Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1943
1943 is the year the war turns. Stalingrad falls to the Soviets in February. The Allies land in Sicily in July. The Pacific campaign grinds forward island by island. It is a year in which the outcome is no longer uncertain — which means it is a year in which people begin, tentatively, to think about what comes after. The books of 1943 reflect this double consciousness: a literature that is inside the catastrophe and already trying to imagine the world it will leave behind. A woman in Brooklyn publishes a novel about her own childhood that sells three million copies in two years and never goes out of print. A French aviator publishes a children’s book in New York — in exile, his homeland under occupation — that will eventually sell a hundred and forty million copies in six hundred languages. A twenty-three-year-old Brazilian woman publishes a debut novel in a stream-of-consciousness prose that her country has never seen before. A French philosopher publishes the foundational text of existentialism in occupied Paris. And T.S. Eliot publishes the last of his Four Quartets, completing a meditation on time and memory and meaning that had begun in 1936 and that will win him the Nobel Prize five years later.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction, Poetry & Nonfiction · Updated June 2026
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Francie Nolan is eleven years old, growing up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at the turn of the twentieth century — the child of an Irish-German immigrant family that is poor in the specific way of people who have not yet lost hope of ceasing to be so. Her father Johnny is a singing waiter who drinks; her mother Katie is the practical force that holds everything together; her brother Neeley is her closest companion. The novel follows Francie from childhood into young adulthood, through her father’s death and her mother’s second pregnancy and her own first job, and it does all of this with a warmth and a specificity and a refusal of sentimentality that made it unlike anything that had come before it. Published in August 1943, it sold nearly three million copies in the first two years and has never gone out of print. Oprah Winfrey has described it as the book that moved her most when she was growing up. Elia Kazan directed the 1945 film.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is one of those novels whose popular success has made literary culture suspicious of it — as if a book that sells millions of copies must be sentimental, must be simple, must be less than serious. It is none of these things. Betty Smith was writing about the interior lives of working-class women and children at a time when literary fiction rarely gave them the attention she does, and she was doing it in prose that is clear, specific, and completely exact. The tree of the title — an ailanthus, which grows through concrete in vacant lots throughout Brooklyn — is the right image for what she is saying: some things survive by being adapted to conditions that should not support life. Read it without condescension and it will surprise you.
The Little Prince
A pilot crash-lands in the Sahara desert and meets a small boy who has come from a tiny asteroid where he lived alone with a rose he loved and three volcanoes he tended. The boy has been travelling through the solar system, visiting planets each ruled by a single adult — a king with no subjects, a businessman counting stars he believes he owns, a lamplighter faithfully lighting his lamp every minute — and has arrived on Earth, where he meets a fox who teaches him what it means to tame something and be responsible for it. Saint-Exupéry was a French aviator in exile in New York when he wrote and illustrated the book. He dedicated it to his friend Léon Werth, with a note apologising to children for dedicating it to a grown-up, and explaining that Léon Werth was a child once. Saint-Exupéry disappeared on a reconnaissance mission in 1944. The book has sold approximately 140 million copies worldwide and been translated into over 600 languages — one of the best-selling books in history.
The Little Prince is on this list because of what it actually is, which is different from what its reputation suggests. It is not a whimsical children’s book. It is a meditation on love, loss, responsibility, and what adults lose when they grow up — written by a man who was watching his country destroyed, who was far from home, who had nearly died in a series of crashes, and who would be dead within a year. The fox’s lesson — that you are responsible, forever, for what you have tamed — is one of the most concentrated statements of an ethical position in twentieth-century literature. The illustrations are his. The sadness underneath the lightness is real.
The Fountainhead
Howard Roark is a young architect who refuses to compromise his designs for anyone — not for commissions, not for success, not for the woman he loves. He is opposed by Ellsworth Toohey, a architecture critic who understands that the greatest threat to collective mediocrity is the individual who will not be bought, and by Peter Keating, a talented man who has spent his career giving people what they want rather than what he believes in. The novel was rejected by twelve publishers before Bobbs-Merrill accepted it; only 7,500 copies were initially printed. It found its audience slowly and then overwhelmingly. It has sold over ten million copies. Rand wrote the screenplay for the 1949 film starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal.
The Fountainhead is on this list not as an endorsement of Ayn Rand’s philosophy — Objectivism has real and serious problems, and the novel’s treatment of women is difficult — but because it is impossible to account for twentieth-century American culture without it, and because dismissing it without reading it is a mistake. Whatever one thinks of Rand’s argument, The Fountainhead is a novel in the tradition of the great polemical novels: it has a clear position, it dramatises it with real power, and it asks questions about integrity, creativity, and the relationship between the individual and society that do not have simple answers. The Howard Roark courtroom speech is one of the most effective pieces of persuasive prose in American fiction. Know it so you can argue with it.
Near to the Wild Heart
Joana is a young woman who does not fit — not as a child, not in her marriage, not in the world. The novel follows her inner life in a prose that does not describe experience so much as enact it: stream of consciousness, precise and strange, reminiscent of Woolf and Joyce but entirely itself. Lispector was twenty-three years old when she published it in Brazil, having written it between March and November 1942. It won the Graça Aranha Prize and made her immediately prominent in Brazilian letters. She said of her relationship to her protagonist: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” The novel was not translated into English until 1990. It is now considered one of the foundational texts of Brazilian modernism.
Near to the Wild Heart is the most surprising novel on this list — surprising because it is so formally accomplished for a first novel, surprising because it was published in Brazil in 1943 and did not reach English-language readers for nearly fifty years, and surprising because it reads as absolutely contemporary. Lispector was doing something that most European modernists had not managed: she was writing stream of consciousness that was genuinely interior, that did not impose a literary narrative logic on its material but followed the actual movement of a mind. The English translation is by Alison Entrekin and is the right edition. Read it slowly, and know that you are reading a writer who will become one of the most important in the Portuguese language.
Being and Nothingness
Sartre’s philosophical magnum opus, published in Paris in June 1943 under the German occupation, argues that human existence precedes and determines human essence — that there is no fixed human nature, that we are condemned to be free, and that this freedom is the source of both our anxiety and our responsibility. Being and Nothingness is not a novel but it is on this list because it is the foundational text of existentialism — the philosophical position that shaped more serious literature in the second half of the twentieth century than any other single work of thought. The concepts Sartre develops here — bad faith, the gaze of the Other, radical freedom — became the vocabulary in which the postwar generation understood itself.
Being and Nothingness matters to literary readers because it is the philosophical background against which almost all serious postwar fiction operates. Camus, de Beauvoir, Beckett, Salinger, Bellow, Ellison — the writers who mattered in the decades that followed 1943 were all in conversation with what Sartre was arguing here, even when they were arguing against it. The central claim — that existence precedes essence, that we are not born with a fixed nature but create ourselves through our choices — was the most consequential philosophical statement of the twentieth century for fiction, because it meant that character was not destiny but decision. You do not have to read all 700 pages. The introduction alone will change how you read everything else.
Four Quartets
Four long poems — Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, Little Gidding — published together as a complete work in 1943. Each poem is named for a place: an English country house, a Somerset village where Eliot’s ancestors came from, a treacherous reef off Cape Ann, a ruined church in Huntingdonshire. Together they form a sustained meditation on time — on what time is, whether the present moment exists, what it means to move through time, and whether there is any redemption from the repetitions of history. Eliot wrote Little Gidding during the London Blitz, and it is inflected by the specific experience of walking through a city being destroyed at night. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, and the committee cited Four Quartets specifically.
Four Quartets is the hardest and the most rewarding thing on this list. Eliot is asking questions that most people cannot bring themselves to ask directly: whether time is real, whether the self that acts in time is the same self throughout, whether love is possible between people who are necessarily incomplete, whether history has any direction. He asks them in verse of extraordinary musicality and precision — the opening lines of Burnt Norton and Little Gidding are among the finest in the English language. This is not easy reading and does not pretend to be. Read it in a single sitting if you can, aloud if possible, and then again in a year.
Guadalcanal Diary
Richard Tregaskis was a twenty-six-year-old war correspondent for the International News Service when he landed with the First Marine Division on Guadalcanal in August 1942 — one of the first American offensive operations of the Pacific war. He spent the next two months with the Marines under continuous Japanese attack, keeping a daily diary that he published intact and almost unedited in early 1943. The book spent months at the top of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list and was read by millions of Americans who had sons, husbands, and brothers in the Pacific. It was the first close-up account of what the island fighting actually looked and felt like — the heat, the malaria, the air raids, the daily reality of men trying to hold ground against an enemy they could not see.
Guadalcanal Diary matters because it changed what war reporting was. Tregaskis was not writing the rhetoric of heroism that had characterised most official accounts of the war — he was writing what he had seen, in the order he had seen it, with the specific physical details that previous war correspondents had either not had access to or had chosen to omit. The diary form was both a limitation and an advantage: he could not know how it would end, and that unknowing is present in every page. It is the template for the embedded journalism that would characterise coverage of every subsequent American war, from Vietnam to Iraq. Read it as the founding document of a tradition.
Where to start
If you want the novel that has never stopped being read
→ Start with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Betty Smith’s debut has sold over four million copies, never gone out of print, and moved more people than almost any other American novel of the century. Do not let its popular reputation put you off.
If you want the book that is not what it appears to be
→ Read The Little Prince. It is not a children’s book. It is a meditation on love, loss, and responsibility written by a man in exile who was dead within a year. The sadness underneath the lightness is what makes it last.
If you want the book that changed how a generation thought about freedom
→ Read Being and Nothingness — or at least its introduction. Sartre’s central argument that we create ourselves through our choices became the vocabulary in which the postwar generation understood itself, and almost every serious novel of the following thirty years is in conversation with it.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1943
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“You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
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