Reading List · Lisanne Swart
The Best Books of 1960
1960 was one of the most consequential years in the history of twentieth-century publishing — not just for what was written, but for what was decided. In November, a British jury acquitted Penguin Books of obscenity charges for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and the verdict effectively ended literary censorship in the United Kingdom. In the same year, Harper Lee published a novel about racial injustice in the American South that won the Pulitzer Prize and has never gone out of print. Elie Wiesel’s account of Auschwitz reached English-language readers for the first time. Edna O’Brien published her debut and had it banned in Ireland. John Updike launched the sequence that would occupy him for the next thirty years. And the English translation of Lampedusa’s posthumous masterpiece appeared, introducing one of the great sentences in modern literature to the anglophone world. A remarkable year by any measure.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 books · Fiction & Memoir · Published 1960
To Kill a Mockingbird
Scout Finch is six years old when the novel opens. She lives in Maycomb, Alabama, with her brother Jem and their father Atticus, a lawyer who has agreed to defend Tom Robinson — a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in a town that has already decided on its verdict. The novel follows the trial and its aftermath through Scout’s eyes, alongside the story of Boo Radley, the mysterious recluse next door who the children are simultaneously afraid of and fascinated by. Harper Lee spent two and a half years writing it. It was published on 11 July 1960, became a bestseller within weeks, and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Lee published almost nothing else.
What makes To Kill a Mockingbird last is the narrator. Scout is a child, which means she notices the injustice in Maycomb with a directness that an adult narrator would soften or contextualise. She does not yet understand why things are the way they are, and so she asks why — and the novel’s power comes from the gap between her questions and the answers she is given. Atticus is one of the great father figures in fiction: a man who tries to teach his children to see the world as it is without losing the capacity to imagine how it might be different.
Rabbit, Run
Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is twenty-six years old, living in a small Pennsylvania town, working as a demonstrator for a kitchen gadget, married to a woman who drinks. One evening he gets in the car and starts driving south. He does not get very far. The novel follows the weeks after this aborted escape — his relationship with a woman he meets, his return to his wife, the consequences of his inability to stay and his inability to go. Updike wrote Rabbit, Run in the present tense, which was then unusual, as a way of staying inside Rabbit’s consciousness as it moved. Three sequels followed across the next thirty years: Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest.
Rabbit Angstrom is not a sympathetic character in any simple sense — he is selfish, inarticulate, and causes real damage to the people around him. But Updike does something essential: he makes you feel exactly what Rabbit feels, the sense of something narrowing, a life closing in before it has properly opened. The present tense keeps you inside his body, his irritations, his moments of grace on the basketball court. The novel is a diagnosis of a particular kind of American male disappointment that has not become any less relevant in sixty years.
Night
In the spring of 1944, Elie Wiesel was fifteen years old and living in the town of Sighet, in what is now Romania. In May the Jews of Sighet were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Night is Wiesel’s account of what followed — the arrival at the camps, the separation from his mother and sisters whom he never saw again, his survival alongside his father, his father’s death from exhaustion and dysentery in January 1945, weeks before liberation. The book was originally written in Yiddish, published in French in 1958, and reached English-language readers for the first time in 1960. Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Night has never gone out of print.
Wiesel writes with a restraint that makes the horror more present, not less. He does not editorialise. He does not ask the reader to feel anything in particular — he simply describes what happened, in prose that is stripped of everything unnecessary, and allows the weight of events to accumulate. The destruction of his faith is the book’s central subject — not a polemic about God’s absence but a precise account of what it is to watch the world you believed in cease to be true. It is one of the most important books of the twentieth century and one of the shortest.
The Country Girls
Cáitlín Brady and Baba Brennan grow up together in rural County Clare in the 1950s. Cáitlín is gentle, romantic, and oppressed by a world that seems designed to keep her in her place. Baba is wily, sharp, and determined to escape. The novel follows their attempt to move from the convent school they have been expelled from to Dublin, and the men and disappointments they encounter there. O’Brien wrote it in three weeks while her children were asleep. It was published in 1960 and immediately banned in Ireland by the Censorship Board as indecent and obscene — a designation that the local priest in O’Brien’s home parish amplified by publicly burning copies. Two sequels followed: The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss.
O’Brien was doing something in 1960 that had not been done in Irish literature before: writing about women’s interiority — about desire, loneliness, and the particular suffocation of a society that had decided what women were for — without apology and without euphemism. The banning was, as these things often are, a confirmation that the book had landed somewhere true. Cáitlín is one of the great naive heroines of modern fiction: you see what she cannot see about herself, and that double vision is what gives the novel its particular ache.
The Leopard
Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, is watching his world end. It is the 1860s, and Garibaldi’s campaign to unify Italy is transforming Sicily: the old aristocracy is being displaced by the new bourgeoisie, the forms of power are changing, and the Prince — intelligent, melancholic, too clear-eyed for comfort — can see exactly what is happening and cannot stop it. Lampedusa spent the last years of his life writing the novel. He died in 1957, before it was published. It appeared in Italy in 1958, rejected by two major publishers before being accepted by Feltrinelli; it won the Premio Strega. The English translation, by Archibald Colquhoun, appeared in 1960.
The Leopard contains one of the most famous lines in modern literature: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” It is spoken by the Prince’s nephew Tancredi, but it describes the Prince’s own understanding of his situation — and of the mechanism by which power perpetuates itself across political change. The novel is elegiac in its tone and precise in its intelligence. It is about Sicily, about aristocracy, about the nature of historical change, and about the particular experience of being lucid enough to understand your own obsolescence.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Constance Chatterley is married to Sir Clifford, a baronet paralysed from the waist down after the First World War. The marriage is intellectual but not physical. She begins an affair with Mellors, the gamekeeper on their Nottinghamshire estate. Lawrence wrote the novel in 1928, but it was immediately banned in England and America for its explicit depiction of sexuality and its use of language that had not previously appeared in a mainstream publication. In August 1960, Penguin Books published the unexpurgated text in Britain — the edition that had been available in Paris for thirty years but had never been legally sold in England. The trial for obscenity began in October. Penguin won. The verdict in November 1960 sold 200,000 copies on the day of its announcement and effectively ended literary censorship in the United Kingdom.
The novel itself is important — it is Lawrence at full force, writing about class, the body, industrialism, and the particular damage that modern life does to the capacity for feeling. But the 1960 Penguin edition is as significant as the book inside it. The trial changed what could be published in Britain, and the defence witnesses — who included E.M. Forster, Rebecca West, and Richard Hoggart — made the argument that literature has a moral seriousness that the law was wrong to override. It is one of the hinge moments in the history of what fiction is allowed to do.
How to navigate this list
If you want the most enduring novel
→ Read To Kill a Mockingbird. It has never stopped being necessary and it has never stopped being readable.
If you want the most important memoir
→ Read Night. It is short, devastating, and one of the foundational texts of Holocaust literature.
If you want the most elegant novel
→ Read The Leopard. Lampedusa wrote it once, perfectly, and then died. It has never been surpassed as a novel about the end of a world.
If you want to understand a pivotal moment in publishing history
→ Lady Chatterley’s Lover (the 1960 Penguin edition) — read it alongside the story of the trial.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1960
What books were published in 1960?
1960 was one of the most important years in twentieth-century publishing. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee won the Pulitzer Prize and became an immediate classic. Rabbit, Run by John Updike launched one of the great American novel sequences. Night by Elie Wiesel reached English-language readers for the first time. Edna O’Brien’s debut The Country Girls was published and immediately banned in Ireland. The English translation of Lampedusa’s The Leopard appeared. And Penguin published Lady Chatterley’s Lover in full for the first time in England, winning an obscenity trial that changed the course of British publishing.
What is To Kill a Mockingbird about?
To Kill a Mockingbird is set in Maycomb, Alabama, in the 1930s. Scout Finch, aged six at the novel’s opening, narrates the story of her father Atticus — a lawyer who agrees to defend Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. The novel follows the trial and its aftermath, refracted through Scout’s childhood understanding of the adult world around her. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and has sold over forty million copies. Harper Lee published almost nothing else.
What is Night by Elie Wiesel about?
Night is Elie Wiesel’s account of his deportation to Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944, when he was fifteen. It describes the death of his family, the destruction of his faith, and his survival. Originally written in Yiddish and published in French in 1958, the first English translation appeared in 1960. Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. Night is one of the foundational texts of Holocaust literature and has never gone out of print.
What is The Leopard about?
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa is set in Sicily during the Risorgimento — the period of Italian unification in the 1860s — and follows Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, as he navigates the collapse of the aristocratic world he was born into. The novel’s most famous line — “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change” — has become one of the most quoted sentences in modern literature. Lampedusa died before the novel was published; it appeared posthumously in Italy in 1958 and in English translation in 1960.
Why is the 1960 Lady Chatterley’s Lover edition significant?
D.H. Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1928, but it was immediately banned in England and the United States for its explicit depiction of sexuality. In 1960, Penguin Books published the unexpurgated text in Britain, resulting in a prosecution for obscenity under the Obscene Publications Act. Penguin won the case in November 1960, and the verdict effectively ended literary censorship in the United Kingdom. The edition sold 200,000 copies on the day of its release.
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