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I feel that I was able to learn a lot more than I already did about the last 100 ish years. I already thought I knew a lot but as I went through this process, I realized that there was still a ton of things that I had no idea about. I really enjoyed this process.

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Postmodernism can be seen as a reaction against the ideas and values of modernism, as well as a description of the period that followed modernism's dominance in cultural theory and practice in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. The term is associated with scepticism, irony and philosophical critiques of the concepts of universal truths and objective reality.

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The term was first used around 1970. As an art movement postmodernism to some extent defies definition - as there is no one postmodern style or theory on which it is hinged.

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Contemporary and Postmodernism
: Fact #1

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Contemporary and Postmodernism
: Fact #1

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Modern Art is a container concept referring to art during the period of Modernism, starting and ending roughly around 1850 and 1950.

Postmodern Art consists of art produced during Postmodernism’s cultural and philosophical era, starting roughly around 1950 and arguably ongoing up to today.

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Contemporary Art Issue - Platform, Publisher & Gallery on Contemporary Art

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Explained: Modern Art vs Postmodern Art — CAI

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In just eight simple questions, the confusion concerning Modern Art versus Postmodern Art will become clear, pointing out the key differences with examples.

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Contemporary and Postmodernism
: Authors and Works

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Contemporary and Postmodernism
: Authors and Works

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Contemporary and Postmodernism: Period Characteristics 

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Contemporary and Postmodernism: Period Characteristics 

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On August 2, 1990, the Iraqi army invaded Kuwait. When negotiations failed, the United States-led coalition of military forces attacked the Iraqi Army in January 1991 and officially liberated Kuwait on February 25, 1991.

Stephen King's Dolores Claiborne, John Grisham's The Pelican Brief, and Danielle Steel's Mixed Blessings, are 1992 Bestsellers.

A 51-day standoff in Waco, TX, begins when agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms attempt to arrest Branch Davidian leader David Koresh on February 28, 1993.

Matthew Broderick is awarded the 1995 Best Actor Tony Award for his role in the musical "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying."

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1990 Fast Facts - History - U.S. Census Bureau

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Census data, news headlines, and pop culture images and information related to the decade of the 1990s.

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In 1999, people believed that Furbies contained computer chips so they could record words and repeat them. Obviously that wasn't true, but the National Security Agency still banned people from bringing their Furbies to work.

AOL Instant Messenger launched in 1997 and gained 53 million users in less than 10 years and wasn't full discontinued until December 2017.

In 1992 during a 60 Minutes interview about Bill’s infidelity, Hillary Clinton said, “I'm not sitting here as some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.” Hillary later gave an apology to the singer.

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In 1999, people believed that Furbies contained computer chips so they could record words and repeat them. Obviously that wasn’t true, but the National Security Agency still banned people from bringing their Furbies to work.

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Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000)

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2000)

Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000)

Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (2001)

Alice Munro, Runaway (2004)

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Some books are flashes in the pan, read for entertainment and then left on a bus seat for the next lucky person to pick up and enjoy, forgotten by most after their season has passed. Others stick around, are read and re-read, are taught and discussed. sometimes due to great artistry, sometimes due to luck, and sometimes because they manage to recognize and capture some element of the culture of the time.

In the moment, you often can't tell which books are which. The Great Gatsby wasn't a bestseller upon its release, but we now see it as emblematic of a certain American sensibility in the 1920s. Of course, hindsight can also distort the senses; the canon looms and obscures. Still, over the next weeks, we'll be publishing a list a day, each one attempting to define a discrete decade, starting with the 1900s (as you've no doubt guessed by now) and counting down until we get to the (nearly complete) 2010s.

Though the books on these lists need not be American in origin, I am looking for books that evoke some aspect of American life, actual or intellectual, in each decade-a global lens would require a much longer list. And of course, varied and complex as it is, there's no list that could truly define American life over ten or any number of years, so I do not make any claim on exhaustiveness. I've simply selected books that, if read together, would give a fair picture of the landscape of literary culture for that decade-both as it was and as it is remembered. Finally, two process notes: I've limited myself to one book for author over the entire 12-part list, so you may see certain works skipped over in favor of others, even if both are important (for instance, I ignored Dubliners in the 1910s so I could include Ulysses in the 1920s), and in the case of translated work, I'll be using the date of the English translation, for obvious reasons.

For our eleventh installment, below you'll find 10 books that defined the 2000s. (Head here for the 1910s, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s).

Chabon published his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, in 1988, so he'd been around for a while by the time this beloved novel came out and blew everyone's mind. Anecdotally, I've probably heard more people say this is their favorite novel than any other (though "everything by Murakami" (see below) is up there too) which certainly recommends it to this list-a book can't define a decade if no one's reading it. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was our introduction to Michael Chabon as a heavy hitter, and it's still his magnum opus. The book was a bestseller, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001; the judges described it as "an exhilarating triumph of language and invention, a stunning novel in which the tragicomic adventures of a couple of boy geniuses reveal much about what happened to America in the middle of the 20th century. Like Phillip Roth's American Pastoral or Don DeLillo's Underworld, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a superb novel with epic sweep, spanning continents and eras, a masterwork by one of America's finest writers."

There's no use tiptoeing around it: J. K. Rowling owned the 2000s. Sure, almost half of the Harry Potter books were published in the 90s-the first one came out in 1997-but 2000 was the year that the fandom (and the marketing teams) really kicked into high gear. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was the first massive book in the series at 600+ pages (the initial three are normal lengths, but after the Goblet of Fire they would all be enormous), first book in the series to be published at the same time in the US and the UK, with a " record-setting combined first printing of more than five million copies." The book was released for the first time on a Saturday so that children would be able to start reading it immediately, and it may have been this that allowed for the first midnight release parties, now a famous part of Pottermania. Enthusiasm for the series only increased throughout the decade, and in 2007, when the final book was published, it sold 11 million copies in 24 hours, making it the fastest-selling book in history. The influence of these books has been vast and varied. In 2007, TIME named Rowling a runner-up for Person of the Year. "Now translated into 65 languages, the books have joined a canon that stretches from Cinderella to Star Wars, giving people a way to discuss culture and commerce, politics and values," TIME noted.

Princeton English professor William Gleason compares the series' impact to the frenzy that surrounded Uncle Tom's Cabin before the Civil War. "That book penetrated all levels of society," he says. "It's remarkable how similar the two moments are." And he does not see this as a passing fad or some triumph of clever marketing. "They've spoken profoundly to enough readers that they will be read and reread by children and by adults for a long time," he says. Feminist scholars write papers on Hermione's road to self-determination. Law professors cite Dobby's tale to teach contract law and civil rights. University of Tennessee law professor Benjamin Barton published "Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy," in the Michigan Law Review, which examined Rowling's view of the legitimacy of government. His conclusion? "Rowling may do more for libertarianism than anyone since John Stuart Mill." A Rutgers researcher named a rare rain-forest plant in Ecuador apparata after her verb apparate because it seemed to appear out of nowhere. French intellectuals debate whether the stories indoctrinate kids into free-market capitalism. In Turkey, the books were absorbed into the argument over Turkey's cultural geography: Is Harry a symbol of Western imperialism or of lost Eastern traditions of mysticism and alchemy? A seventh-grade teacher in Pakistan in November invited her class to compare the country's crisis to Harry Potter. The class immediately cast Pervez Musharraf as Voldemort and Benazir Bhutto as Bellatrix. "Potter is like a Rorschach blot," says Georgetown government professor Daniel Nexon, "for people articulating concerns about globalization in their cultural setting. It's incredibly significant that Potter even enters these debates."

And that is on top of the impact, even her critics acknowledge, of inspiring a generation of obsessive readers unafraid of fat books and complex plots. "They're easy to underestimate because of what I call the three Deathly Hallows for academics," says James Thomas, a professor of English at Pepperdine University. "They couldn't possibly be good because they're too recent, they're too popular, and they're too juvenile." But he argues that the books do more than entertain. "They've made millions of kids smarter, more sensitive, certainly more literate and probably more ethical and aware of hypocrisy and lust for power. They've made children better adults, I think. I don't know of any books that have worked that kind of magic on so many millions of readers in so short a time in the history of publications."
Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000)
"This may be the first novel ever written that truly feels at home in our borderless, globalized, intermarried, post-colonial age, populated by "children with first and last names on a direct collision course,"" Lev Grossman wrote in TIME. "The overlapping fates of Smith's characters seem to trace the new structures of 21st-century life and test their sturdiness as framework for peace and happiness. Both deeply Dickensian and playfully post-modern, White Teeth doesn't quail before the rampantly ramifying novelistic complexities of a multicultural world. It revels in them." Smith's debut (published when she was just 24) was extremely well-received, decorated with multiple awards, and became a bestseller, but one famous person famously did not like it. If this is "hysterical realism," Mr. Wood, I think I love hysterical realism.

Love him or hate him, or hate to love him, or hated him until you read that profile and now sort of love him or at least hate that you hate him, J-Franz is a cultural pillar of the 2000s, a writer who deftly captured our collective American anxiety and thoroughly entertained us in the process, and um, who also fought with Oprah. I mean, there's a reason TIME put him on its cover and declared him a Great American Novelist at the end of the decade (it's because he wrote good chick lit and convinced us all it was high literature, one Literary Hub editor informed me). In fact, he was the only novelist to be on the cover of the magazine in that decade. The Corrections, Emily Eakin wrote in the New York Times, "is as clever as those of the brainy postmodernists he admires but infinitely more accessible."

Like DeLillo and Gaddis, he dazzles the reader with trenchant riffs on contemporary life-everything from mood-enhancing pharmaceuticals to bisexuality to cruise-ship culture. But rather than relay his thoughts about the world through chilly rhetorical pyrotechnics or plots of mind-boggling complication, Franzen embeds them in the lives of affecting human characters.

It sounds suspiciously simple. But this, it turns out, is Franzen's big idea: characters are what the contemporary social novel lacks-and what can save it from oblivion. And come to think of it, he has a case. In stuffing their books with formal gimmicks, postmodernists turned the social novel into an act of intellectual machismo and long ago showed characters the door. (Can you remember the name of a single person from Underworld, other than J. Edgar Hoover?) As male novelists abandoned psychological realism for oracular pronouncements, the job of creating memorable characters became women's work-the forte of writers like Anne Tyler and Annie Proulx.

Sounds like that Literary Hub editor was right. In any event, The Corrections won the 2001 National Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was one of the biggest bestselling novels of the decade.

Honestly, I might have put Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) here, or The View from Castle Rock (2006) or Too Much Happiness (2009)-it doesn't much matter. They're all equally genius. Count them all. Munro has had a long career-she published her first collection in 1968-so it's also a little ridiculous to claim her for one decade or another, but let's settle her here in the 2000s, during the boom of creative writing programs (and thus the boom of imitators), and the years leading up to her Nobel Prize for literature-which she won in 2013, with the Swedish Academy rightly cited her as a "master of the contemporary short story."

In the mid-2000s, this was the novel that everyone was pressing into one another's hands, wide-eyed and whispering. Read this. I know-I was pressed and pressed in turn, and I wasn't alone. A puzzlebox of a novel, it managed to be high brow and low brow, undeniably intellectual and deeply entertaining. The novel, Ted Gioia wrote, is "almost a textbook example" of how what he calls " conceptual fiction "

is enlivening contemporary fiction-all the more vital because it manages to be bold and experimental without destroying the key elements of narrative structure, character development and linguistic comprehensibility that earlier progressive movements often ignored at their own peril. The power of a book such as Cloud Atlas is amplified because its higher level complexities don't require the ground floor level of the story be burnt, pillaged and destroyed. Instead of trying to keep up with the Pynchons and Gaddises, who only live in the penthouse, Mitchell occupies the whole building, even the boiler room and broom closet.

And in a 2010 profile of Mitchell, Wyatt Mason wrote:

Although the themes in Cloud Atlas weren't new-the English novel has been exploring various degrees of human rapaciousness from Moll Flanders to Bleak House to Atonement - Mitchell had found a new form for their dramatization. Formal ingenuity, though, is just one feature of Mitchell's excellence and, as Michael Chabon wrote in an e-mail message, not the most significant: "Mitchell has to catch you and hold you and keep you reading through what initially appear to be a series of more or less unrelated fragments. It is only his gift for making sentences, and his equally strong gift for framing characters, that enable him to play his marvelous game with narrative structure."

In both structure and writing, this novel is unlike anything else-and I'd wager it will continue to influence contemporary literature for years to come.

The most popular novel by our most recent Nobel Laureate in literature (though I'd argue The Remains of the Day is still his best) was much acclaimed and much purchased when it was published in 2005, though it seems critics are still arguing over whether it's dystopian sci-fi or coming-of-age or a complex metaphor about race or horror or literary fiction of the highest caliber (the answer being, of course, all of these, and a hearty duh to you). Rachel Cusk reads the novel as being as much about art itself as it is about clones and humanity. "On one level Ishiguro seems to be saying that art is a con-trick, like religion; that it obscures from us the knowledge or awareness of our own mortality, knowledge that in the case of the Hailsham children is brutally withheld," she wrote in The Guardian.

We believe that art is immortal, and so we represent creativity as an absolute good; but in making this representation to children, are we interfering with their right to know about and accept death? . . . Never Let Me Go, like the clones it portrays, has in the end something of a double nature, for it both attracts and annihilates. Or perhaps it is a book that requires two readers, the reader who can be blind to its ugly visage, and the reader who can see into its delicately conflicted soul. For those who perceive the latter, the novel's bleak horror will leave a bruise on the mind, a fetter on the heart.

Murakami is another heavy-hitter with surprisingly wide appeal, considering the oddness of his work. Everyone has their own personal ranking system for Murakami's works, which is exactly why he's on this list. Everyone has an opinion, because everyone's thought about him, at least a little bit. For me, this is the best of his novels in this decade (though overall I prefer The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997), and though no one asked, you're still reading this space, so I might as well inform you that Norwegian Wood is bad trash).

"When the English translation of Haruki Murakami's bestselling A Wind-Up Bird Chronicle transformed one of Japan's best-kept literary secrets into the world's best-known living Japanese novelist, this reviewer's acquaintances neatly subdivided themselves into three groups: besotted devotees (one British friend went so far as to name his newborn son "Haruki"); critical admirers; and people who came out in a nasty rash," David Mitchell wrote in The Guardian. He doesn't count this one as a masterpiece (he cites A Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, as he too has his ranking system, and like me, he is correct) but revels in Murakami's seductive prose and "trademark kookinesses," and notes that "Murakami's protagonists radiate a likeable humanity at odds with many of the "Asia Extreme" Japanese writers currently being translated into English, including Ryu (no relative) Murakami, Natsuo Kirino and Ring-master Koji Suzuki. Murakami writes Cert 18 scenes with aplomb when his plot demands it, but these never feel gratuitous or onanistic."
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
Another popular, bestselling Pulitzer Prize winner (I wonder if those things have any connection to one another), The Road may not be McCarthy's best work (that is certainly Blood Meridian) but it is certainly his most read. And, despite its near-psychotic inattention to grammar, it's still a fantastic achievement. "What emerges most powerfully as one reads The Road is not a prognosticatory or satirical warning about the future, or a timeless parable of a father's devotion to his son, or yet another McCarthyesque examination of the violent underpinnings of all social intercourse and the indifference of the cosmic jaw to the bloody morsel of humanity," wrote Michael Chabon in The New York Review of Books.

The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent's greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with. The fear of one day being obliged for your child's own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, above all, the fear of knowing-as every parent fears-that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited. It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with which The Road extends the metaphor of a father's guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself in a ruined, friendless world that The Road finds its great power to move and horrify the reader.
Roberto Bolaño, 2666 (first English translation, Natasha Wimmer, 2008)
It is pretty bleak, especially for a bestseller. " The Road has found a surprisingly enthusiastic audience given its foreboding and, at times, gruesome sensibility," wrote Ted Gioia. "It won the Pulitzer, made it into Oprah's book club, and was placed by Entertainment Weekly at the top of a list of the best books of the last 25 years. Entertainment Weekly? If this is entertainment, I think I will trade in my big screen TV for a long stint in solitary confinement. This gripping novel will force readers outside their comfort zones, and ultimately succeeds without making even the smallest concession to the formulas of escapist fiction." A feat in itself.
See also:
There's a fair argument that Bolaño's final, posthumously published novel is not only one of the defining books of the decade, but of the century. " 2666 is as consummate a performance as any 900-page novel dare hope to be," Jonathan Lethem wrote in the New York Times Book Review.

Bolaño won the race to the finish line in writing what he plainly intended, in his self-interrogating way, as a master statement. Indeed, he produced not only a supreme capstone to his own vaulting ambition, but a landmark in what's possible for the novel as a form in our increasingly, and terrifyingly, post-national world. The Savage Detectives looks positively hermetic beside it. . . . A novel like 2666 is its own preserving machine, delivering itself into our hearts, sentence by questing, unassuming sentence; it also becomes a preserving machine for the lives its words fall upon like a forgiving rain, fictional characters and the secret selves hidden behind and enshrined within them: hapless academic critics and a hapless Mexican boxer, the unavenged bodies deposited in shallow graves. By writing across the grain of his doubts about what literature can do, how much it can discover or dare pronounce the names of our world's disasters, Bolaño has proven it can do anything, and for an instant, at least, given a name to the unnamable.

Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai (2000), George Saunders, Pastoralia (2000), Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (2000), David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (2000), Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed (2001), Richard Russo, Empire Falls (2001), Yann Martel, The Life of Pi (2001), Percival Everett, Erasure (2001), Neil Gaiman, American Gods (2001), Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001), Gary Indiana, Do Everything in the Dark (2001), Dennis Lehane, Mystic River (2001), Ann Patchett, Bel Canto (2001), Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (2002), César Chávez, The Words of César Chávez (2002), Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002), W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (first English translation, 2002), Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones (2002), Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (2002), Edward P. Jones, The Known World (2003), Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003), Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife (2003), Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City (2003), Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner (2003), Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (2003), Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003), Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (2003), Zoë Heller, Notes on a Scandal (2003), Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses (2003), Tobias Wolff, Old School (2003), Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004), Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind (first English translation, 2004), Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (2004), Carl Hiaasen, Skinny Dip (2004), Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004), Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (2004), Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners (2005), Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian (2005), Zadie Smith, On Beauty (2005), Stephenie Meyer, Twilight (2005), John Green, Looking for Alaska (2005), Markus Zusak, The Book Thief (2005), Chris Adrian, The Children's Hospital (2006), Deborah Eisenberg, Twilight of the Superheroes (2006), John Boyne, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese (2006), Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (2006), Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives (2007), Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind (2007), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (2007), Tom McCarthy, Remainder (2007), André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name (2007), Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008), Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (2008), Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (first English translation, 2008), Keith Gessen, All the Sad Young Literary Men (2008), Steven Millhauser, Dangerous Laughter (2008), Joseph O'Neill, Netherland (2008), Richard Price, Lush Life (2008), John Updike, The Widows of Eastwick (2008), Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep (2005), Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (2009)

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A Century of Reading: The 10 Books That Defined the 2000s

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Some books are flashes in the pan, read for entertainment and then left on a bus seat for the next lucky person to pick up and enjoy, forgotten by most after their season has passed. Others stick around, are read and re-read, are taught and discussed.

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The 1990s is often remembered as a decade of relative peace and prosperity: The Soviet Union fell, ending the decades-long Cold War, and the rise of the Internet ushered in a radical new era of communication, business and entertainment. However, the decade was not without violence and tragedy, including the Bosnian genocide, the Rodney King beating and subsequent L.A. Riots, and the bombing of the World Trade Center. The Columbine High School shooting marked a solemn chapter in gun violence, and the devastatingly deadly Oklahoma City bombing by a domestic terrorist followed lethal standoffs between federal agents and armed civilians at Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas.

(History.com)

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Featured

The 1990s is often remembered as a decade of relative peace and prosperity: The Soviet Union fell, ending the decades‑long Cold War, and the rise of the Internet ushered in a radical new era of communication, business and entertainment. However, the decade was not without violence and tragedy, including the Bosnian genocide, the Rodney King [...]

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1990s: Peace, Prosperity and the Internet | HISTORY

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The 1990s was a decade often remembered for its relative prosperity and peace, as well as the rise of the Internet and 1990s fashion, movies and music.

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Unlike the 1970s, when hard-hitting movies addressed controversial subjects, lighthearted fare seemed to reign supreme in the 1980s. Films like “Ghostbusters,” “Die Hard,” “The Breakfast Club” and “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” kept audiences enthralled and box office receipts high.

The decade was also the era when blockbusters dominated: Movies like “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," “Beverly Hills Cop” and mammoth franchises like the Indiana Jones, Back to the Future and Star Wars series appealed to moviegoers of all ages, making hundreds of millions of dollars in domestic and international releases.

But not everything was superficial escapism: Many now-famous directors honed their craft with dark, serious movies like David Lynch in “Blue Velvet” and “The Elephant Man,” Martin Scorsese in “Raging Bull” and Gus Van Sant in “Drugstore Cowboy.”

(History.com)

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Reagan Revolution

The populist conservative movement known as the New Right enjoyed unprecedented growth in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It appealed to a diverse assortment of Americans including evangelical Christians, anti-tax crusaders, advocates of a more powerful American presence abroad, disaffected white liberals and defenders of a free market with few if any regulations.

Did You Know? At the beginning of the decade, as the Cold War showed no signs of easing, arms control advocates argued for a "nuclear freeze" agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1982, almost a million people rallied in support of the freeze in New York City's Central Park. Many historians believe this was the largest mass demonstration in American history.

The movement resonated with many citizens who had once supported more liberal policies but who no longer believed the Democratic Party represented their interests.

Reaganomics

Reagan advocated for industrial deregulation, reductions in government spending and tax cuts for both individuals and corporations, as part of an economic plan he and his advisors referred to as " supply-side economics." His economic and social agenda was largely shared by his across-the-pond friend, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

The resulting economic growth would allegedly "trickle down" to everyone-but whether it did or not is a matter of ongoing debate among politicians and economists. George H.W. Bush, campaigning against Reagan in the 1980 primary election, referred to his opponent's economic policy as "voodoo economics."

Reagan's economic policies-known as Reaganomics-initially proved less successful than its partisans had hoped, particularly when it came to a key tenet of the plan: balancing the budget.

Huge increases in military spending-during the Reagan administration, Pentagon spending would reach $34 million an hour -were not offset by spending cuts or tax increases elsewhere. This fact, plus Reagan's militaristic posture in international affairs, earned him the nickname "Ronald Ray-Gun."

By early 1982, the United States was experiencing its worst recession since the Great Depression. Nine million people were unemployed in November of that year. Businesses closed, families lost their homes and farmers lost their land. The economy slowly righted itself, however, and Reaganomics grew popular again.

Even the stock market crash of October 1987 did little to undermine the confidence of middle-class and wealthy Americans in the president's economic agenda. Many also overlooked the fact that Reagan's policies created record budget deficits: During his eight years in office, the federal government accumulated more debt than it had in its entire history.

Reagan Doctrine

Like many other American leaders during the Cold War, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywhere. As a result, his administration was eager to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist governments and insurgencies around the world. This policy, applied in nations including Grenada, El Salvador and Nicaragua, was known as the Reagan Doctrine.

Despite its mixed track record, a majority of Americans still believed in the conservative agenda by the late 1980s. When Ronald Reagan left office in 1989, he had the highest approval rating of any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1988, Reagan's vice president, George H. W. Bush, soundly defeated Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in the presidential election.

Fall of Communism

While Reagan and Thatcher trumpeted the march of conservative politics and capitalism, the foundations of communism grew increasingly shaky. In Poland, former electrician Lech Walesa led striking workers to form Solidarity, the first labor union to develop in a Soviet bloc nation. In 1980, representatives of the communist government of Poland agreed to the demands of the strikers.

In 1985, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began to introduce the twin concepts of glasnost, or "openness" and perestroika, or "restructuring," to revive the moribund Soviet economy-but those efforts yielded few tangible results.

By the end of the 1980s, communism was in rapid retreat across Europe and Asia. The Berlin Wall, which had long divided the German city into an eastern, communist-held half and a western democratic half, was torn down by ecstatic crowds in 1989. And two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed.

In communist China, the Tiananmen Square protests-student-led demonstrations calling for democracy, free speech and a free press-began in the spring of 1989. In June of that year, the protests were ended by the Chinese government in a bloody crackdown known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Yuppie Culture

In some respects, the popular culture of the 1980s reflected the era's political conservatism. For many people, the embodiment of the decade was the young, urban professional, or "yuppie," a baby boomer with a college education, a good-paying job and expensive taste.

Many people derided yuppies for being self-centered and materialistic, and surveys of young urban professionals across the country showed that they were, indeed, more concerned with making money and buying consumer goods than their parents and grandparents had been.

Movies in the 1980s

Unlike the 1970s, when hard-hitting movies addressed controversial subjects, lighthearted fare seemed to reign supreme in the 1980s. Films like "Ghostbusters," "Die Hard," "The Breakfast Club" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" kept audiences enthralled and box office receipts high.

The decade was also the era when blockbusters dominated: Movies like "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," "Beverly Hills Cop" and mammoth franchises like the Indiana Jones, Back to the Future and Star Wars series appealed to moviegoers of all ages, making hundreds of millions of dollars in domestic and international releases.

But not everything was superficial escapism: Many now-famous directors honed their craft with dark, serious movies like David Lynch in "Blue Velvet" and "The Elephant Man," Martin Scorsese in "Raging Bull" and Gus Van Sant in "Drugstore Cowboy."

Television in the 1980s

At home, millions watched family sitcoms like "The Cosby Show," "The Simpsons," "thirtysomething" "Family Ties," "Roseanne" and "Married...with Children." They also skipped broadcast network fare and watched rented movies on their new VCRs.

By the end of the 1980s, broadcast networks realized they were in serious trouble as 60 percent of American television owners had cable service. Soon, cable companies like HBO, Cinemax, TBS and Nickelodeon were household names.

In 1980, the Cable News Network first aired, and soon CNN became a major player in delivering U.S. and international news via satellite worldwide, 24 hours a day. One year later, another revolutionary cable network, MTV, made its debut and completely changed the way Americans thought about music, dance and fashion.

Music in the 1980s

The music videos MTV played made stars out of bands like Duran Duran, R.E.M. and Culture Club and megastars out of artists like Madonna, Prince, Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson, whose elaborate "Thriller" video helped sell 600,000 albums in the five days after its first broadcast.

Later, MTV became a forum for those who went against the grain or were left out of predominantly white, yuppie culture. Rap and hip-hop artists such as Public Enemy channeled the frustration of urban Blacks into their powerful album "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back."

But because of the consistent promotion of white musicians and bands on MTV, other venues soon opened up for emerging artists. BET, or Black Entertainment Television, premiered in 1980 as a challenger to MTV by promoting Black bands and musicians.

Hard rock acts such as Metallica and Guns N' Roses captured the sense of malaise among young people, particularly young men. The 1980s also saw the growing popularity of electronic music, house music, reggae, new wave and other dance-club favorites.

Fashion in the 1980s

In addition to serving as a platform for music, MTV also influenced fashion: People across the country (and around the world) did their best to copy the hairstyles and fashions they saw in music videos. Soon, musicians like Madonna, MC Hammer and Boy George also became style icons.

But behind the gloss of MTV, another influence grew in both music and fashion: Punk culture and new-wave fashion, especially in London, grew from a late-1970s trend into a potent 1980s fashion force worldwide, with designers like Vivienne Westwood leading the charge. Ripped jeans and jackets-replete with safety pins and other metallic adornments-Doc Martens boots, spiked hair and heavy makeup were all the rage.

Other fashion trends from the 1980s included athletic wear-running shoes or basketball shoes, track suits and leg warmers-worn as everyday clothing. The preppy look, which mimicked the clothing worn by Ivy League students and buttoned-up professionals, invaded college campuses and nightclubs alike, following the success of " The Official Preppy Handbook," published by Lisa Birnbach in 1980.

AIDS Crisis

Within a few years, an alarmed public learned about the spread of a deadly infectious disease now known as AIDS, or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, transmitted by direct contact with bodily fluids. Because it was initially dismissed by many-including the political and medical establishments-as occurring only among gay men, the disease spread rapidly, with at least 100,000 U.S. cases and an estimated 400,000 AIDS cases worldwide by the end of the 1980s.

Red ribbons supporting AIDS awareness soon adorned clothes, books, cars and public buildings, including the White House. The first antiviral treatment for AIDS, azidothymidine (AZT), was made available in 1987 and was followed by other, more advanced treatments, but the disease remains a health threat to this day.

Women in the News

Expanding on the hard-won rights that women earned in previous decades, women were leaders in many arenas in the 1980s, from politics to science and the arts. Maggie Thatcher was elected as the first woman prime minister of Great Britain, and Corazon Aquino -following the assassination of her husband, Senator Benigno Aquino Jr.-was ushered into office as the first women president of the Philippines.

U.S. astronaut Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly in space on the space shuttle Challenger in 1983. On the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor was appointed by President Reagan as the first woman to serve as associate justice.

Arguably the most famous woman of the era was Princess Diana, who married Charles, the Prince of Wales, in an elaborate 1981 televised wedding watched by some 750 million people around the world. Her visage was to grace television screens and magazine covers for many years thereafter until Diana's death in 1997.

Disasters

A number of disasters, both natural and manmade, made headlines in the 1980s. The decade began with the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington. The titanic explosion claimed more than 50 human lives and destroyed thousands of acres of forest and rangeland.

In Bhopal, India, an explosion at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in 1984 led to the worst industrial accident in history. At least 2,000 people died and another 200,000 were injured when poisonous gas enveloped the city.

In Alaska, the pristine shores of Prince William Sound were stained black in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez tanker spilled some 11 million gallons of crude oil into the sea, killing hundreds of thousands of seabirds, otters, seals and whales. Even 30 years later, pockets of crude oil remained in some areas.

And in the blue skies above Cape Canaveral, Florida, the space shuttle Challenger exploded as millions of people watched on television and on the ground. All seven crew members aboard were killed.

Technology in the 1980s

Soon, scattered computer users began to communicate with one another through an early network developed by the U.S. Department of Defense: ARPANET. In 1983, the network adopted TCP/IP, a set of communications protocols that led to the creation of the internet, and the modern era of computer communications was born.

With the personal computer, or PC, now available to middle-class consumers, Microsoft-founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen-soon became the dominant player in PC software. In 1983, Microsoft released Word, a simple, practical word-processing program, followed in 1985 by Windows, now the world's most popular computer operating system. And Apple released its first Apple computer in 1984.

Communication took another leap forward when Motorola introduced the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, a handheld cellular telephone. Weighing in at 1 lb., 12 ounces and 13 inches tall, the brick-like cell phone was a novelty at the time, but it heralded the beginning of a new era. By 2021, almost 15 million cell phones would be in use worldwide.

Sources

Timeline: 1980s. Security and Exchange Commission: Historical Society.
List of 1980's Major News Events in History. The People History.
The 10 biggest tech breakthroughs of the 1980s. TechRadar.
POP Culture: 1980. United States Census Bureau.
1980s: Pop Culture in Excess. The Guardian (UCSD).
The 10 defining moments of the 1980s. SBS.

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1980s: Fashion, Movies & Politics | HISTORY

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The 1980s were a decade of political conservatism, such as President Ronald Reagan's Reaganomics, and of blockbuster movies, pop culture and fashion on MTV.

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While Reagan and Thatcher trumpeted the march of conservative politics and capitalism, the foundations of communism grew increasingly shaky. In Poland, former electrician Lech Walesa led striking workers to form Solidarity, the first labor union to develop in a Soviet bloc nation. In 1980, representatives of the communist government of Poland agreed to the demands of the strikers.

(History.com)

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Reagan Revolution

The populist conservative movement known as the New Right enjoyed unprecedented growth in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It appealed to a diverse assortment of Americans including evangelical Christians, anti-tax crusaders, advocates of a more powerful American presence abroad, disaffected white liberals and defenders of a free market with few if any regulations.

Did You Know? At the beginning of the decade, as the Cold War showed no signs of easing, arms control advocates argued for a "nuclear freeze" agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1982, almost a million people rallied in support of the freeze in New York City's Central Park. Many historians believe this was the largest mass demonstration in American history.

The movement resonated with many citizens who had once supported more liberal policies but who no longer believed the Democratic Party represented their interests.

Reaganomics

Reagan advocated for industrial deregulation, reductions in government spending and tax cuts for both individuals and corporations, as part of an economic plan he and his advisors referred to as " supply-side economics." His economic and social agenda was largely shared by his across-the-pond friend, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

The resulting economic growth would allegedly "trickle down" to everyone-but whether it did or not is a matter of ongoing debate among politicians and economists. George H.W. Bush, campaigning against Reagan in the 1980 primary election, referred to his opponent's economic policy as "voodoo economics."

Reagan's economic policies-known as Reaganomics-initially proved less successful than its partisans had hoped, particularly when it came to a key tenet of the plan: balancing the budget.

Huge increases in military spending-during the Reagan administration, Pentagon spending would reach $34 million an hour -were not offset by spending cuts or tax increases elsewhere. This fact, plus Reagan's militaristic posture in international affairs, earned him the nickname "Ronald Ray-Gun."

By early 1982, the United States was experiencing its worst recession since the Great Depression. Nine million people were unemployed in November of that year. Businesses closed, families lost their homes and farmers lost their land. The economy slowly righted itself, however, and Reaganomics grew popular again.

Even the stock market crash of October 1987 did little to undermine the confidence of middle-class and wealthy Americans in the president's economic agenda. Many also overlooked the fact that Reagan's policies created record budget deficits: During his eight years in office, the federal government accumulated more debt than it had in its entire history.

Reagan Doctrine

Like many other American leaders during the Cold War, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywhere. As a result, his administration was eager to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist governments and insurgencies around the world. This policy, applied in nations including Grenada, El Salvador and Nicaragua, was known as the Reagan Doctrine.

Despite its mixed track record, a majority of Americans still believed in the conservative agenda by the late 1980s. When Ronald Reagan left office in 1989, he had the highest approval rating of any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1988, Reagan's vice president, George H. W. Bush, soundly defeated Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis in the presidential election.

Fall of Communism

While Reagan and Thatcher trumpeted the march of conservative politics and capitalism, the foundations of communism grew increasingly shaky. In Poland, former electrician Lech Walesa led striking workers to form Solidarity, the first labor union to develop in a Soviet bloc nation. In 1980, representatives of the communist government of Poland agreed to the demands of the strikers.

In 1985, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began to introduce the twin concepts of glasnost, or "openness" and perestroika, or "restructuring," to revive the moribund Soviet economy-but those efforts yielded few tangible results.

By the end of the 1980s, communism was in rapid retreat across Europe and Asia. The Berlin Wall, which had long divided the German city into an eastern, communist-held half and a western democratic half, was torn down by ecstatic crowds in 1989. And two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed.

In communist China, the Tiananmen Square protests-student-led demonstrations calling for democracy, free speech and a free press-began in the spring of 1989. In June of that year, the protests were ended by the Chinese government in a bloody crackdown known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Yuppie Culture

In some respects, the popular culture of the 1980s reflected the era's political conservatism. For many people, the embodiment of the decade was the young, urban professional, or "yuppie," a baby boomer with a college education, a good-paying job and expensive taste.

Many people derided yuppies for being self-centered and materialistic, and surveys of young urban professionals across the country showed that they were, indeed, more concerned with making money and buying consumer goods than their parents and grandparents had been.

Movies in the 1980s

Unlike the 1970s, when hard-hitting movies addressed controversial subjects, lighthearted fare seemed to reign supreme in the 1980s. Films like "Ghostbusters," "Die Hard," "The Breakfast Club" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" kept audiences enthralled and box office receipts high.

The decade was also the era when blockbusters dominated: Movies like "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," "Beverly Hills Cop" and mammoth franchises like the Indiana Jones, Back to the Future and Star Wars series appealed to moviegoers of all ages, making hundreds of millions of dollars in domestic and international releases.

But not everything was superficial escapism: Many now-famous directors honed their craft with dark, serious movies like David Lynch in "Blue Velvet" and "The Elephant Man," Martin Scorsese in "Raging Bull" and Gus Van Sant in "Drugstore Cowboy."

Television in the 1980s

At home, millions watched family sitcoms like "The Cosby Show," "The Simpsons," "thirtysomething" "Family Ties," "Roseanne" and "Married...with Children." They also skipped broadcast network fare and watched rented movies on their new VCRs.

By the end of the 1980s, broadcast networks realized they were in serious trouble as 60 percent of American television owners had cable service. Soon, cable companies like HBO, Cinemax, TBS and Nickelodeon were household names.

In 1980, the Cable News Network first aired, and soon CNN became a major player in delivering U.S. and international news via satellite worldwide, 24 hours a day. One year later, another revolutionary cable network, MTV, made its debut and completely changed the way Americans thought about music, dance and fashion.

Music in the 1980s

The music videos MTV played made stars out of bands like Duran Duran, R.E.M. and Culture Club and megastars out of artists like Madonna, Prince, Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson, whose elaborate "Thriller" video helped sell 600,000 albums in the five days after its first broadcast.

Later, MTV became a forum for those who went against the grain or were left out of predominantly white, yuppie culture. Rap and hip-hop artists such as Public Enemy channeled the frustration of urban Blacks into their powerful album "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back."

But because of the consistent promotion of white musicians and bands on MTV, other venues soon opened up for emerging artists. BET, or Black Entertainment Television, premiered in 1980 as a challenger to MTV by promoting Black bands and musicians.

Hard rock acts such as Metallica and Guns N' Roses captured the sense of malaise among young people, particularly young men. The 1980s also saw the growing popularity of electronic music, house music, reggae, new wave and other dance-club favorites.

Fashion in the 1980s

In addition to serving as a platform for music, MTV also influenced fashion: People across the country (and around the world) did their best to copy the hairstyles and fashions they saw in music videos. Soon, musicians like Madonna, MC Hammer and Boy George also became style icons.

But behind the gloss of MTV, another influence grew in both music and fashion: Punk culture and new-wave fashion, especially in London, grew from a late-1970s trend into a potent 1980s fashion force worldwide, with designers like Vivienne Westwood leading the charge. Ripped jeans and jackets-replete with safety pins and other metallic adornments-Doc Martens boots, spiked hair and heavy makeup were all the rage.

Other fashion trends from the 1980s included athletic wear-running shoes or basketball shoes, track suits and leg warmers-worn as everyday clothing. The preppy look, which mimicked the clothing worn by Ivy League students and buttoned-up professionals, invaded college campuses and nightclubs alike, following the success of " The Official Preppy Handbook," published by Lisa Birnbach in 1980.

AIDS Crisis

Within a few years, an alarmed public learned about the spread of a deadly infectious disease now known as AIDS, or Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, transmitted by direct contact with bodily fluids. Because it was initially dismissed by many-including the political and medical establishments-as occurring only among gay men, the disease spread rapidly, with at least 100,000 U.S. cases and an estimated 400,000 AIDS cases worldwide by the end of the 1980s.

Red ribbons supporting AIDS awareness soon adorned clothes, books, cars and public buildings, including the White House. The first antiviral treatment for AIDS, azidothymidine (AZT), was made available in 1987 and was followed by other, more advanced treatments, but the disease remains a health threat to this day.

Women in the News

Expanding on the hard-won rights that women earned in previous decades, women were leaders in many arenas in the 1980s, from politics to science and the arts. Maggie Thatcher was elected as the first woman prime minister of Great Britain, and Corazon Aquino -following the assassination of her husband, Senator Benigno Aquino Jr.-was ushered into office as the first women president of the Philippines.

U.S. astronaut Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly in space on the space shuttle Challenger in 1983. On the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O'Connor was appointed by President Reagan as the first woman to serve as associate justice.

Arguably the most famous woman of the era was Princess Diana, who married Charles, the Prince of Wales, in an elaborate 1981 televised wedding watched by some 750 million people around the world. Her visage was to grace television screens and magazine covers for many years thereafter until Diana's death in 1997.

Disasters

A number of disasters, both natural and manmade, made headlines in the 1980s. The decade began with the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington. The titanic explosion claimed more than 50 human lives and destroyed thousands of acres of forest and rangeland.

In Bhopal, India, an explosion at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in 1984 led to the worst industrial accident in history. At least 2,000 people died and another 200,000 were injured when poisonous gas enveloped the city.

In Alaska, the pristine shores of Prince William Sound were stained black in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez tanker spilled some 11 million gallons of crude oil into the sea, killing hundreds of thousands of seabirds, otters, seals and whales. Even 30 years later, pockets of crude oil remained in some areas.

And in the blue skies above Cape Canaveral, Florida, the space shuttle Challenger exploded as millions of people watched on television and on the ground. All seven crew members aboard were killed.

Technology in the 1980s

Soon, scattered computer users began to communicate with one another through an early network developed by the U.S. Department of Defense: ARPANET. In 1983, the network adopted TCP/IP, a set of communications protocols that led to the creation of the internet, and the modern era of computer communications was born.

With the personal computer, or PC, now available to middle-class consumers, Microsoft-founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen-soon became the dominant player in PC software. In 1983, Microsoft released Word, a simple, practical word-processing program, followed in 1985 by Windows, now the world's most popular computer operating system. And Apple released its first Apple computer in 1984.

Communication took another leap forward when Motorola introduced the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, a handheld cellular telephone. Weighing in at 1 lb., 12 ounces and 13 inches tall, the brick-like cell phone was a novelty at the time, but it heralded the beginning of a new era. By 2021, almost 15 million cell phones would be in use worldwide.

Sources

Timeline: 1980s. Security and Exchange Commission: Historical Society.
List of 1980's Major News Events in History. The People History.
The 10 biggest tech breakthroughs of the 1980s. TechRadar.
POP Culture: 1980. United States Census Bureau.
1980s: Pop Culture in Excess. The Guardian (UCSD).
The 10 defining moments of the 1980s. SBS.

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1980s: Fashion, Movies & Politics | HISTORY

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The 1980s were a decade of political conservatism, such as President Ronald Reagan's Reaganomics, and of blockbuster movies, pop culture and fashion on MTV.

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Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)

Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)

William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (1984)

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Some books are flashes in the pan, read for entertainment and then left on a bus seat for the next lucky person to pick up and enjoy, forgotten by most after their season has passed. Others stick around, are read and re-read, are taught and discussed. sometimes due to great artistry, sometimes due to luck, and sometimes because they manage to recognize and capture some element of the culture of the time.

In the moment, you often can't tell which books are which. The Great Gatsby wasn't a bestseller upon its release, but we now see it as emblematic of a certain American sensibility in the 1920s. Of course, hindsight can also distort the senses; the canon looms and obscures. Still, over the next weeks, we'll be publishing a list a day, each one attempting to define a discrete decade, starting with the 1900s (as you've no doubt guessed by now) and counting down until we get to the (nearly complete) 2010s.

Though the books on these lists need not be American in origin, I am looking for books that evoke some aspect of American life, actual or intellectual, in each decade-a global lens would require a much longer list. And of course, varied and complex as it is, there's no list that could truly define American life over ten or any number of years, so I do not make any claim on exhaustiveness. I've simply selected books that, if read together, would give a fair picture of the landscape of literary culture for that decade-both as it was and as it is remembered. Finally, two process notes: I've limited myself to one book for author over the entire 12-part list, so you may see certain works skipped over in favor of others, even if both are important (for instance, I ignored Dubliners in the 1910s so I could include Ulysses in the 1920s), and in the case of translated work, I'll be using the date of the English translation, for obvious reasons.

For our ninth installment, below you'll find 10 books that defined the 1980s. (Head here for the 1910s, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s).

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Raymond Carver has a fair bid for being the most iconic and influential American short story writer ever-but he's certainly the most iconic and influential American short story writer of the 1980s, due to this collection (just think of how many times you've seen the title construction parodied and reused) as well as Cathedral (1983) and Where I'm Calling From (1988). "Carver stands squarely in the line of descent of American realism," Marilynne Robinson wrote in a 1988 review of the latter.

His weaknesses are for sentimentality and sensationalism. His great gift is for writing stories that create meaning through their form. Much attention has been paid to his prose, and to his preoccupation with very ordinary lives and with disruption, divorce, displacement, sadness, the thankless business of cadging income from small and unlikable jobs. He should be famous for the conceptual beauty of his best stories, and disburdened of his worst, which could then pass into relative neglect. The narrative foreground in Mr. Carver's fiction is typically muted or flattened. The stories have in common a sort of bafflement, justified in the best ones by the fact that their burdens are truly mysterious. Anecdotes - for want of a better word - looming and untranslatable like remembered dreams (which they sometimes are) figure so largely in these stories as to suggest that they are analogues to fiction itself, and also to consciousness, specifically to consciousness as it is shared, collective or bonding. It has been usual for a long time to lament the absence of myth in modern life, as if intuitions of the primordial and essential were the products of culture and would be dispelled with the loss of certain images and illusions, as if the forces myth describes were not real or powerful enough to impose themselves on our attention all unbidden. The bafflement in the best of these stories does not render an absence of meaning but awkwardness in the face of meaning, a very different thing.

His work sold exceptionally well ( for short stories) in his lifetime and is still a staple of contemporary literary culture, taught widely at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and copied everywhere. Even whispers that his editor Gordon Lish had too much of a hand in his stories have not much tarnished his legacy-or appeal.

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Walker's most famous novel was a critical hit upon its release, winning the National Book Award as well as the Pulitzer (she was the first black woman ever to win it). It was a groundbreaking work and remains an essential womanist text, hailed for its literary excellence as well as its frank portrayal of impoverished black women, domestic abuse, and lesbian relationships. The 1985 film adaptation made it a full-blown sensation, for all Americans, but particularly for black women. As Victoria Bond put it in The New Republic, " The Color Purple lingers as perhaps the cultural touchstone for black women in America, a kind of lingua franca of familiarity and friendship." As far as the controversy, she goes on:

Spike Lee said that the Steven Spielberg-produced film was "done with hate," and that the Mr.- character was a "one-note animal." The Coalition Against Black Exploitation protested The Color Purple's 1985 Los Angeles premiere for its depiction of black men abusing black women. The novelist Ishmael Reed called The Color Purple "a Nazi conspiracy," and even suggested that both the novel and the film were critically acclaimed expressly because they slam black men.

Reed was wrong then and he's wrong now. The popularity of The Color Purple has very little to do with besmirching black men. Instead, it has everything to do with black women's rejection of respectability politics: from the lesbian relationship between Celie and Shug, Mr.-'s ex-lover; to the representation of traditional Christianity as small-minded and stifling; to the narrative's assertion that domestic violence arises from patriarchal hysteria about women's strength, not our weakness.

Black women turned out in droves to see the film. We continue to reference it today because it breaks a certain cultural silence about abuse. Respectability politics imperil black women by demanding we stay mute; they insist that black people are a monolith whose reputation must be protected and preserved, whatever the cost. This extends to art, which appears only to be acceptable if black characters are struggling to "get better," to put checkered pasts firmly in the past. But the truth is obvious. We aren't interested in stories about the perfect; we're interested in stories about the real.

"There is no way to overstate how radical Gibson's first and best novel was when it first appeared," Lev Grossman wrote in TIME. "Violent, visceral and visionary (there's no other word for it), Neuromancer proved, not for the first or last time, that science fiction is more than a mass-market paperback genre, it's a crucial tool by which an age shaped by and obsessed with technology can understand itself."

The book, Cory Doctrow told The Guardian, "remains a vividly imagined allegory for the world of the 1980s, when the first seeds of massive, globalised wealth-disparity were planted, and when the inchoate rumblings of technological rebellion were first felt."

A generation later, we're living in a future that is both nothing like the Gibson future and instantly recognisable as its less stylish, less romantic cousin. Instead of zaibatsus [large conglomerates] run by faceless salarymen, we have doctrinaire thrusting young neocons and neoliberals who want to treat everything from schools to hospitals as businesses."

In it, Gibson popularized the term "cyberspace" (this is the 80s, remember) and predicted the internet, that "consensual hallucination" that we're all now plugged into at all hours. He also more or less invented "cyberpunk," an aesthetic system that has had untold influence on all the SF and fantasy since. It was, after all, the first novel to win the "holy trinity of science fiction": the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award, and it is still read and lionized today.
Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (1984)
A coming-of-age classic, a staple of middle and high school reading curriculums, and a classic of Chicano literature that by 2002 had sold two million copies in 11 languages, "making Ms. Cisneros one of the best-selling Hispanic authors in the United States." Critic Lorna L. Pérez called the novel "perhaps the most widely read and taught text in Latina literature" and highlighted its "striking revision of the Western literary and theoretical canon."

Her appropriation of the form, style, and philosophical complications of her literary predecessors reveals profound and entrenched assumptions about subjectivity, class, and ethnicity, categories that historically and contemporarily marginalize individuals like her protagonist Esperanza Cordero. In engaging-both explicitly and implicitly-the literary predecessors that haunt the house on Mango Street, Cisneros is able to alleviate what Harold Bloom calls the "anxiety of influence" not by attempting to overshadow or destroy her predecessors, but by revealing the ideological constructs that lay in the foundations of their writing, thereby redefining the grounds of subjectivity and revealing the unhomely-or that which remains hidden-in the work. By engaging her literary influences in this way, Cisneros offers a revision to their assumptions, and as such lays the foundation for a radical literature that can encompass positions that have been relegated to the margins.
Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove (1985) Don DeLillo, White Noise (1985)
This last, of course, being something we gratefully see more and more every day.

There was considerable dissent in the Literary Hub office over this book-or, to be precise, over whether we should replace it with Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, which is also a western published in 1985, and which most of our staff (yours included) prefer, as a novel. But Cormac McCarthy, for me, is on the whole more a writer of the 90s and 00s, and unlike Blood Meridian, Lonesome Dove was loved and appreciated in its time as well as afterwards. And honestly, the literary 1980s was all about Lonesome Dove. It was a stupendously reviewed bestseller, and went on to win the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The New York Times called it the first "Great Cowboy Novel" and the LA Times called it "Larry McMurtry's loftiest novel, a wondrous work, drowned in love, melancholy, and yet, ultimately, exultant." Then, of course, there was the miniseries, which premiered in 1989, and as with Roots, cemented the legacy of its source material (not to mention brought back the miniseries format, which had been considered increasingly unprofitable). It is now a canonical pillar of the American western, perhaps the most uniquely American of all genres-and no more so than in Texas, where it ranks with the Bible and the Warren Commission Report.

This is an essential novel of 1980s America not only because it was written then, and not only because it was popular and acclaimed then (it won the National Book Award), but because it hacks directly at the culture of that time. " White Noise finds its greatest distinction in its understanding and perception of America's soundtrack," Jayne Anne Phillips wrote in The New York Times.

White noise includes the ever-present sound of expressway traffic, "a remote and steady murmur around our sleep, as of dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream." Television is "the primal force in the American home, sealed-off, self-contained, self-referring . . . a wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages . . . like chants. . . . Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it." Television, Murray Siskind asserts, "practically overflows with sacred formulas." White noise includes the bold print of tabloids, those amalgams of American magic and dread, with their comforting "mechanism of offering a hopeful twist to apocalyptic events." Fast food and quad cinemas contribute to the melody, as do automated teller machines. Nowhere is Mr. DeLillo's take on the endlessly distorted, religious underside of American consumerism better illustrated than in the passage on supermarkets.

As Lev Grossman put it in TIME: "Though it's pitched at a level of absurdity slightly above that of real life, White Noise captures the quality of daily existence in media-saturated, hyper-capitalistic postmodern America so precisely, you don't know whether to laugh or whimper."

The book was precise about the anxiety, self-absorption, and alienation of the '80s-which, what do you know, hasn't exactly let up. "This turning inward was happening across America in 1985," writes Nathaniel Rich in The Daily Beast.

Exhausted by the paranoia of Watergate era, and the panic of the oil embargo and the Iran hostage crisis, the nation sought the comforts of old-fashioned Hollywood movies, delivered by an old-fashioned Hollywood actor. White Noise was published two months after Ronald Reagan's second inauguration, which followed the most effective marketing campaign in American political history, sounding visceral notes of hope ("It's morning again in America") and terror ("There is a bear in the woods"). In "Supermarket", the narrator asks Americans to judge the state of the country by the contents of their local supermarket-a tactic, incidentally, followed by DeLillo, who ends White Noise with a nightmarish scene inside of one. Walter Mondale, who had tried to make the election about the budget deficit and interest rates, soon realized his mistake, releasing ads with horror-movie music and images of nuclear warheads, but it was too late.

White Noise even eerily presaged the Bhopal gas leak with his airborne toxic event. "In light of the recent Union Carbide disaster in India that killed over 2,000 and injured thousands more," Phillips notes, " White Noise seems all the more timely and frightening-precisely because of its totally American concerns, its rendering of a particularly American numbness."

If you're reading this space, I probably don't have to expound on the importance of Toni Morrison to you. But just to cover all our bases, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988, and was a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award-though lost out to something called Paco's Story, which rankled then and rankles now. In 2006, the editors of the New York Times asked "a couple hundred" writers, critics, and editors to vote on "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years," and the winner-by a relatively large margin-was Beloved. "Any other outcome would have been startling," wrote A.O. Scott, "since Morrison's novel has inserted itself into the American canon more completely than any of its potential rivals.

With remarkable speed, Beloved has, less than 20 years after its publication, become a staple of the college literary curriculum, which is to say a classic. This triumph is commensurate with its ambition, since it was Morrison's intention in writing it precisely to expand the range of classic American literature, to enter, as a living black woman, the company of dead white males like Faulkner, Melville, Hawthorne and Twain. When the book first began to be assigned in college classrooms, during an earlier and in retrospect much tamer phase of the culture wars, its inclusion on syllabuses was taken, by partisans and opponents alike, as a radical gesture. (The conservative canard one heard in those days was that left-wing professors were casting aside Shakespeare in favor of Morrison.) But the political rhetoric of the time obscured the essential conservatism of the novel, which aimed not to displace or overthrow its beloved precursors, but to complete and to some extent correct them.
Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)
In Slate, Stephen Metcalf agrees. "Like two other American novels devoted to race, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, Beloved exists wholly beyond its own artistic merits and demerits," he writes.

These books have become something more than mere literature; they're homework, with an afterlife guaranteed by their place (or in the case of Huck Finn, its embattled absence) on the high-school and college syllabus. ("Only Shakespeare rivals her in the number of senior theses devoted to her work," Harvard English professor Barbara Johnson has said.) Were it simply a matter of social redress, we could all go home now, the Dead White Males having been forced to cocktail with a Living Black Woman. But Beloved isn't solely a work of protest and advocacy, as Morrison herself has insisted, nor solely a symbol for the progress and virtue of the prestige-granting institutions in American letters. It's a serious novel and a work of art, and it deserves to be accorded the highest respect. It deserves, in other words, to be asked, Yes, but are you any good?

Reader, it is.
See also:
This may be the most 80s of all the 80s books on this 80s list (though it's a foot race against White Noise), which is not a particularly novel point. "So regularly is Tom Wolfe's brash 1987 tome described as 'the quintessential novel of the 80s' that you almost feel the phrase could be slapped on as a subtitle," Hermoine Hoby wrote in The Guardian. "But the ability to 'capture the decade' isn't the only measure of a writer's ability, and like a hot-pink puffball dress, this story displays a blithe disregard for nuance." Indeed-though un-nuanced as it is, it's a riot, a satirical novel about money, clothes, success, greed, racism, and corruption in New York City, an absolute nonsense whirlwind that turned into a major best-seller.

"Now comes Tom Wolfe, aging enfant terrible, with his first novel, (his first novel!), six hundred and fifty-nine pages of raw energy about New York City and various of its inhabitants-a big, bitter, funny, craftily plotted book that grabs you by the lapels and won't let go," Pat Conroy wrote in the New York Times. "As in much of his other work, such as The Right Stuff, Mr. Wolfe's strategy is to somehow batter the reader into submission, using an incantatory repetition of certain emblematic phrases, (HIS FIRST NOVEL!), detailed description of people's clothing, hyperbole, interior monologue whenever he feels like it, and various other New Journalism devices he is apparently too fond of to give up. What is amazing is that he gets away with it." Great, now I have to say "indeed" again.

Again, there was some argument in the Literary Hub office over whether it was more important to include this volume or Carl Sagan's Cosmos (1981), so I'd say that all things being equal, Hawking has had the greater cultural influence. After all, Hawking's plain-language explanation of the universe has sold more than 10 million copies since it was first published-spending 147 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and an astonishing 237 weeks on the Times of London bestseller list-and been translated into some 35 languages. It's more or less the reason why the average American has any idea about space, or black holes, or quantum mechanics, or the theory of relativity-despite the theory that it is "probably the least-read, most-bought book ever."

Midnight's Children (1981) is probably the better book, but it was The Satanic Verses that kicked off the largest literary controversy of the 1980s. The book, based in part on the life of the Islamic Prophet Mohammad, was vehemently protested by some Muslims, and on February 14th, 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a fatwa against Rushdie, calling for his assassination. "I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of the Satanic Verses book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who are aware of its content are sentenced to death," he announced, and the Iranian government offered $6 million to anyone who killed Rushdie. The author apologized, but to no avail. Bookstores carrying the book in the US and UK were bombed, and so was at least one newspaper that ran an editorial supporting the book. Rushdie's Japanese translator was murdered, and his Italian and Norwegian translators were attacked and seriously injured. Protests were held all over the world, and Rushdie spent the next nine years in hiding-until September 1998, when the new Iranian President Mohammed Khatami said he would not uphold the fatwa. (Though it is still in effect.)

Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline (1980), Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (1980), J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), Carl Sagan, Contact (1980), Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler (first English translation, 1981), Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (1981), Stephen King, Cujo (1981), Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories (1981), Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (1981), Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban (1982), W. P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe (1982), Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List (1982), Raymond Carver, Cathedral (1983), Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (first English translation, 1983), Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927-1979 (1983), Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon (1983), Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale (1983), Susan Hill, The Woman in Black (1983), Stephen King, Pet Sematary (1981), Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City (1984), Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (first English translation, 1984), Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (1984), Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School (1984), Martin Amis, Money (1984), Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (first English translation, 1984), Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits (first English translation, 1985), John Irving, The Cider House Rules (1985), Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero (1985), Patricia MacLachlan, Sarah, Plain and Tall (1985), Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game (1985), Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Laura Numeroff, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (1985), Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (1985), Lorrie Moore, Self-Help (1985), Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), Richard Ford, The Sportswriter (1986), Brian Jacques, Redwall (1986), Stephen King, It (1986), Art Spiegelman, Maus I (1986), Alan Moore, Watchmen (1986), Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (1987), James Ellroy, Black Dahlia (1987), Stephen King, Misery (1981), Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On (1987), Gary Paulsen, Hatchet (1987), Mary Gaitskill, Bad Behavior (1988), John Grisham, A Time to Kill (1988), David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988), Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming Pool Library (1988), Roald Dahl, Matilda (1988), Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (first English translation, 1988), Martin Amis, London Fields (1989), Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989), Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life (1989), Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1989), Oscar Hijuelos, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (1989)

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A Century of Reading: The 10 Books That Defined the 1980s

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Some books are flashes in the pan, read for entertainment and then left on a bus seat for the next lucky person to pick up and enjoy, forgotten by most after their season has passed. Others stick around, are read and re-read, are taught and discussed.

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The 1980s, often remembered for its materialism and consumerism, also saw the rise of the "yuppie," an explosion of blockbuster movies and the emergence of cable networks like CNN and MTV, which introduced the music video and launched the careers of many iconic artists.

(History.com)

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The 1960s was a time of upheaval in virtually every part of American culture.

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The 1960s started off as the dawn of a golden age to most Americans.

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Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)

Betty Friedan: The Feminine Mystique (1963)

Malcom X and Alex Haley: The Autobiography of Malcom X (1965)

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A Century of Reading: The 10 Books That Defined the 1960s

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Some books are flashes in the pan, read for entertainment and then left on a bus seat for the next lucky person to pick up and enjoy, forgotten by most after their season has passed. Others stick a…

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The 1960s to mid-1970s counterculture generation was an era of change in identity, family unit, sexuality, dress, and the arts.

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Harlem became a destination for African Americans of all backgrounds.

(National Museum of African American History and Culture)

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The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York City as a Black cultural mecca in the early 20th Century.

(History.com)

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Harlem Renaissance: Period Characteristics 

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Harlem Renaissance: Period Characteristics 

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Dress codes were entrenched in law, and “crossdressing” was illegal.

(Emily J Edwards)

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The 1950s were a decade marked by the post-World War II boom, the dawn of the Cold War and the civil rights movement in the United States.

(History.com)

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J.D. Salinger: The Catcher on the Rye (1951)

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man (1952)

Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

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Some books are flashes in the pan, read for entertainment and then left on a bus seat for the next lucky person to pick up and enjoy, forgotten by most after their season has passed. Others stick around, are read and re-read, are taught and discussed. sometimes due to great artistry, sometimes due to luck, and sometimes because they manage to recognize and capture some element of the culture of the time.

In the moment, you often can't tell which books are which. The Great Gatsby wasn't a bestseller upon its release, but we now see it as emblematic of a certain American sensibility in the 1920s. Of course, hindsight can also distort the senses; the canon looms and obscures. Still, over the next weeks, we'll be publishing a list a day, each one attempting to define a discrete decade, starting with the 1900s (as you've no doubt guessed by now) and counting down until we get to the (nearly complete) 2010s.

Though the books on these lists need not be American in origin, I am looking for books that evoke some aspect of American life, actual or intellectual, in each decade-a global lens would require a much longer list. And of course, varied and complex as it is, there's no list that could truly define American life over ten or any number of years, so I do not make any claim on exhaustiveness. I've simply selected books that, if read together, would give a fair picture of the landscape of literary culture for that decade-both as it was and as it is remembered. Finally, two process notes: I've limited myself to one book for author over the entire 12-part list, so you may see certain works skipped over in favor of others, even if both are important (for instance, I ignored Dubliners in the 1910s so I could include Ulysses in the 1920s), and in the case of translated work, I'll be using the date of the English translation, for obvious reasons.

For our sixth installment, below you'll find 10 books that defined the 1950s. (Head here for the 1910s, 20s, 30s, and 40s).

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J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Whether you consider Holden an egotistical whiner or a melancholy boy genius, and even if you really, really hate it, there's no denying that this novel, which has sold more than 65 million copies since its publication (though this number is a few years old and certainly soft), and continues to sell at a healthy clip, was a crucial cultural touchstone in America in the 1950s. David Shields and Shane Salerno go further in the introduction to their biography Salinger, writing that the book "redefined postwar America and can best be understood as a disguised war novel."

Salinger emerged from the war incapable of believing in the heroic, noble ideals we like to think our cultural institutions uphold. Instead of producing a combat novel, as Norman Mailer, James Jones, and Joseph Heller did, Salinger took the trauma of war and embedded it within what looked to the naked eye like a coming-of-age novel.

It may have even influenced the way we think about teenagers to this day. "It absolutely speaks to that moment the teenager emerges as a recognizable social group," Salinger scholar Sarah Graham told the BBC. "Before that people went through their teenage years with no sense it was a particular kind of identity. It is the first novel of the modern teenage years." Indeed, it was only after WWII that a distinctive youth culture began to emerge: in part because more teenagers were in high school and fewer were working to support their families. They had time on their hands and angst in their hearts. "Leisure gave teenagers time to reflect on where they were going," Dr. Graham said. "The idea of existential angst in some way draws from Catcher in the Rye as much as the novel reflects it. There is a strong dialogue between the book and the teenage experience-they are mutually shaping." As Adam Golub has pointed out, Holden was the first teenager Americans really knew who refused to grow up, and was celebrated for it. This of course despite the fact that Salinger did not at all write the book for teenagers, and that it was well received-called "brilliant" by reviewer after reviewer -as a novel for adults.

Famously, the contemporary hype around Catcher was so great that it forced Salinger into the reclusiveness he's now known for-he was looking, primarily, for privacy, and didn't mind perpetuating a myth around himself in the process.

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Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
"I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me," Ellison writes in the opening lines of this much-read, much-assigned, and highly influential novel. (So influential that President Obama modeled Dreams of My Father on it.) The novel was awarded the National Book Award in 1953. In his acceptance speech, Ellison said: "If I were asked in all seriousness just what I considered to be the chief significance of Invisible Man as a fiction, I would reply: Its experimental attitude and its attempt to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth-century fiction."

When I examined the rather rigid concepts of reality which informed a number of the works which impressed me and to which I owed a great deal, I was forced to conclude that for me and for so many hundreds of thousands of Americans, reality was simply far more mysterious and uncertain, and at the same time more exciting, and still, despite its raw violence and capriciousness, more promising.

To see America with an awareness of its rich diversity and its almost magical fluidity and freedom I was forced to conceive of a novel unburdened by the narrow naturalism which has led after so many triumphs to the final and unrelieved despair which marks so much of our current fiction. I was to dream of a prose which was flexible, and swift as American change is swift, confronting the inequalities and brutalities of our society forthrightly, but yet thrusting forth its images of hope, human fraternity, and individual self-realization. A prose which would make use of the richness of our speech, the idiomatic expression, and the rhetorical flourishes from past periods which are still alive among us. Despite my personal failures there must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
The novel manages to be many things at once; this is one of its many strengths. "Evenhandedly exposing the hypocrisies and stereotypes of all comers," Lev Grossman wrote in TIME, " Invisible Man is far more than a race novel, or even a bildungsroman. It's the quintessential American picaresque of the 20th century."

Fahrenheit 451 is one of those books we all think we understand-probably because we've all had to "analyze" it in high school-but even its author wavered on the point. In a 1956 radio interview, Bradbury explained it in the context of government censorship:

I wrote this book at a time when I was worried about the way things were going in this country four years ago. Too many people were afraid of their shadows; there was a threat of book burning. Many of the books were being taken off the shelves at that time. And of course, things have changed a lot in four years. Things are going back in a very healthy direction. But at the time I wanted to do some sort of story where I could comment on what would happen to a country if we let ourselves go too far in this direction, where then all thinking stops, and the dragon swallows his tail, and we sort of vanish into a limbo and we destroy ourselves by this sort of action.

When asked in 2005 what inspired the book burning in the novel, Bradbury had a pithier response: "Well, Hitler of course."

When I was fifteen, he burnt the books in the streets of Berlin. Then along the way I learned about the libraries in Alexandria burning five thousand years ago. That grieved my soul. Since I'm self-educated, that means my educators-the libraries-are in danger. And if it could happen in Alexandria, if it could happen in Berlin, maybe it could happen somewhere up ahead, and my heroes would be killed.
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)
He also spoke against McCarthyism in his lifetime, and the novel has frequently been interpreted of a criticism of the same, but in later life Bradbury denied this and claimed that it was "a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature," despite the fact that television was relatively new at the time, just becoming popular. Whatever it means, it remains an enduring classic.

Initial reviews were mixed when the first volume of Tolkien's fantasy epic was first published, but the ones that knew, really knew. None other than W. H. Auden reviewed the book in the Times, praising Tolkien's The Hobbit as "one of the best children's stories of this century" and writing of his new volume for adults:
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
On the primitive level of wanting to know what happens next, The Fellowship of the Ring is at least as good as The Thirty-Nine Steps. . . . [But] if one is to take a tale of this kind seriously, one must feel that, however superficially unlike the world we live in its characters and events may be, it nevertheless holds up the mirror to the only nature we know, our own; in this, too, Mr. Tolkien has succeeded superbly, and what happened in the year of the Shire 1418 in the Third Age of Middle Earth is not only fascinating in A. D. 1954 but also a warning and an inspiration. No fiction I have read in the last five years has given me more joy than The Fellowship of the Ring.

With the second two books (Tolkien originally meant the three books of The Lord of the Rings to be published as a single volume) it steadily gained readership, exploding in popularity particularly in the 1960s with the publication of the paperbacks, and has become one of the best-selling literary works of all time. It is also generally agreed to be the best literary epic ever written, and has had untold influence on the genre ever since its publication. Tolkien's worlds have been re-immortalized in the songs of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Rush, etc., and more recently drawn out into increasingly unnecessary films (The Hobbit, I'm looking at you). Less widely known were J. R. R. Tolkien's rap battle skills.

Nabokov's most famous novel was originally published in Paris (in English) in 1955 by a publisher whose other titles included Until She Screams, Tender Thighs, and There's a Whip in My Valise, and generally ignored until Graham Greene called it one of the best books of the year. Then it was roundly disparaged and dismissed as trash, and banned by the French government-no wonder that smuggled-in copies were already being sold for $20 a pop when it was finally published in the US by G. P. Putnam's Sons, kicking off what Nabokov called in his journal "Hurricane Lolita." As Steve King writes:

Within four days of publication in the U.S. the book was into a third printing; by September 13th it had become the first book since Gone with the Wind to sell 100,000 copies in its first three weeks; by the end of September, it was #1 on the bestseller lists. By the time Nabokov appeared on the cover of Newsweek in 1962, it seemed that the only one who hadn't read the book was Groucho Marx, who quipped, "I plan to put off reading Lolita for six years, until she's eighteen."

Since then, of course, the novel-along with its eponymous character-has become iconic, though more contemporary readers understand the way the image of Humbert's nymphet has been twisted as the years have worn on. "With the possible exception of Gatsby, no twentieth-century American literary character penetrated the public consciousness quite like Lolita," Ira Wells noted in The New Republic.
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955)
Her very name entered the language as a common noun: "a precociously seductive girl," according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. (Gatsby, by contrast, had to settle for a mere adjective: "Gatsbyesque.") . . . [But] we have forgotten Lolita. At least, we've forgotten about the young girl, "standing four feet ten in one sock," whose childhood deprivation and brutalization and torture subliminally animate the myth that launched a thousand music videos. The publication, reception, and cultural re-fashioning of Lolita over the past 60 years is the story of how a twelve-year-old rape victim named Dolores became a dominant archetype for seductive female sexuality in contemporary America: It is the story of how a girl became a noun.
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957)
But the fact that we're still talking about, going over the contents and the form and the way its been misunderstood and the way we failed Nabokov and the way Nabokov failed us is only proof of the novel's significance. It is certainly a book about rape, though it does not invite us to accept rape. It is certainly a book about erotic obsession, though we are meant to pity the obsessed. It is certainly an enduring literary masterpiece.

All three of Baldwin's most famous works- Go Tell It On the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, and Giovanni's Room -were published in the 50s, the decade that he established himself as an essential intellectual, social, literary, and moral voice in this country. All of these were defining books of the decade, but I've chosen to highlight the essay collection above either of the two novels because of Baldwin's importance as an activist and social critic. That is, with these ten essays, as well as much of his other writing and speaking, he helped haul America into the second half of the twentieth century. We're not quite there yet, but much of the ground we've gained is due to Baldwin. He also influenced a whole generation of American writers. "Speeches will be given, essays written and hefty books will be published on the various lives of James Baldwin," Maya Angelou wrote after his death.

Some fantasies will be broadcast and even some truths will be told. Someone will speak of the essayist James Baldwin in his role as the biblical prophet Isaiah admonishing his country to repent from wickedness and create within itself a clean spirit and a clean heart. Others will examine Baldwin the playwright and novelist who burned with a righteous indignation over the paucity of kindness, the absence of love and the crippling hypocrisy he saw in the streets of the United States and sensed in the hearts of his fellow citizens. I will speak of James Baldwin, my friend and brother. . . . [who] set the stage for me to write I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, encouraged me to take a course in cinematography in Sweden and told me that I was intelligent and very brave.
Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
I can't tell you how much it pains me that Ayn Rand is the only woman on this list. I would love to have replaced her (and/or some of the others here, cough, Kerouac, cough) with Hannah Arendt, or Flannery O'Connor, or Patricia Highsmith, or Barbara Pym. But there's no denying the influence of Atlas Shrugged on America-horrible and damaging and Paul Ryan-producing as it may be. Atlas Shrugged is Rand's treatise on Objectivism (read: "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute"), her love letter to capitalism, her libertarian rant, and her magnum opus. It was a bestseller in the week of its release and for 22 weeks in total, and sales rose again after the 2007 financial crisis. It has remained popular among high school students and conservatives (an apparently odd paring, though I can think of a few other qualities that unite them), the former likely in part because the Ayn Rand institute donates 400,000 copies of her novels to high schools every year.

"I know from talking to a lot of Fortune 500 C.E.O.'s that Atlas Shrugged has had a significant effect on their business decisions, even if they don't agree with all of Ayn Rand's ideas," bank executive John A. Allison told The New York Times. "It offers something other books don't: the principles that apply to business and to life in general. I would call it complete."
Leon Uris, Exodus (1958)
Since its publication it has spurred many, many slobbering tributes that include lines like " Atlas Shrugged has shaped the worldview of many devotees of liberty," and again, given us Paul Ryan-not to mention Alan Greenspan, who didn't exactly prevent the recession that readers ran to his idol Ayn Rand to assuage.

"That's not writing; that's typing," said Truman Capote. "It changed my life like it changed everyone else's," said Bob Dylan. Whatever you may think of it (and I think it has . . . not held up well), On the Road is without a doubt the most important book, indeed the defining text, of the much-mythologized American "Beat Generation." It's not only in retrospect, either-we knew this as soon as the novel was published. " On the Road is the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as "beat," and whose principal avatar he is," wrote Gilbert Millstein in his 1957 New York Times review, flying in the face of much critical response at the time. "Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, The Sun Also Rises came to be regarded as the testament of the "Lost Generation," so it seems certain that On the Road will come to be known as that of the "Beat Generation." He was correct. "After 1957 On The Road sold a trillion Levis and a million espresso coffee machines, and also sent countless kids on the road," William S. Burroughs once remarked.
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958)
This was of course due in part to the media, the arch-opportunists. They know a story when they see one, and the Beat movement was a story, and a big one . . . The Beat literary movement came at exactly the right time and said something that millions of people of all nationalities all over the world were waiting to hear. You can't tell anybody anything he doesn't know already. The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.

Upon its publication, this novel, a massive chronicle of the founding of the State of Israel, instantly became a huge international phenomenon. The hardcover was on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year, with a cool 19 weeks in the top spot. The paperback was "the fastest-selling work every published by Bantam," according to Ira B. Nadel's Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller, and by 1965 was among the top 10 bestsellers of all time. The popularity of the novel, and of the 1960 film adaptation, shaped American perception of Israel, immediately after its publication and beyond. As Uris himself said: "My greatest accomplishment is Exodus. It changed peoples lives, it changed the conception of the Jewish people in the international scene." For his part, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister, said: "As a literary work, it isn't much. But as a piece of propaganda, it's the greatest thing ever written about Israel."

The novel, Bradley Burston wrote in Haaretz, "transformed American Jews as no other work has done, before or since . . . it was savaged by critics and academics, and resoundingly ignored by literary prize committees. When the book appeared in 1958, however, it sold in the millions. It was said that it was nearly as common to find a copy of Exodus in American-Jewish households as to find the Bible-and, of the two, not a few Jewish households apparently had only Exodus."

Needless to say, this American sympathy for Israel and the American Jewish community changed the face of the country and has had lasting effects-both positive and negative, particularly, in the latter case, due to its gross demonization of Arabs. Also, not for nothing, but many Americans could use the reminder that this novel is a work of fiction.
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"The genius of Chinua Achebe, like all genius, escapes precise analysis," Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote in the introduction to a Penguin Classics edition of the text.

If we could explain it fully, we could reproduce it, and it is of the nature of genius to be irreproducible. Still, there has been no shortage of attempts to explain his literary achievement, an achievement that starts with the fact that Things Fall Apart (1958), the first of the novels in his "African trilogy" defined a starting point for the modern African novel. There are, as critics are quick to point out, earlier examples of extended narrative written in and about Africa by African writers. Some of them-Amos Tutuola's Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), Cyprian Ekwensi's People of the City (1954), to name but two also written by Nigerians-remain eminently worth reading. But place them beside the work of Achebe and you will see that in his writing something magnificent and new was going on.

One reason for this, which often passes without notice, is that Achebe solved a problem that these earlier novels did not. He found a way to represent for a global Anglophone audience the diction of his Igbo homeland, allowing readers of English elsewhere to experience a particular relationship to language and the world in a way that made it seem quite natural-transparent, one might almost say. Achebe enables us to hear the voices of Igboland in a new use of our own language. A measure of his achievement is that Achebe found an African voice in English that is so natural its artifice eludes us.

Achebe introduced African literature to the rest of the world-and opened the door for a whole host of African writers in the UK and America, both by his success and as an editor of the African Writers Series, published by Heinemann. His first novel has sold over 20 million copies and been translated into 57 languages, and has been taught ever since its publication as a text essential for understanding decolonization and mid-century Africa.

Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (1950), Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (1950), Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train (1950), C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (first English translation, 1951), Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (1951), Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time (1951), Isaac Asimov, the Foundation Trilogy (1951-1953), Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (first English translation, 1952), Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt (1952), Bernard Malamud, The Natural (1952), Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood (1952), Barbara Pym, Excellent Women (1952), John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952), Kurt Vonnegut, Piano Player (1952), E. B. White, Charlotte's Web (1952), Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953), James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (1953), Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1953), Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (1953), William S. Burroughs, Junky (1953), Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953), J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories (1953), Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954), William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954), Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (1954), Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (1954), Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), J. P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man (1955), Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955), The Guinness Book of Records (1955), Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse (first English translation 1955), Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955), John Ashbery, Some Trees (1956), Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals (1956), Dodie Smith, The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room (1956), Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (1956), John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957), Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat (1957), Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Towards Freedom (1957), Bernard Malamud, The Assistant (1957), Nevil Shute, On the Beach (1957), Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957), Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (first English translation 1958), Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana (1958), Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (1958), Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask (first English translation, 1958), Americo Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand (1958), T. H. White, The Once and Future King (1958), Robert Bloch, Psycho (1959), Günter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959), Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959), William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959), Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959), John Knowles, A Separate Peace (1959), Strunk & White, The Elements of Style (1959), D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (unexpurgated U.S. version released 1959)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Century of Reading: The 10 Books That Defined the 1950s

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Some books are flashes in the pan, read for entertainment and then left on a bus seat for the next lucky person to pick up and enjoy, forgotten by most after their season has passed. Others stick around, are read and re-read, are taught and discussed.

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The 1950s is often viewed as a period of conformity, when both men and women observed strict gender roles and complied with society's expectations.

(Khan Academy)

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The people listed in 1940 U.S. census records were greatly affected by what was going on in 1930s America.

(Family Search)

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In the 1930s, big bands and swing music were popular, with Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Glenn Miller popular bandleaders.

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Saturday Night Dance, 1940
Voices from the Dust Bowl, 1940-1941

Even during hard times and wartime, people need to be entertained. The American people in the 1930s and 1940s were no exception. They enjoyed many forms of entertainment, particularly if they could do so inexpensively.

With the addition of sound, movies became increasingly popular. Comedies, gangster movies, and musicals helped people forget their troubles. In the early 1940s, some of the great dramas of American film reached theaters. Radio was also wildly popular, offering many kinds of programs, from sermons to soap operas.

In the 1930s, big bands and swing music were popular, with Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Glenn Miller popular bandleaders. In the 1940s, the bands started to break up, and band singers like Frank Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan went out on their own. War songs became popular.

Among the unemployed in the Depression were artists and performers of many types. Government programs to assist these people resulted in production of plays and artworks for all to enjoy.

As you examine the documents in this section, compare arts and entertainment in the 1930s and 1940s with arts and entertainment as you know them today. What similarities do you see? What differences? How might you explain the continuity you see, as well as the change?

To find additional sources on this topic, use the names of specific forms of art or entertainment to search the collections; for example, you might use such words as music, dance, or theater in your search.

Documents

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Art and Entertainment in the 1930s and 1940s | Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945 | U.S. History Primary Source Timeline | Classroom Materials at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Even during hard times and wartime, people need to be entertained. The American people in the 1930s and 1940s were no exception. They enjoyed many forms of entertainment, particularly if they could do so inexpensively. With the addition of sound, movies became increasingly popular. Comedies, gangster movies, and musicals helped people forget their troubles.

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Dashiell Hammett: The Maltese Falcon (1930)

Irma S. Rombauer: The Joy of Cooking (1931)

Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)

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Some books are flashes in the pan, read for entertainment and then left on a bus seat for the next lucky person to pick up and enjoy, forgotten by most after their season has passed. Others stick around, are read and re-read, are taught and discussed. sometimes due to great artistry, sometimes due to luck, and sometimes because they manage to recognize and capture some element of the culture of the time.

In the moment, you often can't tell which books are which. The Great Gatsby wasn't a bestseller upon its release, but we now see it as emblematic of a certain American sensibility in the 1920s. Of course, hindsight can also distort the senses; the canon looms and obscures. Still, over the next weeks, we'll be publishing a list a day, each one attempting to define a discrete decade, starting with the 1900s (as you've no doubt guessed by now) and counting down until we get to the (nearly complete) 2010s.

Though the books on these lists need not be American in origin, I am looking for books that evoke some aspect of American life, actual or intellectual, in each decade-a global lens would require a much longer list. And of course, varied and complex as it is, there's no list that could truly define American life over ten or any number of years, so I do not make any claim on exhaustiveness. I've simply selected books that, if read together, would give a fair picture of the landscape of literary culture for that decade-both as it was and as it is remembered. Finally, two process notes: I've limited myself to one book for author over the entire 12-part list, so you may see certain works skipped over in favor of others, even if both are important (for instance, I ignored Dubliners in the 1910s so I could include Ulysses in the 1920s), and in the case of translated work, I'll be using the date of the English translation, for obvious reasons.

For our fourth installment, below you'll find 10 books that defined the 1930s.

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According to my esteemed colleagues at CrimeReads, Dashiell Hammett more or less invented the American hardboiled crime novel, and also inspired the entire film noir genre (although, Molly Odintz would like me to specify here, film noir also owes a lot to German expressionism). This novel is not only important for all of those that would come after it (see below, for instance), but also -not to mention the very popular and highly mythologized film adaptation(s). "Spade has no original," Hammett wrote in the introduction to a 1934 edition of the novel.

He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not-or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague-want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client.

The Maltese Falcon was an instant bestseller when it was published in hardcover, and saw seven printings in 1930. Unlike some of the other novels on this decade's list, in this case the critics loved it as well as the readers. In the New Republic, Donald Douglas wrote that the novel showed "the absolute distinction of real art" and in The Judge, Ted Shane wrote that "the writing is better than Hemingway; since it conceals not softness but hardness." In the New York Evening Graphic, Gilbert Seldes wrote that The Maltese Falcon was "the real thing and everything else has been phony." No surprise then that we're still reading it today.

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You couldn't say that the contents of this novel reflect American life in the 1930s, exactly-beginning as it does in a pre-revolutionary Chinese village-but it was certainly a sensation of its time, so it must have struck a certain chord. It was the bestselling novel of 1931 and 1932, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, and certainly contributed to Buck's Nobel Prize in 1938, which made her the first American woman to win the Nobel for literature. Some have even suggested that the book-and the subsequent film-stirred up enough pro-Chinese sentiment in Americans to contribute to the 1943 repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act. ("It humanized Chinese people," Maxine Hong Kingston said. "It is written with so much empathy that for the first time, Americans had to see Chinese as equals.") And Buck wasn't only an American phenomenon: during her lifetime she was the most translated American author of the 20th century.

But the novel-and Buck's work in general-is not without controversy. Highbrow critics found her prose lacking. "Pearl's Asian subjects, her prose style, her gender, and her tremendous popularity offended virtually every one of the constituencies that divided up the literary 1930s," wrote her biographer Peter Conn. "Marxists, Agrarians, Chicago journalists, New York intellectuals, literary nationalists, and New Humanists had little enough in common, but they could all agree that Pearl Buck had no place in any of their creeds and canons." Buck, though born in West Virginia, had grown up in China, but Chinese intellectuals and even officials were offended by her depiction of China, to the point of denying her entry to the country.

Since the 1930s, Puck has become decidedly unfashionable. "In the years after World War II, Buck's literary reputation shrunk to the vanishing point," Conn writes in the preface to his Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography.

She stood on the wrong side of virtually every line drawn by those who constructed the lists of required reading in the 1950s and 1960s. To begin with, her principal subjects were women and China, both of which were regarded as peripheral and even frivolous in the early postwar years. Furthermore, she preferred episodic plots to complex structures and had little interest in psychological analysis. In addition to all that, she was not a felicitous stylist, and she even displayed a taste for formulaic phrases. Needless to say, none of this endeared her to that vast cultural heartland stretching from the East River to the Hudson.

. . .

She was also the victim of political hostility, attacked by the right for her active civil rights efforts, distrusted by the left because of her vocal anti-Communism. Beyond that, she undoubtedly suffered because of her gender: more often than not, it was her male rivals and critics who declared that her gigantic success only demonstrated the bad judgment of American readers-especially women readers, who have always made up the majority of Buck's audience. (In the course of gathering material for this book, I have corresponded with upwards of 150 librarians and archivists around the country. Fully a dozen of them have told me that Pearl Buck was their mother's favorite writer. Fathers are never mentioned.)

At any rate, Buck is fascinating, but this is a list and only the first entry so I'll stop here. In summation: this book was important. We should all probably be reading it, if only to form our own opinions.

If we're measuring influence by which books were ubiquitous in American homes, this one takes the cake. (Listen, I'm not sorry.) Rombauer self-published her private cookbook in 1931-a project she'd undertaken as part of an effort to cope with her husband's suicide the year before-with the subtitle A Compilation of Reliable Recipes with a Casual Culinary Chat and illustrations by her daughter, including the above original cover, which depicts Saint Martha, the patron saint of servants and cooks, slaying a dragon with a broom. They sold almost all of the 3,000 copies they printed, and in 1936 the book was reprinted by Bobbs-Merrill Company, quickly becoming a bestseller. "For thirty odd years I have enjoyed cooking as an avocation, and as I moved about from place to place I found myself encumbered with an ever increasing supply of cook books-domestic, foreign, published and unpublished," Rombauer wrote in the original introduction.

The result of this encumbrance was an anothology of favorite recipes, which disposed for all time of my ambulant library. These recipes have been developed, altered and created outright, so that the collection as it now stands may make a claim for originality-enough, it is hoped, to justify its publication, and to hold the interest of those who encouraged me to put it into book form.

In this practical outgrowth of a pleasant experience, I have attempted to make palatable dishes with simple means and to lift everyday cooking out of the commonplace.

Well, she did it. The conversational style, practical recipes, and storytelling of The Joy of Cooking made it hugely popular, both in the decade of its arrival and ever since, and after many, many editions, it's still the most popular cookbook in America, other than, I guess, the internet-by 2006, 18 million copies had been printed. By now I'm sure there are even more. We love the recipes, but we also love the voice. "Irma was such a good writer," said Beth Wareham, the editor of the 2006 edition. "At the end of the day what brings it back is that interesting literary quality."

With Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley's dystopian classic-in which biological reproduction has been sidestepped, society has been organized by intellect, and soma keeps everyone happy-is still the text against which we repeatedly judge our present and (possibly) future. It was written, reportedly, in just four months, in part as a satirical response to the popular utopian literature of the preceding era, but was heralded upon publication as Huxley's best work, and is still his most famous. "It was Huxley's genius to present us to ourselves in all our ambiguity," wrote Margaret Atwood in 2007.

Alone among the animals, we suffer from the future perfect tense. Rover the Dog cannot imagine a future world of dogs in which all fleas will have been eliminated and doghood will finally have achieved its full glorious potential. But thanks to our uniquely structured languages, human beings can imagine such enhanced states for themselves, though they can also question their own grandiose constructions. It's these double-sided imaginative abilities that produce masterpieces of speculation such as Brave New World.

Though it didn't really gain traction in America until the 1940s, almost 20 years after Kafka's death, I can't ignore the most-read work by one of the most influential authors in modern literature, whom W. H. Auden called "the Dante of the 20th century." I mean, few authors are famous enough to be their own adjectives, and you've probably heard the term "Kafkaesque" even if you've never read anything by the actual Kafka. Though honestly, I'm sure you have, which only aids in my point here.

Another blockbuster, another two-year #1 bestseller, in 1936 and 1937, another Pulitzer Prize, and another popular film adaptation-but unlike Buck, who published some 80 books in total, Gone with the Wind was Mitchell's only contribution to the world of letters. Despite that fact, it's been even more enduring in its popularity and relevance. Set in George during the Civil War and Reconstruction, the novel is an elaborate fantasy, a historical drama/romance/bildungsroman, and people loved it. Critics, not so much. In the New Yorker in 1992, Claudia Roth Pierpont wrote:

In the summer of 1936, American literature divided resoundingly along its oldest fault line, and the resulting chasm seemed to grow wider and deeper with every sale-roughly a million by the end of December-of a hefty new novel called Gone with the Wind. One one side of the fissure, patently serious writers and critics conceded that they were hopelessly outnumbered-a fact that the representatives of literature had been bemoaning since at least the middle of the previous century, even before Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous complaint that he was being driven from the literary marketplace by "a damned mob of scribbling women" and a public taste "occupied with their trash." . . . The fear of a downwardly spiraling culture associated with a new mass audience had taken on, in literature, the specific taint of the superficial sex. While men who did not understand literary art could be counted on, for the most part, to stick to newspapers, the lettered (if not highly educated) female population had long monopolized sales of fiction, corrupting the novel from its noble roots in Romance-in the greater historical sense, as a worldly or spiritual quest-into romance in the distinctly lesser sense of a courtship tale culminating in marriage.

This was the mood when Gone With the Wind hit shelves: "a triple-decker Victorian romance issued nearly twenty years after the Joycean disruptions of modernism; a book by an unknown writer that sold more copies in its first few weeks than many major authors sold in their lifetimes; a story that took root in the national imagination with the rampant force of a myth or a psychosis; America's favorite novel and no part of its literature." (Which isn't even to approach the racism and historical inaccuracies within it, criticisms which emerged later.) It even became a bestseller despite costing $3.00, a then-exorbitant price for a book. Some critics wondered if this was the end of literature; some critics wondered if it was the end of highbrow literary fiction. It turned out to be neither, but it's still one of the most remarkable literary events of this or any decade.

It's probably more read now than it was then, and even now not enough, but Barnes's slim, exuberant Nightwood still deserves its place here for its decades-long reverberations. It was one of the earliest widely-published novels to represent an overt lesbian relationship, for one thing, and a slim Modernist masterpiece for another. "Djuna Barnes's Nightwood is not much more than a couple of hundred pages long, and more people have heard about it than have read it," Jeanette Winterson wrote in The Guardian.

Reading it is mainly the preserve of academics and students. Others have a vague sense that it is a modernist text, that T. S. Eliot adored it, that Dylan Thomas called it "one of the three major prose works by a woman" (accept the compliment to Barnes, ignore the insult directed elsewhere), that the work is an important milestone on any map of gay literature-even though, like all the best books, its power makes a nonsense of any categorisation, especially of gender or sexuality.

Yes, and perhaps Eliot can give us some indication of why it's not more often read: "A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give," he wrote in the introduction. Maybe so, if snobby-but if lesser read than some of the others on this list, it is as evocative of its time (if in Paris less so than America). Winterson again:

Barnes's Paris is of its moment, however Nightwood has not survived as a slice of history, but as a work of art. The excitements and atmosphere of her period are there, but there is nothing locked-in about Nightwood. Readers in 1936, when it was published in Britain, would have been uncomfortably aware of Hitler's rise and rise, and his notorious propaganda offensive at the Berlin Olympics-remember, "strength through joy"?

It was the year of the British abdication crisis, when Edward VIII chose his American mistress, Wallis Simpson, over the British throne. In America, other women were in the headlines-Margaret Mitchell published Gone With the Wind, and Clare Boothe Luce's stage play, The Women, was taking Broadway by storm. This year also saw the start of the Spanish civil war.

Of course, now we have to contend with what at least one writer calls its " racial essentialism," but even so, this novel is frequently counted among the best and most important LGBTQ books of the first half of the 20th century.

If anyone else out there has been forced to take a Carnegie course, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about here. In fact the lecture series came first-it was when an editor at Simon & Schuster, Leon Shimkin, took one that he had the idea to turn it into a book, and convinced Carnegie to get on board. The book was a huge success, selling millions of copies and going through some 17 printings in its first year. Though mostly ignored, if not derided, by critics, it is widely considered now to be one of the most influential (and best-selling) books in American history. Carnegie found himself the father of what would become the enormous self-help genre (he called it an "action-book," as the term "self-help" did not exist yet).

When it was published, Hurston's book made a serious splash among the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance and the black intellectuals of the decade-though for the most part, it was not a positive splash. Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alain Locke and other luminaries criticized it, in part for its refusal to conform to W. E. B. DuBois's ideals of African American "uplift" or to unpack racial tensions directly, and also on account of its celebration of female sexuality. Wright accused it of containing "no theme, no message, no thought. In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy." After a brief flurry, it faded into the background-only to be revitalized in the 1970s, the charge led by Alice Walker. "Hurston herself was refreshingly free of all the ideologies that currently obscure the reception of her best book," wrote Harold Bloom in the introduction to a book of critical essays on the author.

Her sense of power has nothing in common with politics of any persuasion, with contemporary modes of feminism, or even with those questers who search for a black aesthetic. . . . [S]he was outrageous, heroically larger than life, witty in herself and the cause of wit in others. She belongs now to literary legend, which is as it should be. . . . With Whitman, Hurston herself is now an image of American literary vitality, and a part of the American mythology of exodus, of the power to choose the party of Eros, of more life.

Happily for us, we all read her now.

Steinbeck's most famous-if not most parodied-novel won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in the year of its release. "I'm trying to write history while it is happening, and I don't want it to be wrong," Steinbeck wrote of the novel. And later, famously: "I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this." This, of course, being the Great Depression, from which its readers were still reeling, and the plight of the tenant farmers as he describes in his novel. You can't blame him. The Grapes of Wrath was extraordinarily well received by critics and readers, becoming the bestselling novel of the year; it is now a staple of college syllabi. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1962, the committee would cite it as his "epic chronicle" of a "tragic episode in the social history of the United States."

See also: William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930), Margaret Sanger, My Fight for Birth Control (1931), William Faulkner, Light in August (1932), Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm (1932), Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods (1932), Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934), P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins (1934), John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra (1934), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night (1934), Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust (1934), Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (1934), William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! (1936), Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa (1937), John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1937), Franz Kafka, The Trial (first English translation 1937), John Dos Passos, U.S.A. (1937), J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937), Thornton Wilder, Our Town (1938), Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1938), George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (1938), Evelyn Waugh, Scoop (1938), Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (1939), Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939), Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), Ludwig Bemelmans, Madeline (1939), T. H. White, The Sword in the Stone (1939), James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939), Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun (1939), Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (1939)

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A Century of Reading: The 10 Books That Defined the 1930s

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Some books are flashes in the pan, read for entertainment and then left on a bus seat for the next lucky person to pick up and enjoy, forgotten by most after their season has passed. Others stick around, are read and re-read, are taught and discussed.

# data[].attributes.body
The 30s and 40s were decades of great cultural change. After the exuberance of the 20s, people became more conservative, quiet and introspective.

(Mediakron)

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For the first time, more Americans lived in cities than on farms.

(History.com)

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The Roaring Twenties was a period in American history of dramatic social, economic and political change.

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Scott Fitzgerald: This Side of Paradise (1920)

Sinclair Lewis: Main Street (1920)

Albert Einstein: The Meaning of Relativity (1922)

Emily Post: Etiquette (1922)

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In the Roaring Twenties, a surging economy created an era of mass consumerism.

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Modernist writers in general rebelled against clear-cut storytelling and formulaic verse from the 19th century.

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Modernism is a period in literary history which started around the early 1900s and continued until the early 1940s.

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Alice Walker

Fact #1

Alice Walker became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with her novel The Color Purple

(Britannica)

Fact #2

Alice Walker (b. 1944) is an American writer, poet, and activist known for her insightful portrayal of African American life and culture.

(National Museum of African American History and Culture)

Fact #3

Alice Walker is a novelist, short-story writer, poet, essayist, and activist.

(New Georgia Encyclopedia)

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Mark Twain

Fact #1

Mark Twain was a humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who remains best known for his adventure stories of American boyhood.

(Britannica)

Fact #2

As a baby, he wasn't expected to live.

(History.com)

Fact #3

At 18‚ Sam headed east to New York City and Philadelphia‚ where he worked on several different newspapers.

(Mark Twain House.Org)

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It was a dominant current in French art between 1850 and 1880.

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Realism rejects imaginative idealization in favor of close observation of outward appearances.

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Insert 2nd fact and image here

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Insert first fact and image here

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*either put an image of the chart here or type them

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PERIOD NAME AND DATE: Period Characteristics 

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PERIOD NAME AND DATE: Period Characteristics 

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*Either put and image of the chart here or type them

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