth-century literature produced. The essay is not technically difficult; Camus deliberately wrote for readers outside the academy, and the prose is as clear and precise as the fiction. The opening question — is life worth living? — is the question that the war years made impossible to avoid, and Camus’s answer — yes, but not for the reasons you might expect — is the one that gave the postwar generation something to hold on to. Read this after The Stranger, or before it.
Chess Story
On a transatlantic ocean liner, a world chess champion is persuaded to play a game against a group of passengers. Among them is an Austrian man named Dr. B, who reveals that he learned to play chess in an unusual way: he spent months in solitary confinement under the Gestapo, where his only mental occupation was a chess manual he had found and memorised completely. He played thousands of games against himself, inside his own mind, until he could no longer distinguish between the games in his head and reality. Zweig completed the novella in Brazil in early 1942. He and his wife took their lives on February 22nd of that year, leaving a farewell letter in which he wrote that he no longer had the strength to begin again. Chess Story was published posthumously.
Chess Story is the most devastating book on this list — not because of what happens in it, but because of who wrote it and when. Zweig was one of the most widely read European writers of the first half of the century, a humanist and pacifist who had watched the culture he loved destroy itself, and who had spent years in exile unable to write in the ways he knew how. The novella is about what happens to a mind under totalitarian isolation — the specific psychological damage of being left alone with nothing but your own thoughts — and it was written by a man who was experiencing a version of exactly that. That Zweig completed it and then died before it could be published is one of the most painful facts in twentieth-century literary history.
The Screwtape Letters
Screwtape is a senior devil in the bureaucracy of Hell, and he is writing a series of letters to his nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter assigned to secure the damnation of a young English man. The letters advise Wormwood on how to exploit his patient’s weaknesses, confuse his thinking, undermine his relationships, and prevent him from attending to the things that might actually make him good. Lewis published the letters as a serial in The Guardian in 1941 and collected them as a book in 1942. They made him an international celebrity overnight. He later said writing the book was an unpleasant experience, because it required him to sustain a diabolical point of view throughout.
The Screwtape Letters works on two levels simultaneously, and both of them are worth taking seriously. The first is as a work of Christian apologetics: Lewis is using the inverted perspective of a devil’s advice manual to make the positive case for what a good human life looks like, by showing in detail what the obstacles to it are. The second is as a work of moral psychology: the temptations Screwtape describes — distraction, self-pity, the confusion of spiritual life with emotional self-indulgence, the subtle corruption of good intentions — are recognisable regardless of one’s beliefs. You do not have to be a Christian to find this book uncomfortably accurate. Read it as a portrait of how the good deteriorates in ordinary circumstances, not extraordinary ones.
Go Down, Moses
Seven interconnected stories about the McCaslin family of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi — a family that contains both white landowners and Black descendants of the same patriarch — spanning from before the Civil War to 1940. The stories trace the inheritance of guilt and land and race across three generations, and include “The Bear,” Faulkner’s long hunting story in which a boy named Ike McCaslin pursues a legendary bear through the Mississippi wilderness and, in doing so, confronts the full weight of what his family has owned and done. The book is sometimes published as a novel, sometimes as a story collection; Faulkner called it a novel. It is among his most complex and most admired works.
Go Down, Moses is the Faulkner book to read if you want to understand what he was actually doing — which was not simply being difficult, but constructing a narrative form adequate to the actual complexity of Southern history: the way that the past and present exist simultaneously, the way that race and land and guilt cannot be disentangled, the way that knowledge of what happened and refusal to act on that knowledge are different forms of the same corruption. “The Bear” alone would justify the book’s place on any list of the essential American fiction of the century. Read it knowing that you will need to read it twice.
The Moon Is Down
A small, unnamed northern town — clearly Norwegian — is occupied by an unnamed foreign army — clearly German. The novel follows both the occupiers and the occupied: the colonel who believes that people can be reasoned into accepting subjugation, the mayor who understands that they cannot, and the ordinary townspeople who begin, slowly and at great cost, to resist. Steinbeck published it in March 1942 and it was immediately banned in all Nazi-occupied countries. Clandestine editions were printed in occupied Norway, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark. It was parachuted into occupied Europe by the Office of Strategic Services. The King of Norway awarded Steinbeck the Haakon VII Freedom Cross after the war.
The Moon Is Down is the Steinbeck novel most outside his usual reputation — not the California farms and the Dust Bowl migration, but a study of occupation and resistance that was written as propaganda in the best sense: an argument for a political position made through specific, credible characters whose behaviour you understand. Its claim — that free people cannot be permanently subjugated because the desire for freedom is itself a kind of force — was the claim that people living under occupation needed to hear in 1942. That it was read clandestinely throughout occupied Europe, that people risked their lives to print and distribute it, is the most direct test of a book’s power that literature has. Read it knowing what it cost to read it then.
Berlin Diary
William Shirer was a CBS Radio correspondent in Berlin from 1934 to 1940, and his diary is the record of those years: the Nuremberg rallies, the Anschluss in Austria, the occupation of the Sudetenland, the invasion of Poland, the fall of France — witnessed from inside Germany by an American journalist who was filing dispatches under Nazi censorship and keeping the truth in a private journal he smuggled out in 1940. The book reached number one on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list and became one of the most important works of documentary writing about the rise of the Third Reich. It led eventually to Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), one of the great works of postwar historical writing.
Berlin Diary is on this list as the indispensable record of how the catastrophe that produced all the other books on this list actually felt from the inside — from inside Germany, in real time, in the years when it was still possible to believe it might not happen, and then in the years when it was happening and no one could stop it. Shirer’s diary has the specific authority of someone who was there, who filed the reports, who saw the rallies and the crowds and the ordinary Germans who went along with it. His later anguish — at having understood what was coming and having been unable to prevent it — is present throughout. Read it to understand the context in which everything else on this page was written.
Where to start
If you want the single most important book of the year
→ Read The Stranger. The most widely read French novel of the twentieth century, published under the occupation at twenty-eight by a man who would win the Nobel Prize fifteen years later. The opening sentence is the most famous in modern French literature. Read it in one sitting.
If you want to understand what the war did to the mind of a great European writer
→ Read Chess Story. Stefan Zweig completed it days before his death. It is about the psychological destruction wrought by totalitarian isolation, written by a man experiencing his own version of it. It is short — two hours — and it will stay with you for months.
If you want to understand the philosophical ground beneath the whole decade
→ Read The Myth of Sisyphus alongside The Stranger. Together they constitute one of the most complete intellectual and artistic responses to the question the war years made unavoidable: what do you do with a life when you know the universe does not care whether you live it well?
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“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” — Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
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