The 75 Best Books of the Past 75 Years

[nx74defiant]

by Ann Prachett
appeared in Parade 06/26/2016

1940s
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (1943)
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (1949)
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)

1950s
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (1951)
Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1951)
Charlotte's Webb by E.B. White (1952)
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952)
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (1953)
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor (1955)
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin (1956)
The Civil War, Volumes 1-3 by Shelby Foote (1958, 1963, 1974)
The Once and Future King by T.H. White (1958)
Nine Stores by J.D. Salinger (1953)

1960s
Night by Elie Wiesel
The Rabbit Angstrom novels by John Updike
Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
The Double Helix by James D. Watson
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

1970s
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
Burr by Gore Vidal
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

1980s
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Maus by Art Spiegelman
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
A Perfect Spy by John le Carré

1990s
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
All Over but the Shoutin’ by Rick Bragg
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
The Collected Stories by Grace Paley
Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick
The Color of Water by James McBride
The Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
On Writing by Stephen King
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

2000s
__ The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Old Filth by Jane Gardam
Collected Poems by Jane Kenyon
Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion
What Is the What by Dave Eggers
Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
The Lion and the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

2010s

New Selected Stories by Alice Munro
Collected Poems by Jack Gilbert
The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn
My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson