Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1970
1970 was the year the Beatles formally dissolved, four students were shot dead at Kent State, and the first Earth Day was held. The counterculture had peaked and was beginning to curdle. What the writers of 1970 understood — before the decade had time to explain itself — was that something had broken and that the question was not how to go back but how to live inside the wreckage. Toni Morrison published her first novel. Joan Didion wrote about the end of the sixties in real time. Yukio Mishima completed his tetralogy and then killed himself. It was a year of endings that were also, quietly, beginnings.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Updated June 2026
Fiction
The Bluest Eye
Pecola Breedlove is a Black girl growing up in Ohio who prays every night for blue eyes. She believes that if she were beautiful — if she looked like Shirley Temple — her life would stop being what it is. Morrison’s first novel tells the story of what that wish costs her, and what the world that planted it deserves. It is short, formally intricate, and devastating in a way that does not announce itself until it is already inside you.
Morrison was twenty-nine when she started writing this and knew exactly what she was doing. The Bluest Eye is not a novel about racism as an abstraction — it is about what it feels like from inside, how it distorts the way a child sees herself, and what that distortion does over time. It announces one of the great careers in American literature, and it does it without a wasted sentence. Read it before Beloved, and then read Beloved.
Nonfiction
The White Album
Didion’s second essay collection opens with one of the most famous sentences in American nonfiction: we tell ourselves stories in order to live. What follows is a precise and vertiginous account of California in the late sixties and early seventies — Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, the doors of perception, the collapse of a narrative that had briefly made sense. Didion writes about her own nervous breakdown alongside the breakdown of a decade, and cannot always tell them apart.
The White Album is the essential document of the moment 1970 was living through. Didion understood that the sixties had not ended in triumph or defeat but in a kind of bewilderment — the story had stopped making sense and nobody had a replacement. Her method is to keep reporting, precisely and without comfort, from inside the disorientation. Nobody has written better about the feeling of a culture losing its footing.
Fiction
The Decay of the Angel
The fourth and final volume of Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy, completed the day before he performed a ritual suicide at a military base in Tokyo. Honda, now old, adopts a beautiful and terrifyingly cold young man he believes to be the fourth reincarnation of his lifelong friend Kiyoaki. The novel ends with Honda visiting an elderly abbess who has no memory of Kiyoaki at all — and the possibility that everything Honda believed about the world was false.
The circumstances of its composition make The Decay of the Angel impossible to read neutrally, but the novel earns its weight without them. Mishima spent five years building a fictional architecture that would end here, with the erasure of everything it had constructed. The final pages are among the most unsettling in twentieth-century literature — not violent, just empty in a way that the preceding three volumes make unbearable. Read the tetralogy in order; this is where it was always going.
Fiction
Play It As It Lays
Maria Wyeth is a former actress living in Los Angeles, driving the freeways at dawn to keep herself from falling apart. Her marriage has dissolved, her daughter is in a psychiatric facility, she has had an abortion she cannot process, and the people around her are performing lives rather than living them. Didion wrote it in white space — short chapters, hard cuts, enormous silences — and it reads like a transcript of a mind that has stopped believing in continuity.
Play It As It Lays is the novel that does for Hollywood and the American West what The Great Gatsby did for the East — strips the mythology down to what it actually costs. Maria is not a victim; she is a woman who has looked directly at the emptiness and found she cannot look away. The formal choices are inseparable from the meaning: the white space on the page is the thing the novel is about. Read it in a single sitting if you can.
Fiction
Deliverance
Four Atlanta businessmen take a canoe trip down a wild Georgia river before it is dammed and flooded. What begins as a weekend adventure becomes a survival ordeal after two of them are attacked by local men. Ed Gentry, the narrator, must decide how far he will go to get home. Dickey wrote it as a poet — the prose is muscular and precise in a way that advertising-copywriter fiction rarely is — and the novel’s real subject is masculinity, nature, and what emergency reveals about the self.
Deliverance is a better novel than its reputation as a thriller suggests. Dickey is asking a serious question about what men are and what they want — whether the violence they carry is something to be ashamed of or something older than shame. The river is real and the jeopardy is real, but the novel keeps asking what Ed is learning about himself, and it does not give a comfortable answer. Read it before you decide you already know what it is.
Nonfiction
The Female Eunuch
Greer’s argument was that women had been conditioned to be the castrated version of themselves — docile, domestic, dependent — and that the first act of liberation was to understand how thoroughly that conditioning had worked. The book is funny, erudite, and deliberately provocative: Greer wrote for women who had been polite for too long. It was published in October 1970 and became one of the defining texts of second-wave feminism.
The Female Eunuch matters as much for how it was written as for what it argued. Greer was a classicist and a polemicist and she brought both to bear — the book is a pleasure to read even when it is infuriating, and it is sometimes infuriating in the right direction. What it did in 1970 was name things that women recognised but had not had language for. Fifty years on, the things it named are still worth understanding, even where the arguments have dated.
Fiction
The Driver’s Seat
Lise is travelling to an unnamed European city. We know from the first pages that she will be murdered there. The novel follows her through the day as she moves, with purposeful strangeness, toward what she has arranged for herself. Spark tells us the ending before we see it, and what follows is not suspense but something more uncomfortable: the steady realisation of what Lise wants and why. It is one hundred and twelve pages and reads in a single sitting.
The Driver’s Seat is Spark at her most disturbing and most controlled — a novel about a woman who insists on being the agent of her own story even when that story is her death. The formal structure mirrors the content: Spark puts Lise in the driver’s seat of the narrative too, and the effect is deeply unsettling in ways that are hard to articulate without spoiling. It asks what autonomy means when the available scripts are all inadequate. Read it and then read it again.
Nonfiction
Sexual Politics
Millett’s doctoral thesis, turned into a book, argued that the personal is political — that the power relations between men and women are not private matters but a political system as rigorous as any other, and that literature is one of the places where that system is enforced and celebrated. She analysed Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, and D.H. Lawrence with a precision that none of them had anticipated and that changed how literary criticism understood its own stakes.
Sexual Politics is the book that made visible what had been invisible: that the way male writers described women was not neutral observation but the exercise of power, and that taking it seriously as criticism meant taking that power seriously. Its close readings of Mailer in particular remain some of the most effective literary demolitions in the language. Read it alongside The Female Eunuch — they arrived in the same year and together constitute the year’s most important intellectual argument.
Fiction
The Earthquake Bird
Replacing with: The Stories of John Cheever — collected 1978, stories written through 1970. John Cheever spent the fifties and sixties writing about the American suburb with a precision and an ache that no one else was attempting. These stories — Cheever called them a document of a kind of American life that was already disappearing as he wrote it — map the distance between what the postwar dream promised and what it actually felt like to live inside it: the drinking, the infidelity, the strange despairs of men with everything they were supposed to want.
The Cheever stories belong to 1970 the way Fitzgerald belongs to 1925 — they are the essential record of the class and era, and reading them now is like reading a letter from a world that no longer exists but that explains the one we inherited. The Swimmer alone would make the collection essential. Read it as the definitive portrait of the American middle-class male in the postwar decades — admiring and devastating in equal measure.
Fiction
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Angelou’s memoir of her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas — the racism, the poverty, the rape at age eight, the years of silence that followed — became one of the most widely read books of the early seventies after its publication in 1969. It introduced a voice and a form of witness that American literature had not quite had before: precise, unsparing, occasionally funny, always in full possession of itself. The title comes from Paul Laurence Dunbar.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings belongs here because 1970 was the year it began to be read — the year it found its audience and changed what memoir was understood to be capable of. Angelou understood that bearing witness to your own life with full literary intelligence was not self-indulgence but a political act. Read it alongside The Bluest Eye: two Black women, born a decade apart, arriving in the same year with the same insistence on being fully seen.
Where to start
If you want the novel that announces one of literature’s greatest careers
→ Start with The Bluest Eye. Morrison knew exactly what she was doing on the first page, and it shows.
If you want the book that best captures what 1970 felt like from the inside
→ Read Play It As It Lays. Didion’s white space is the decade’s white space. Short, hard, and exact.
If you want the year’s most important intellectual argument
→ Read The Female Eunuch and Sexual Politics together. They arrived simultaneously and between them changed how the decade understood itself.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1970
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“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” — Joan Didion
If this list resonated with you, you’ll find more books like these on my personal bookshelf — hand-picked for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
