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. Of course, hindsight can also distort the senses; the canon looms and obscures. 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 decadeβa global lens would require a much longer list.
Head here for the s , 20s , and 30s. Richard Wright, Native Son No matter how much qualifying the book might later need, it made impossible a repetition of the old lies. A blow at the white man, the novel forced him to recognize himself as an oppressor. A blow at the black man, the novel forced him to recognize the cost of his submission. Native Son assaulted the most cherished of American vanities: the hope that the accumulated injustice of the past would bring with it no lasting penalties.
(mh=ltZrrHZQD2CzIJhb)1.jpg "Prostitutes Rock Hill")
It is a difficult novel, in which a young black man named Bigger Thomas, living in Chicago in the s, who suffocates, decapitates, and burns the body of a white woman, then rapes and kills his own girlfriend after he tells her about it, and eventually is sentenced to death, to which he goes without expressing much remorse. It is an intentional exaggeration meant to expose the racism and oppression that could create such a monster.
We are beginning to realize that art has no boundaries and that creed, race, or color must not interfere where credit is due. Certainly his influence is undeniable, though the book is not without its critics. McCullers began working on what would become her first novel when she was 19; it would be published when she was only Everyone, it seemed, wanted change and no one seemed to know how to hasten it, direct it or evaluate it. In this last sense, and possibly many more, America then was not so different from America now.
(mh=9psBD9GWMe6Uf0P2)8.jpg "SEX ESCORT in Rock Hill")
Where truth fails, fiction flourishes. As you see, self-reckoning is already a theme in this decadeβthough writing from , one wishes we had accomplished it a little more thoroughly. It provided such a vivid account of childhood that many men felt as though Smith were writing about theirs. Smith received a steady stream of letters from men around the world, thanking her for the effect her writing had on them.
