Reading List · Lisanne Swart
The Best Books of 1965
1965 was a year of reckoning. Autobiography was the dominant mode: Malcolm X told his life story to Alex Haley in more than fifty interviews between 1963 and 1965, and the book appeared eight months after his death as one of the essential documents of the twentieth century. Truman Capote spent four consecutive issues of The New Yorker inventing a genre. Sylvia Plath’s Ariel arrived posthumously and changed what a poem could say about the body and about death. John Fowles published The Magus, the novel he had written first and published third. Ralph Nader published a book about cars that ended in federal law. And in Moscow a novel finished in 1940 was still waiting for a printer. It was a year in which writers were working at the outermost edge of what their forms could hold.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Five first published in 1965, one that 1965 was waiting for
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The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X told his life story to Alex Haley in more than fifty interviews between 1963 and 1965. He was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan on 21 February 1965. Doubleday cancelled its contract three weeks later, out of concern for the safety of its staff; Grove Press published the book on 29 October that year. It covers his childhood in Nebraska and Michigan, his father’s death in 1931, officially ruled a streetcar accident and believed by his mother to have been murder by the Black Legion, his mother’s breakdown and institutionalisation, his years as a street hustler and burglar in Boston and Harlem, his conversion to the Nation of Islam in prison, his rise to become the Nation’s most prominent spokesman, his break with Elijah Muhammad — the affairs with young secretaries that Muhammad confirmed to him in 1963, the remark about the Kennedy assassination that got him silenced for ninety days, and his departure from the Nation on 8 March 1964 — his pilgrimage to Mecca and conversion to Sunni Islam, and the death threats that preceded his assassination. The final chapters, written in the weeks before he died, show a man who had changed his views substantially and was still changing them. It is one of the most important books ever published in the United States.
What the Autobiography does that almost no other book does is make transformation completely visible. Malcolm X is not the same person on the last page as on the first — his politics, his theology, his understanding of race and of himself have all changed, more than once, in ways that the narrative tracks without smoothing over the contradictions. The book is also, at the level of sentence and scene, a brilliant piece of writing: Haley’s role was to ask questions and organise, but the voice is entirely Malcolm’s, and it is one of the great American voices of the twentieth century. Its argument that self-transformation is possible — that a person is not fixed by their circumstances — has influenced everyone from James Baldwin to Barack Obama.
In Cold Blood
On 15 November 1959, four members of the Clutter family were murdered in their farmhouse in Holcomb, Kansas. The killers were arrested in Las Vegas on 30 December 1959: Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, two petty criminals who had driven to the farm expecting to find a safe full of cash and found nothing. Truman Capote read about the murders in the New York Times and travelled to Kansas with Harper Lee to report on the aftermath. He spent six years on the book, interviewing everyone involved, including Smith and Hickock on death row, with whom he also corresponded at length. In Cold Blood ran across four consecutive issues of The New Yorker, from 25 September to 16 October 1965, and Random House published it as a book on 17 January 1966. Smith and Hickock had been hanged on 14 April 1965, five months before the first instalment appeared. It is the founding text of what Capote called the “nonfiction novel”: a work of journalism written with the techniques of literary fiction.
Capote’s achievement is to make you understand Perry Smith — not excuse him, but understand him — without for a moment minimising what he did to the Clutters. The portrait of Smith’s childhood is one of the most devastating accounts of how neglect and violence produce violence that exists in American literature. The book is also a portrait of rural Kansas, of the bewilderment of a community that had believed itself safe, and of the machinery of American capital punishment. The moral complication at the book’s centre — Capote needed the executions to happen in order to finish his book, and he had come to care about the men who would be executed — is one it never resolves, and is better for not resolving.
Ariel
Plath wrote the poems collected in Ariel in a frenzy of productivity in the autumn and winter of 1962, in the months after her separation from Ted Hughes and in the weeks before her death by suicide in February 1963. Hughes edited and arranged the collection, which Faber and Faber published in London in 1965 and Harper & Row in New York in 1966 — in a different order from the manuscript Plath had left, dropping some of the poems she had chosen and adding others she had not. The collection includes “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” “Fever 103°,” “Cut,” and the title poem. The poems are written at an intensity that has no equivalent in twentieth-century English-language poetry: the body, death, rebirth, the father, the husband, the self as spectacle — all of it compressed into images of extraordinary precision and violence. Ariel was an immediate literary sensation and remains one of the most read poetry collections in English.
The argument about Ariel — whether it is confessional, whether it is feminist, whether its fame is inseparable from the circumstances of Plath’s death, whether Hughes’s editorial choices distorted Plath’s intentions — has never been resolved and probably cannot be. What is not arguable is the quality of the poems themselves: they are written at a pitch of linguistic control and emotional extremity that is entirely her own, and that has never been replicated. The relationship between Ariel and The Bell Jar — published two years earlier, in the last month of her life, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas — is worth understanding: the poems arrived after the novel, and they are doing something the novel could not.
The Magus
Nicholas Urfe is a young Englishman who takes a teaching job on a remote Greek island to escape his life. There he encounters Maurice Conchis, a wealthy recluse who lives in a villa called Bourani and who begins to stage a series of elaborate, disorienting theatrical events for Nicholas — events that involve actors, apparent visions, historical narratives, psychological manipulation, and a beautiful woman who may be many things. The novel follows Nicholas’s attempts to understand what Conchis is doing to him, and whether it is possible to understand it. Jonathan Cape published it in 1965. It was the first novel Fowles wrote and the third book he published, after The Collector (1963) and The Aristos (1964). He kept reworking it and published a revised version in 1977; both versions remain in print. The Magus was one of the most widely read literary novels of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly among young readers who had no reliable framework for what it was doing.
Fowles is working with ideas about freedom, identity, and the relationship between fiction and reality that were in the air in the 1960s — existentialism, game theory, the nouveau roman — but The Magus wears its influences lightly enough to remain genuinely gripping as a narrative. The manipulation at its centre — who is doing it to whom, and why — keeps you reading. What the novel is ultimately arguing, about the necessity of uncertainty and the insufficiency of any explanation, is more serious than its surface suggests. It is also a book about a certain kind of young man who believes himself exceptional and needs to be disabused of this belief — a subject Fowles understood from the inside.
Unsafe at Any Speed
Ralph Nader’s investigation into the American automobile industry and its systematic failure to prioritise safety over profit. Grossman Publishers brought it out on 30 November 1965. The Chevrolet Corvair — a rear-engined car that Nader argued was dangerously prone to rollover because of design decisions General Motors made to reduce costs — is chapter one of eight; the rest of the book is about dashboards, crash survivability, exhaust pollution, styling, and the habit of blaming drivers for what engineers had built. More broadly, it argues that the automobile industry had the technology to make cars significantly safer and had chosen not to use it, and that the regulatory framework supposed to protect consumers was captured by the industry it was meant to regulate. General Motors’ response — hiring private investigators to dig up damaging personal information about Nader, and having him followed and harassed — became public knowledge when Nader sued. The president of General Motors, James Roche, apologised to him before a Senate subcommittee on 22 March 1966; Lyndon Johnson signed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act on 9 September that year; and in January 1970 the New York Court of Appeals ruled that Nader’s invasion-of-privacy claim could go forward, after which General Motors settled out of court in August 1970 for 425,000 dollars, which he put into the Center for Auto Safety.
Unsafe at Any Speed is on this list because it is one of the clearest examples of a book that changed a specific, concrete thing in the world: the Senate hearings had already opened in March 1965, eight months before the book came out, but it was Nader’s case — and then General Motors’ response to it — that turned those hearings into federal law. Nader’s argument — that corporate decisions about product safety are political decisions that require political accountability, not just market accountability — was not new, but he made it in enough detail, about a specific enough product, that it could not be ignored. The pattern of GM’s response — attacking the critic rather than engaging the criticism — is a template that has been followed many times since.
The Master and Margarita
Bulgakov worked on The Master and Margarita in secret from 1928 until his death in 1940, burning the first manuscript in 1930 and then writing it again. He never saw it in print. A censored version appeared in the Soviet literary journal Moskva in issue 11 of 1966 and issue 1 of 1967, with about twelve percent of the text cut; a manuscript was smuggled out of the Soviet Union, and YMCA Press in Paris published the first uncensored book edition in 1967. It is on this page because it is the book of 1965 that was already finished and waiting — not because it was published that year, which it was not. The novel operates on two intertwined planes: contemporary Moscow, where the Devil arrives in the person of Professor Woland accompanied by a retinue of demons and proceeds to expose the corruption, cowardice, and conformity of Soviet literary society; and ancient Jerusalem, where Pontius Pilate interrogates Yeshua Ha-Nozri (Jesus) and makes the decision that will haunt him for eternity. The Master is a novelist who has written a book about Pilate and been destroyed by the Soviet literary establishment; Margarita is the woman who loves him and makes a bargain with the Devil to save him.
Bulgakov wrote this novel knowing it would never be published in his lifetime, and the freedom that knowledge gave him is visible on every page. The Master and Margarita is simultaneously a devastating satire of Soviet bureaucracy and literary politics, a philosophical novel about courage and cowardice, a love story, and a work of pure comic invention — the scenes in which Woland’s retinue dismantles Moscow’s cultural elite are among the funniest things in twentieth-century fiction. The two timelines illuminate each other: the cowardice of Pilate and the cowardice of the Soviet apparatchiks are the same cowardice. It is one of the indispensable novels of the century.
How to navigate this list
If you read one book from this year
→ The Autobiography of Malcolm X. One of the most important books ever published in the United States. Start there.
If you want the book that invented a genre
→ In Cold Blood. Capote called it the nonfiction novel. He was right, and it has never been bettered.
If you want the most formally radical novel
→ The Master and Margarita. Written in secret, published posthumously, and completely unlike anything else.
If you want the poetry collection that changed everything
→ Ariel. Read it after The Bell Jar. The two books are in conversation.
Books first published in 1965
Twelve books whose first publication genuinely falls in 1965, next to the six above. The line under each is what it is for, not what it is about.
Dune
First Nebula
Frank Herbert · Chilton Books
Rejected by more than twenty publishers, then the first novel ever to win the Nebula.
The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosiński · Houghton Mifflin
His first novel, though not his first book. Presented as memoir for years; it is not.
An American Dream
Norman Mailer · Dial Press, March
Written as a serial in Esquire, then rewritten by about forty percent for the book.
Everything That Rises Must Converge
Posthumous
Flannery O’Connor · Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Nine stories, published the year after she died.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Kurt Vonnegut · Holt, Rinehart and Winston, April
His fifth novel, and the first appearance of Kilgore Trout.
Stoner
John Williams · Viking, April
Sold fewer than two thousand copies and went out of print within a year.
The Source
Best seller
James A. Michener · Random House
The best-selling novel in America that year.
The Looking Glass War
John le Carré · Heinemann, June
Written against the readers who had found the last one romantic.
Les Choses
Prix Renaudot
Georges Perec · Julliard
His first novel. Printed in about a thousand copies, then sold about a hundred thousand.
Manchild in the Promised Land
Debut
Claude Brown · Macmillan
His first book, and it has sold more than four million copies since.
Up the Down Staircase
Bel Kaufman · Prentice-Hall
Number two on the year’s bestseller list, behind The Source.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Philip K. Dick · Doubleday
One of the strangest books of a strange year.
First books published in 1965
Five writers whose first book — or first novel, which is not always the same thing — came out in 1965. The difference matters more often than you would think, and it is where most lists go wrong.
Les Choses
Georges Perec
His first novel, two years before he joined the Oulipo. It won the Prix Renaudot.
Manchild in the Promised Land
Claude Brown
His first book. His second did not follow until 1976.
Eleven Poems
Seamus Heaney
A sixteen-page pamphlet from Festival Publications at Queen’s University Belfast, November 1965 — his first published book. All but one of its poems went into Death of a Naturalist the following year, which is his first proper collection.
Unsafe at Any Speed
Ralph Nader
He was thirty-one, and it is the book that made his name. It is usually called his first book; I could not find a catalogue record that says so outright, so this page does not claim it.
The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosiński
His first novel — but not, as is often written, his first book. Two works of nonfiction had appeared in 1960 and 1962 under the name Joseph Novak.
1965 in books, in short
- Nobel Prize
- Mikhail Sholokhov, “for the artistic power and integrity with which, in his epic of the Don, he has given expression to a historic phase in the life of the Russian people”. See every Nobel winner
- Pulitzer, fiction
- The Keepers of the House, Shirley Ann Grau — awarded in 1965 for a book published in 1964. See every Pulitzer winner since 1980
- National Book Award
- Herzog, Saul Bellow — also a 1964 book, winning in 1965
- Prix Goncourt
- L’Adoration, Jacques Borel
- Prix Renaudot
- Les Choses, Georges Perec — a 1965 book, and his first
- Best seller
- The Source by James A. Michener topped the Publishers Weekly list of novels in the United States. Four of that top five were first published in 1965; only Herzog, at number three, was not
Two of the prizes above went to books published in 1964, which is the trap in every list of “1965 books” assembled from prize records: Herzog and The Keepers of the House are both 1964 books. The Goncourt and the Renaudot both went to books of their own year, and one of those two, Les Choses, is in the list above.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1965
What books were published in 1965?
1965 produced some of the most enduring books of the postwar decades. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, told to Alex Haley and published after Malcolm’s assassination in February of that year, became one of the essential documents of twentieth-century American life. Truman Capote serialised In Cold Blood in The New Yorker, inventing what he called the nonfiction novel. Sylvia Plath’s Ariel appeared posthumously and changed what English-language poetry was capable of. John Fowles published The Magus. Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, and the scandal that followed it, turned a set of Senate hearings into federal safety law. Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, finished in 1940, was still unpublished and would not appear in print until 1966, or in full until 1967. Further down this page there is a longer list of the books first published in 1965.
What is the best book from 1965?
If you read one 1965 book, read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. It is the book from that year I recommend most often, and the one that still does something no other book on this page does: it shows a person changing his mind, in public, more than once, without tidying away the contradictions. If you want the book that invented a form rather than a life, read In Cold Blood. If you want poetry, read Ariel.
Which novels were published in 1965?
Among the novels first published in 1965: Dune (Frank Herbert), The Magus (John Fowles), Stoner (John Williams), An American Dream (Norman Mailer), God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (Kurt Vonnegut), The Painted Bird (Jerzy Kosiński), The Source (James A. Michener), The Looking Glass War (John le Carré), Les Choses (Georges Perec), Up the Down Staircase (Bel Kaufman) and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (Philip K. Dick). Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge also appeared that year, the year after she died.
Who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965?
Mikhail Sholokhov, the Soviet novelist of And Quiet Flows the Don. The Swedish Academy’s citation reads: “for the artistic power and integrity with which, in his epic of the Don, he has given expression to a historic phase in the life of the Russian people”. The epic of the Don is And Quiet Flows the Don, which had appeared in four volumes between 1928 and 1940.
Which writers published their first book in 1965?
Georges Perec published Les Choses, his first novel, and won the Prix Renaudot with it. Claude Brown published Manchild in the Promised Land, his first book. Seamus Heaney published Eleven Poems, a sixteen-page pamphlet from Queen’s University Belfast — his first book, though Death of a Naturalist in 1966 is his first proper collection. Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed at thirty-one. And The Painted Bird was Jerzy Kosiński’s first novel, though not his first book: two works of nonfiction had appeared under a pseudonym.
What is The Autobiography of Malcolm X about?
The Autobiography of Malcolm X covers his entire life: his childhood in Nebraska and Michigan, his father’s death in 1931, ruled an accident and believed by his mother to have been murder, his years as a street hustler in Boston and Harlem, his conversion to the Nation of Islam while in prison, his rise to national prominence as the Nation’s most visible spokesman, his break with Elijah Muhammad, his pilgrimage to Mecca and conversion to Sunni Islam, and the death threats that preceded his assassination in February 1965. The book was told to Alex Haley in more than fifty interviews between 1963 and 1965, and Grove Press published it on 29 October 1965 after Doubleday cancelled its contract. What makes it essential is how completely it shows a person in transformation — Malcolm X’s views changed substantially and more than once, and the book tracks those changes without smoothing over the contradictions.
What is In Cold Blood about?
In Cold Blood reconstructs the 1959 murder of four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, and the investigation, capture, trial, and execution of the killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. Capote spent six years on the book, travelling to Kansas with Harper Lee, interviewing everyone involved, and corresponding extensively with Smith and Hickock on death row. The book ran across four consecutive issues of The New Yorker between 25 September and 16 October 1965, and Random House published it on 17 January 1966. Capote called it a nonfiction novel — a work of journalism written with the narrative techniques of literary fiction — and In Cold Blood is the founding text of that genre. Its portrait of Perry Smith in particular, built from his own account of his childhood, is one of the most sustained attempts in American literature to understand how a person arrives at an act of extreme violence.
What is Ariel by Sylvia Plath about?
Ariel is Plath’s second collection, published posthumously by Faber and Faber in 1965, two years after her death, in an arrangement Ted Hughes made. The poems were written in the autumn and winter of 1962, in the period after her separation from Hughes. They deal with the body, death, rebirth, the father, creativity, and the self with an intensity and linguistic precision that has no equivalent in twentieth-century English-language poetry. The collection includes “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” and the title poem. Hughes edited and arranged the collection differently from the manuscript Plath had prepared; the debate about his editorial choices, and what they reveal about his relationship to her legacy, has continued since the 1980s.
What is The Master and Margarita about?
The Master and Margarita operates on two intertwined storylines. In contemporary Moscow, the Devil arrives as Professor Woland, accompanied by a retinue of demons, and proceeds to expose the hypocrisy, cowardice, and conformity of Soviet literary and bureaucratic society through a series of increasingly chaotic supernatural interventions. In ancient Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate interrogates Yeshua Ha-Nozri and makes the moral compromise that will haunt him forever. The Master is a novelist destroyed by the Soviet literary establishment for writing about Pilate; Margarita is the woman who loves him. Bulgakov worked on the novel in secret from 1928 until his death in 1940, burning the first manuscript in 1930; it was first published in a censored Soviet serialisation in Moskva in 1966 and 1967, and uncensored in Paris in 1967.
Was The Master and Margarita published in 1965?
No, and this page says so rather than pretending otherwise. Bulgakov finished the novel in 1940 and died that year without seeing it in print. A censored version appeared in the Soviet journal Moskva in issue 11 of 1966 and issue 1 of 1967, with about twelve percent of the text cut. The first uncensored book edition came out in Paris in 1967, from YMCA Press, printed from a manuscript smuggled out of the Soviet Union. It is on this page because it is the great finished novel that 1965 was still waiting for.
Footnotes
The Autobiography of Malcolm X 5 facts
Grove Press published the book on 29 October 1965. Doubleday had cancelled its contract three weeks after the assassination, out of concern for the safety of its staff.correction
Alex Haley conducted more than fifty in-depth interviews with Malcolm X between 1963 and 1965.
Earl Little died in 1931. The death was officially ruled a streetcar accident; Malcolm’s mother believed he had been murdered by the Black Legion, and Malcolm X himself expressed conflicting beliefs about it as an adult.correction
Malcolm X came to believe the accounts of Elijah Muhammad’s affairs with young secretaries in 1963; after his remark about the Kennedy assassination on 1 December 1963 the Nation silenced him for ninety days, and he announced his departure on 8 March 1964.correction
He was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan on 21 February 1965.
In Cold Blood 5 facts
The book ran in four consecutive issues of The New Yorker, dated 25 September, 2 October, 9 October and 16 October 1965.correction
The four issues as a set, listed by a rare-book dealer with the same dates.
Annals of Crime: In Cold Blood story in The New Yorker, September 25 – October 16, 1965, Four Issues
Random House published the book on 17 January 1966.
The Clutter family were murdered on 15 November 1959. Smith and Hickock were arrested in Las Vegas on 30 December 1959, six weeks later.
Smith and Hickock were hanged on 14 April 1965, five months before the first instalment appeared.
Ariel 2 facts
Faber and Faber published Ariel in London in 1965; Harper & Row followed in the United States in 1966.
Ted Hughes changed Plath’s ordering of the poems, dropped some of the pieces she had chosen and added others she had not.correction
The Magus 2 facts
The Magus was the first novel Fowles wrote but the third book he published, after The Collector in 1963 and The Aristos in 1964.correction
Jonathan Cape published it in 1965; Fowles kept reworking it and published a revised version in 1977.
Unsafe at Any Speed 8 facts
Grossman Publishers published the book on 30 November 1965.
The Corvair is chapter one of eight. The remaining chapters are about instrument panels, crash survivability, exhaust pollution, engineers, styling, blaming the driver, and government regulation.correction
James Roche, the president of General Motors, apologised to Nader before a Senate subcommittee on 22 March 1966.
In January 1970 the New York Court of Appeals held that Nader’s invasion-of-privacy claim stated a cause of action, which let the suit go forward; it decided nothing else and awarded nothing.correction
General Motors settled out of court in August 1970 for 425,000 dollars. The version that circulates — and that Wikipedia’s article on the book repeats — is that Nader won the case on appeal and was awarded the money. He did not.correction
Lyndon Johnson signed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, together with the Highway Safety Act, on 9 September 1966.
Nader was thirty-one when the book appeared. (This page calls it neither his first book nor not his first: it is widely described that way, and I found no publisher or library record that says so outright. Britannica is cited here for his age only.)correction
The Senate subcommittee on traffic safety, chaired by Abraham Ribicoff, opened its hearings on 22 March 1965 — eight months before the book was published. The book did not start the process; it, and the scandal that followed, changed how it ended.correction
Abraham Ribicoff and the Traffic Safety Hearings — Levin Center
The Master and Margarita 3 facts
Bulgakov worked on the novel from 1928 until his death in 1940, and burned the first manuscript in 1930.correction
The censored serialisation ran in the journal Moskva, issue 11 of 1966 and issue 1 of 1967, with about twelve percent of the text removed and more of it changed.correction
A manuscript was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and YMCA Press published the first uncensored book edition in Paris in 1967 — not, as this page said before, in Frankfurt.correction
1965 in books 18 facts
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1965 went to Mikhail Sholokhov, with the citation quoted on this page.
The 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction went to The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau, a book published in 1964.
1965 Pulitzer Prize Winners & Finalists — The Pulitzer Prizes
The 1965 National Book Award for Fiction went to Herzog by Saul Bellow, also a 1964 book.
The Prix Goncourt 1965 went to Jacques Borel for L’Adoration and the Prix Renaudot 1965 to Georges Perec for Les Choses.
The Source by James A. Michener was the best-selling novel in the United States in 1965 on the Publishers Weekly list, with The Looking Glass War at number four.
Publishers Weekly list of bestselling novels in the United States in the 1960s — Wikipedia
Dune was published by Chilton Books in 1965 after more than twenty rejections, and won the first Nebula Award for Best Novel.
Stoner was published by Viking on 23 April 1965, sold fewer than two thousand copies and was out of print within a year.
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was published on 5 April 1965 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
An American Dream was published in book form on 15 March 1965 by Dial Press, after an eight-part serial in Esquire.
The Looking Glass War was published by William Heinemann in June 1965.
Everything That Rises Must Converge was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1965; Flannery O’Connor had died on 3 August 1964.
Les Choses was published by Julliard in 1965, printed in about a thousand copies, and sold roughly a hundred thousand in its first year after the Renaudot.
Manchild in the Promised Land was Claude Brown’s first book; his second did not appear until 1976.
Eleven Poems was published in November 1965 by Festival Publications at Queen’s University Belfast, a sixteen-page pamphlet; all but one of its poems reappeared in Death of a Naturalist in 1966.correction
The Painted Bird was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1965.
The Source was published by Random House in 1965 and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Doubleday; Up the Down Staircase was published by Prentice-Hall the same year and came second on the Publishers Weekly list.
Manchild in the Promised Land was published by Macmillan in 1965 and has sold more than four million copies in fourteen languages.
The Painted Bird was Jerzy Kosiński’s first novel but his third book: two works of nonfiction appeared in 1960 and 1962 under the name Joseph Novak.correction
Last verified 24 September 2026. Two claims that were in the introduction of this page before — that Artur Lundkvist brought Latin American writing into Swedish in 1965, and that William Styron published The Confessions of Nat Turner in draft that year — could not be supported by any source and have been removed; Styron’s novel is from 1967. Where a source contradicts the version that circulates, the source wins and the correction is on the page, marked above. Anything I could not source to a named publisher, prize body, library record or archive is not on this page.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.
Where to go next
Pages on this site that pick up where 1965 leaves off.
Overview
Best Books by Year
Every reading list on this site, organised by year.
By year
Best Books of 1964
Herzog, A Moveable Feast, Last Exit to Brooklyn.
Genre
Best Fiction Books of All Time
The novels that changed what fiction could do.
Genre
Best Nonfiction Books
The nonfiction titles that are genuinely worth your time.
From the bookshelf
Six books from a year of reckoning, and the one I would hand you first
More hand-picked recommendations on my personal bookshelf — books from every year that stay with you long after the last page.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations