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 weeks before he was assassinated, and the book appeared after his death as one of the essential documents of the twentieth century. Artur Lundkvist brought Latin American magic into Swedish, but the year also belonged to the novel of the self in crisis — Sylvia Plath’s Ariel arrived posthumously and changed what a poem could say about the body and death. In fiction, John Fowles published The Magus and William Styron published The Confessions of Nat Turner in draft. Truman Capote published the book that invented a genre. 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 · Published 1965
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X told his life story to Alex Haley over the course of two years of interviews. He was assassinated on 21 February 1965; the book was published in October of that year. It covers his childhood in Nebraska and Michigan, his father’s death (almost certainly murder by white supremacists), 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 after learning of Muhammad’s affairs with young women, 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 caught six weeks later: 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. In Cold Blood was serialised in The New Yorker in 1965 and published as a book in 1966. 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 he published in 1965 — in a different order and with different inclusions from the manuscript Plath had left. 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, also posthumously under her own name — 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. Fowles revised the novel substantially 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. The book focuses in particular on the Chevrolet Corvair, a rear-engined car that Nader argued was dangerously prone to rollover due to design decisions General Motors made to reduce costs. 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, and the resulting scandal helped pass the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966.
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: it produced federal safety legislation that has saved hundreds of thousands of lives. 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 wrote The Master and Margarita in secret from 1930 until his death in 1940, revising it continuously and never seeing it published. It was first published in a censored serialisation in the Soviet literary journal Moskva in 1966–67 — the closest publication date to this series — and in an uncensored version in 1967 in Frankfurt. 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.
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 produced federal safety legislation. And Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, written in secret in the 1930s, began appearing in Soviet literary journals.
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 at the hands of white supremacists, 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 over two years of interviews and published in October 1965. 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 was serialised in The New Yorker in 1965 and published as a book in 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 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 wrote the novel in secret from 1930 until his death in 1940; it was first published in a censored Soviet serialisation in 1966–67.
What is Ariel by Sylvia Plath about?
Ariel is Plath’s second and final poetry collection, published posthumously in 1965 by Ted Hughes, two years after her death. 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.
More reading lists
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.
Overview
Best Books by Year — Full Overview
Browse all reading lists organised by year.
From the bookshelf
The books that defined a year
If this list resonated with you, you'll find more hand-picked recommendations on my personal bookshelf — curated for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations