Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1978
On 14 December 1978 Alex Haley settled a plagiarism suit over Roots after a five-week trial in which the judge, Robert Ward, said four words about the evidence: “Copying there is, period.” A second suit over the same book had been thrown out three months earlier. That was the loudest book story of the year, and it had nothing to do with the books that lasted. While it ran, John Irving published his fourth novel and stopped being a writer other writers had heard of; John Cheever gathered thirty years of stories into one volume that would collect three major prizes in three different years; and Georges Perec finished the novel he had spent nine years building. These nine are the ones from 1978 I still hand to people, and every one of them was first published that year.
By Lisanne Swart · 9 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · All first published in 1978
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The World According to Garp
T.S. Garp is the illegitimate son of Jenny Fields, a nurse who wanted a child and no husband, and who becomes an accidental feminist figurehead when she writes a memoir about exactly that decision. Garp grows up, writes novels, marries, has children, and spends the rest of the book trying to keep his family away from a world that keeps finding them anyway. Irving builds the novel out of excerpts from Garp’s own fiction, his mother’s celebrity, and a run of accidents that are funny until they are not. E. P. Dutton published it in 1978 in New York; at 609 pages it was Irving’s fourth novel and the one that made him famous. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979 and lost; the paperback won the award in 1980, in the paperback category that existed only from 1980 to 1983.
This is the novel where Irving’s method becomes visible: he makes you laugh and then takes something away, and the two are not in tension but in order, which is how it actually goes. Jenny Fields is the reason to read it — funny, immovable, entirely herself, and never once softened into a symbol. If you have never read Irving, start here.
The Stand
A weaponised influenza escapes from an American military laboratory and empties the country in weeks. The survivors start dreaming their way toward each other: some toward Mother Abagail Freemantle, 108 years old, in Nebraska, and some toward Randall Flagg, who is building something else in Las Vegas. Doubleday published it in October 1978 after more than 150,000 words had been cut from the manuscript. King restored and rewrote it as The Complete & Uncut Edition in May 1990 — not simply the original text, since he also reordered chapters and moved the whole story forward ten years.
This is King writing an American epic rather than a horror novel: one civilisation ends and the survivors have to decide what the next one runs on. The allegory is not subtle, and it does not need to be. What holds it up is the people in the middle — the ones whose choice costs them something — and the fact that King gives them as much room as his heroes.
The Sea, the Sea
Charles Arrowby, a celebrated London theatre director, retires to a house on the English coast to write his memoirs and settle accounts with a life spent in art. He has barely unpacked when he discovers that Hartley, the woman he loved as a boy, is living in the village nearby with a husband he decides is unworthy of her, and the book turns into the record of a man talking himself into a kidnapping. Chatto & Windus published it in 1978; it was Murdoch’s nineteenth novel and it won the Booker Prize that year, beating a shortlist that included Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop and Kingsley Amis’s Jake’s Thing.
Murdoch wrote twenty-six novels and this is the one that most repays slow reading, because Arrowby hands you everything you need to see through him in a voice so pleased with itself that it never notices. The reader does the interpreting he refuses to do. It is also serious about what a life in art costs the people standing next to it.
Going After Cacciato
Paul Berlin stands one night’s watch at an observation post in Vietnam in 1968, and across that single night he imagines a story: a soldier named Cacciato has walked away from the war, intending to walk to Paris, and the squad has gone after him. The book moves between the watch post, Berlin’s real memories of combat, and the invented march through Laos, India, Afghanistan, Iran, Greece and France. Delacorte Press published it in 1978 in New York, in the Seymour Lawrence imprint, and it won the National Book Award for Fiction the following spring.
This is the Vietnam novel that argues for what fiction can do that reporting cannot: it puts you inside a man’s retreat into his own head and then asks whether that retreat is cowardice or the only sane response available. The three-part structure is not a trick laid over the story; it is the argument.
Life: A User’s Manual
Just before eight in the evening on 23 June 1975, the front of an apartment building at 11 rue Simon-Crubellier in Paris comes away and every room is visible at once. Perec describes them one by one — the objects, the tenants, the tenants before them — across ninety-nine chapters whose order follows a knight’s tour of the building mapped as a ten-by-ten grid. Running through it is Bartlebooth, who spent fifty years on a plan designed to leave no trace: ten learning to paint, twenty painting five hundred seascapes, twenty putting them back together as jigsaws so that each could be destroyed. Hachette published La Vie mode d’emploi in Paris in 1978 and it took the Prix Médicis that autumn; David Bellos’s English translation followed in 1987.
The most formally ambitious book on this list and the one that most rewards the patience it asks for. The constraints are the point: Perec thought art needed resistance, and that an arbitrary rule was what forced you past the first idea. But the accumulation is what stays — all those lives in all those rooms, and Bartlebooth at the centre of them, the purest picture I know of an artist’s impossible ambition.
The Stories of John Cheever
Sixty-one stories covering thirty years, from the New York work of the 1940s to the Westchester suburbs that made his name at The New Yorker. It holds “The Swimmer”, in which a man swims home across his neighbours’ pools and arrives to find the house empty, along with “The Enormous Radio”, “Goodbye, My Brother” and “The Country Husband”. Alfred A. Knopf published it in 1978. It then won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1978, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in April 1979, and a National Book Award in 1981 — one book, three prizes, three years.
He gets called the Chekhov of the suburbs, which is true and still sells him short. His subject is not suburban life as a target; it is the pressure of being required to look content, and the private wreckage that requirement produces. His characters want things they cannot name, and Cheever gives those unnamed wants their full weight without judging or excusing anyone. “The Swimmer” on its own justifies the book, and it earns its strangeness by never explaining it.
Eye of the Needle
Henry Faber, code name Die Nadel, is Germany’s best agent in wartime Britain, and in 1944 he works out the thing that would change the war: the invasion is coming at Normandy and the army massing opposite Calais is made of plywood. Getting the news home takes him to Storm Island off the Scottish coast, where Lucy Rose and her husband David, an RAF pilot who lost the use of his legs, are the last people between him and a submarine. Macdonald & Jane’s published it in London in May 1978 under the title Storm Island; it appeared in America the same year as Eye of the Needle and won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1979. Follett was twenty-eight, and it was his eleventh book, not his first — ten had come before it, most under pseudonyms.
This is the thriller that made Follett possible, and it works for the reason le Carré works: the man you are meant to be afraid of gets the same care as the people trying to stop him. Faber is competent, unsentimental and entirely legible as a professional doing a job. The last stretch, on the island in the storm, is the most sustained piece of tension I know in a thriller of that decade.
Orientalism
Said argues that “the Orient” is not a place European scholarship discovered but a thing it produced: a body of writing, scholarship and administration that described the East in terms which justified governing it, and which kept describing it that way long after the empires went home. He reads novelists, travellers, philologists and colonial officials as one continuous archive. Pantheon Books published it in New York in 1978. It is the book postcolonial studies is usually dated from, and it has been argued with in print ever since.
I have put this on the list because 1978 is not only a year of novels, and because this is the rare book of theory a general reader can actually read: the prose is clear, the examples are concrete, and you can disagree with it chapter by chapter and still come out seeing differently. Read it with the objections beside it; Said would have wanted that more than agreement.
The Snow Leopard
In 1973 Matthiessen walked into the Dolpo region of the Nepalese Himalaya with the field biologist George Schaller, who was going to study blue sheep and hoped to see a snow leopard. Matthiessen was going because his wife had died the year before and he did not know what else to do. The book is the journal of that walk: the weather, the passes, the Buddhist practice he had taken up, and the animal he does not see. The Viking Press published it in 1978. It won the National Book Award for Contemporary Thought in 1979, and then a second National Book Award, for nonfiction, when the paperback appeared in 1980.
The snow leopard never shows up, and the book is about learning to be all right with that. It is the least performative grief writing I know: no lesson is announced, nothing resolves, and the mountain stays indifferent throughout. If you only want one nonfiction book from 1978, this is the one that will stay with you longest.
Where to Start with 1978
If you read one book from 1978
The World According to Garp
Funny, structurally restless, and built around the arguments about feminism, art and ordinary danger that the late seventies were actually having. Irving’s most welcoming novel and still his best.
if you want the finest writing…
Going After Cacciato. O’Brien’s Vietnam novel took the National Book Award and is, to me, the most formally ambitious fiction anyone has written about that war.
if you have one evening…
The Sea, the Sea is not that book — but The Snow Leopard is. A walk into the Himalaya, an animal that never appears, and a man working out how to live with a death.
if you want to leave the English-speaking world…
Life: A User’s Manual, published in Paris in 1978 and not translated into English until 1987. Ninety-nine chapters, one apartment building, one impossible plan.
if you want something that will change how you read everything else…
Orientalism. Nearly fifty years of argument later, it is still the one I see people arguing with rather than around.
Books first published in 1978
Twenty more books whose first publication genuinely falls in 1978, for when you want breadth rather than a recommendation.
The Cement Garden
Ian McEwan · Jonathan Cape, London
Four orphaned children hide their mother’s death in the cellar rather than be taken into care. His first novel.
Chesapeake
US number one, 1978
James A. Michener · Random House, 12 June
Four centuries around Chesapeake Bay, and the best-selling novel in America that year.
The Human Factor
Graham Greene · The Bodley Head, London
An ageing MI6 desk officer passes information to Communist contacts and ends up a disillusioned defector in Moscow.
Rue des Boutiques obscures
Prix Goncourt 1978
Patrick Modiano · Gallimard, Paris
An amnesiac private detective investigates his own wartime identity in occupied Paris. Translated as Missing Person; Modiano took the Nobel in 2014.
A Distant Mirror
Barbara W. Tuchman · Alfred A. Knopf, August
The calamitous fourteenth century told through one French nobleman: war, plague and schism at ground level.
Who Do You Think You Are?
Governor General’s Award 1978
Alice Munro · Macmillan of Canada, Toronto
Linked stories following Rose out of a poor childhood. Published elsewhere as The Beggar Maid.
The Singapore Grip
J. G. Farrell · Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London
A British trading family in Singapore as the Japanese arrive. The last of Farrell’s Empire novels.
Dreamsnake
Nebula 1978, Hugo 1979
Vonda N. McIntyre · Houghton Mifflin, Boston
A healer crosses a post-apocalyptic landscape with engineered serpents after losing the one that matters. The clearest illustration of the prize-year problem on this page.
Illness as Metaphor
Susan Sontag · Farrar, Straus and Giroux
An argument that the metaphors we attach to tuberculosis and cancer do real harm to the people who have them. First published as three essays in the New York Review of Books.
La chiave a stella
Premio Strega 1979
Primo Levi · Einaudi, Turin
Chapters in the voice of a rigger who assembles bridges and cranes around the world. Translated as The Wrench.
Night Shift
Stephen King · Doubleday, 17 February
King’s first collection of short stories, twenty of them, published seven months before The Stand.
The Coup
John Updike · Alfred A. Knopf
The deposed ruler of an invented Sahelian state narrates his own regime from exile in France.
SS-GB
Len Deighton · Jonathan Cape, London
A Scotland Yard detective works a murder case in a Britain occupied by Nazi Germany.
The House of Hunger
Guardian Fiction Prize 1979
Dambudzo Marechera · Heinemann, London
A novella and nine stories on township life in Rhodesia under Ian Smith. From Zimbabwe, in the African Writers Series.
An Imaginary Life
David Malouf · George Braziller, New York, March
Ovid in exile at Tomis, and the wild boy he tries to teach to speak. From Australia.
Success
Martin Amis · Jonathan Cape, London
Two foster brothers narrate alternate chapters across a year in which their fortunes change places.
Ein fliehendes Pferd
Martin Walser · Suhrkamp, Frankfurt
Two middle-aged couples meet on Lake Constance and two old schoolfriends discover they have chosen opposite lives. Translated as Runaway Horse.
Keisri hull
Jaan Kross · Eesti Raamat, Tallinn
A Livonian nobleman writes to the Tsar, serves nine years in prison, and is released under house arrest as officially insane. From Estonia; translated as The Czar’s Madman.
Tales of the City
Armistead Maupin · Harper & Row
The first year of his San Francisco newspaper serial, reworked into a novel. His first book.
Mirabell: Books of Number
National Book Award 1979
James Merrill · Atheneum, New York
The second part of Merrill’s Ouija-board epic, dictated to him by bats.
First books published in 1978
Eight writers whose first book came out in 1978, one who published a first novel but not a first book, and one whose 1978 book still gets called a debut and was not. That difference is one most lists skip.
Tales of the City
Armistead Maupin
His first book and his first novel. The serial had been running since 8 August 1974, first in the Pacific Sun in Marin County and from 1976 in the San Francisco Chronicle; the 1978 book is that first year reworked.
The Cement Garden
Ian McEwan
His first novel, but his second book: the story collection First Love, Last Rites came out in 1975 and won the Somerset Maugham Award.
Final Payments
Mary Gordon
Her first novel. A woman of thirty emerges from eleven years nursing her father. It won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize.
Scruples
Judith Krantz
Her first novel, published when she was fifty, after a magazine career and thirty-one years without writing fiction. It went to number one on the New York Times list.
The Road Less Traveled
M. Scott Peck
His first book. Random House turned it down; Simon & Schuster paid 7,500 dollars and printed five thousand copies. It did not reach a bestseller list until 1984.
The Monkey King
Timothy Mo
His first novel and his first book. It won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1979.
Compromising Positions
Susan Isaacs
Her first novel and her first attempt at fiction, after editing at Seventeen and writing political speeches.
The Crow Eaters
Bapsi Sidhwa
Her debut novel, self-published in English in 1978 in Pakistan. Trade editions followed in Mumbai and London in 1980.
This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall!
Gordon Korman
His first book, written as a seventh-grade English assignment and mailed to Scholastic by the author the following summer, aged thirteen, in his capacity as class book-club monitor. He wrote it at twelve and was fourteen when it came out.
Eye of the Needle
Ken Follett
Not a debut, though booksellers still list it as one. It was his eleventh book: ten came before it between 1974 and 1977, most under the names Simon Myles, Zachary Stone, Bernard L. Ross and Martin Martinsen.
1978 in books, in short
- Nobel Prize
- Isaac Bashevis Singer, announced on 5 October, “for his impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life”. He wrote in Yiddish. The choice was welcomed in the general press and contested inside the Yiddish world, where readers argued the prize belonged to Chaim Grade or Avrom Sutzkever
- Pulitzer, fiction
- The prize handed out in 1978 went to Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson, a book of 1977; McPherson was the first Black writer to win it for fiction. The prize for a book of 1978 came on 16 April 1979 and went to The Stories of John Cheever
- Booker Prize
- The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, her nineteenth novel and her only Booker after being shortlisted three times in the prize’s first five years. The Booker’s own history records that the winner’s name leaked before the announcement
- National Book Awards
- The award given in 1978 went to Blood Tie by Mary Lee Settle, a book of 1977. The one given in 1979 went to Going After Cacciato, a book of 1978 — and it was the last award under that name for eight years
- The awards that were abolished
- In June 1979 the Association of American Publishers ended the National Book Awards after about thirty years and replaced them with The American Book Awards, run on an Academy Awards model with categories for mysteries, westerns and science fiction and a current-interest category that took in a cookbook and a diet book. Alison Lurie wrote a protest letter signed by more than forty former winners and judges, among them Saul Bellow, Donald Barthelme, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth and Susan Sontag, arguing it would become “a rubber-stamp prize for best sellers”. By the first ceremony in 1980, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and William Styron had withdrawn their nominations. The National Book Award name came back in 1987. The awards handed out between 1980 and 1986 were formally The American Book Awards; the National Book Foundation counts them as National Book Awards, and so does this page
- Prix Goncourt and Prix Médicis
- The Goncourt went to Patrick Modiano for Rue des Boutiques obscures, on the third ballot, six votes to three, with the jury noting it was also for his work as a whole. The Médicis went to Georges Perec for La Vie mode d’emploi. Both French prizes are awarded in the autumn of the book’s own year
- Hugo and Nebula
- The 1978 Hugo went to Gateway by Frederik Pohl, a book of 1977. The 1978 Nebula went to Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre, a book of 1978 — presented in April 1979. The Hugo is named for the year of its ceremony and the Nebula for the year the book was eligible, so the same pair of books carries opposite-looking dates
- Best seller
- Chesapeake by James A. Michener, first on the Publishers Weekly annual fiction list for 1978
- Roots on trial
- Two plagiarism suits over Alex Haley’s Roots resolved in 1978, just under three months apart and in opposite directions. Margaret Walker Alexander’s claim was dismissed on 21 September: Judge Marvin Frankel found no actionable similarity, since what the two books shared was historical fact and public-domain material. Harold Courlander’s went to a five-week trial and ended in settlement on 14 December, with Judge Robert Ward saying “Copying there is, period” and passages from Courlander’s The African found stapled to manuscript pages of Roots. Haley “acknowledges and regrets” that material from Courlander’s The African “found their way” into his book. The sum was reported at the time as around 500,000 dollars; later accounts give 650,000
- A prize invented this year
- The Diagram Prize for the Oddest Title was made up in 1978 to give people something to do at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The first winner was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice, a real immunology volume
1978 is the clearest case on this whole site. One book — The Stories of John Cheever — holds a 1978 award from the National Book Critics Circle, a 1979 Pulitzer and a 1981 National Book Award. The Pulitzer given out in 1978 was for a book of 1977, and so was the National Book Award. The Booker and the two French prizes were given in the book’s own year. And in science fiction the same pair of books carries opposite dates, because the Hugo is named after its ceremony and the Nebula after the year the book was eligible. A prize tells you a book was good. It tells you almost nothing about when it came out.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1978
What were the best books published in 1978?
The books first published in 1978 that have lasted include The World According to Garp by John Irving, The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien, The Stories of John Cheever, Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec, The Stand by Stephen King, Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett, Orientalism by Edward Said and The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. All nine were first published that year, not reissued in it.
What is The World According to Garp about?
It follows T.S. Garp, the illegitimate son of Jenny Fields, from an unusual birth to a life as a novelist and father, while his mother becomes a feminist figurehead and the family keeps meeting the violence Garp is trying to keep them away from. It is a comic novel and a family tragedy at the same time, and it is also about what a writer takes from the people around him. E. P. Dutton published it in 1978; it was Irving’s fourth novel.
Which 1978 books won prizes, and in which years?
The Booker Prize went in 1978 to The Sea, the Sea, in the book’s own year. Everything else ran late: Going After Cacciato took the National Book Award in 1979, The Stories of John Cheever the Pulitzer in April 1979, Eye of the Needle the Edgar Award in 1979, The Snow Leopard the National Book Award for Contemporary Thought in 1979, and The World According to Garp a National Book Award in 1980 for its paperback. Life: A User’s Manual won the Prix Médicis in 1978.
Did The World According to Garp win the National Book Award?
Yes, but not the one people mean. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979 and lost. The paperback then won in 1980, in a paperback category that existed only between 1980 and 1983. William Styron won the hardcover award that same year for Sophie’s Choice.
Which writers published their first book in 1978?
Armistead Maupin with Tales of the City, Mary Gordon with Final Payments, Judith Krantz with Scruples, Susan Isaacs with Compromising Positions, M. Scott Peck with The Road Less Traveled, Bapsi Sidhwa with The Crow Eaters and Gordon Korman, fourteen, with This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall!. Ian McEwan published a first novel but not a first book. Ken Follett is often listed as a 1978 debut and was not: Eye of the Needle was his eleventh book.
Was Eye of the Needle Ken Follett’s first novel?
No. It was his eleventh book and his commercial breakthrough. Between 1974 and 1977 he published ten others, most of them under the pseudonyms Simon Myles, Zachary Stone, Bernard L. Ross and Martin Martinsen. It also came out in Britain under a different title, Storm Island, in May 1978. Follett was twenty-eight.
What is Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec?
A novel built on a single frozen moment just before eight in the evening on 23 June 1975, when the front of an apartment building at 11 rue Simon-Crubellier in Paris comes away and every room is visible at once. Its ninety-nine chapters describe the rooms and the people in them across a century, in an order that follows a knight’s tour of the building drawn as a ten-by-ten grid. Perec used elaborate combinatorial rules to decide what each chapter had to contain, and the result reads not as a puzzle but as a long, sad account of what people accumulate.
Who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978?
Isaac Bashevis Singer, announced on 5 October 1978, for narrative art rooted in a Polish-Jewish tradition. He wrote in Yiddish and lived in the United States. The Nobel goes to a body of work rather than a book, so it attaches to no 1978 title.
What else came out in 1978 that is not on this list?
Twenty more titles are listed above under “Books first published in 1978”, including Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden, Graham Greene’s The Human Factor, Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are?, Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, Primo Levi’s La chiave a stella and Patrick Modiano’s Goncourt winner Rue des Boutiques obscures.
Footnotes
Eye of the Needle 6 facts
This page called the spy Heinrich Faber. His name in the novel is Henry Faber; his code name is Die Nadel.correction
This page said Follett was thirty when it was published. He was born on 5 June 1949 and the book appeared in May 1978, so he was twenty-eight.correction
This page said he worked from an outline written in a weekend. No source carries that. His own account says only that he planned the book carefully and wrote a detailed outline.correction
The Edgar Award for Best Novel was given in 1979, not 1978, for the 1978 book. The 1978 Edgar went to William H. Hallahan.correction
It was published in Britain in May 1978 as Storm Island, by Macdonald & Jane’s in London.
It was his eleventh book. Ten preceded it between 1974 and 1977, most under the names Simon Myles, Zachary Stone, Bernard L. Ross and Martin Martinsen.
The World According to Garp 4 facts
The black block on this page quoted “We are all terminal cases.” The sentence is the last line of the novel and runs: “But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.” It is the narrator, not a character in dialogue.correction
Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979; the paperback won in 1980 in the paperback category, which existed only from 1980 to 1983. Styron won the hardcover award that year.correction
E. P. Dutton, 1978, 609 pages; Irving’s fourth novel.
The 1982 film was directed by George Roy Hill and starred Robin Williams and Glenn Close, in her first film role.
The Stand 2 facts
This page said King restored the full text in 1990. The Complete & Uncut Edition of May 1990 restored deleted material but also revised it: chapters were reordered and the story was moved forward ten years, from 1980 to 1990.correction
Doubleday, October 1978. About 150,000 words were cut for the first edition. Published page counts for the restored material vary between 300 and 500 pages by source, so this page gives the word count only.
Life: A User’s Manual 4 facts
This page said Paul Auster called it a masterpiece. No source carries that word. Auster reviewed the book in the New York Times Book Review of 15 November 1987 and wrote that it makes it impossible to think of contemporary French writing in the same way again.correction
This page put the frozen moment at eight in the evening. It is just before eight, on 23 June 1975, at 11 rue Simon-Crubellier.correction
Ninety-nine chapters ordered by a knight’s tour of the building as a ten-by-ten grid. Bartlebooth’s plan runs fifty years: ten learning watercolour, twenty painting five hundred seascapes, twenty solving them as jigsaws.
Prix Médicis 1978. The Prix Médicis étranger that year went to Alexander Zinoviev.
The Stories of John Cheever 5 facts
Sixty-one stories, as given by the publisher.
The National Book Critics Circle lists it under 1978, the year the book was published.
The prizes of 1979 were announced on 16 April; this report of the next day describes them as awarded yesterday.
Cheever, Block, Warren Win Pulitzer Prizes — The Harvard Crimson, 17 April 1979
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
National Book Award 1981, in the paperback category.
The prizes of 1978 9 facts
The argument inside the Yiddish world, and the names of Chaim Grade and Avrom Sutzkever as the writers readers thought should have had it.
Is Isaac Bashevis Singer a Yiddish Writer? — Yiddish Book Center
Nobel Prize in Literature 1978 to Isaac Bashevis Singer, with the citation as quoted.
The announcement date of 5 October 1978 comes from Wikipedia; nobelprize.org does not display it.
The Goncourt of 1978 to Modiano on the third ballot, six votes to three, with the jury noting it was also for his work as a whole.
The 1978 Pulitzer for fiction went to Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson, published in 1977.
Booker Prize 1978 to Iris Murdoch, with the shortlist and the note that the winner’s name leaked before the announcement. That leak is recorded by the Booker Prize itself and this page has found no independent account of it.
The National Book Award given in 1978 went to Blood Tie by Mary Lee Settle, published in 1977 by Houghton Mifflin.
The 1978 Hugo went to Gateway, a book of 1977.
The 1978 Nebula went to Dreamsnake, a book of 1978, presented in April 1979.
The end of the National Book Awards 3 facts
In June 1979 the Association of American Publishers ended the National Book Awards and replaced them with The American Book Awards. Alison Lurie’s protest letter, the signatories and the “rubber-stamp prize for best sellers” objection are reported here.
Coalition Calls for Book Award Boycott — The Washington Post, 10 August 1979
By the first American Book Awards ceremony in 1980, Mailer, Roth and Styron had withdrawn their nominations.
TABA or not TABA — The Christian Science Monitor, 30 April 1980
The National Book Award name was restored in 1987; the National Book Foundation took over management in 1988.
Roots in court 2 facts
Alexander v. Haley, 460 F. Supp. 40, decided 21 September 1978: summary judgment for Haley, no actionable similarity.
The Courlander settlement of 14 December 1978, Judge Ward’s “Copying there is, period”, the stapled passages and Haley’s statement. The sum was reported at the time as about 500,000 dollars, with the exact figure confidential; later accounts give 650,000.
Bethesda Author Settles Roots Suit — The Washington Post, 15 December 1978
The rest of 1978 5 facts
Chesapeake was first on the Publishers Weekly annual fiction list for 1978.
Bestselling books of the twentieth century — AbeBooks, reproducing Publishers Weekly
Orientalism, Pantheon Books, New York, 1978.
The Snow Leopard, The Viking Press, 1978; National Book Award for Contemporary Thought 1979 and a second National Book Award for the 1980 paperback.
The Diagram Prize for the Oddest Title was invented in 1978 for the Frankfurt Book Fair; the first winner was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice.
Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year — Wikipedia
Books often dated 1978 that are not: Daniel Martin and Song of Solomon and In Patagonia and The Silmarillion and The Shining are 1977; If on a winter’s night a traveller and Burger’s Daughter and Kindred are 1979. None of them are on this page.
Last verified 29 September 2026. Everything marked “correction” above is a place where this page said something different before. The one that mattered most is the quotation in the black block: this page had John Irving writing “We are all terminal cases”, which drops the half of the sentence that makes it a sentence. Where a source contradicts the version that circulates, the source wins. The footnotes below cover the claims most likely to be wrong: the nine books, the prizes and the years they belong to, and the two court cases. The twenty further titles and the ten first books were each checked against a publisher, a prize body or a library record, and any of them will be footnoted on request. Where a Wikipedia article is the source, that is what the footnote says.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and every book on it really came out in 1978.
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 1978 leaves off.
The last line of The World According to Garp
“But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”
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.
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