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231 books
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82 voters
1950s Books
Showing 1-50 of 12,085
The Catcher in the Rye (Paperback)
by (shelved 302 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.80 — 3,922,766 ratings — published 1951
Fahrenheit 451 (Mass Market Paperback)
by (shelved 267 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.97 — 2,876,366 ratings — published 1953
Lord of the Flies (Paperback)
by (shelved 237 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.70 — 3,228,298 ratings — published 1954
Lolita (Kindle Edition)
by (shelved 211 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.87 — 954,349 ratings — published 1955
The Old Man and the Sea (Hardcover)
by (shelved 188 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.81 — 1,327,971 ratings — published 1952
The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)
by (shelved 175 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.41 — 3,179,132 ratings — published 1954
The Haunting of Hill House (Paperback)
by (shelved 172 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.81 — 401,494 ratings — published 1959
Giovanni’s Room (Paperback)
by (shelved 159 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.34 — 263,333 ratings — published 1956
On the Road (Paperback)
by (shelved 157 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.61 — 451,306 ratings — published 1957
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia, #1)
by (shelved 145 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.24 — 3,172,206 ratings — published 1950
Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1)
by (shelved 138 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.75 — 416,211 ratings — published 1958
East of Eden (Paperback)
by (shelved 130 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.44 — 653,736 ratings — published 1952
The Two Towers (The Lord of the Rings, #2)
by (shelved 127 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.50 — 1,139,972 ratings — published 1954
The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings, #3)
by (shelved 122 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.58 — 1,053,672 ratings — published 1955
Charlotte’s Web (Paperback)
by (shelved 120 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.21 — 2,061,423 ratings — published 1952
Invisible Man (Paperback)
by (shelved 112 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.92 — 203,330 ratings — published 1952
Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories (Paperback)
by (shelved 108 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.85 — 253,022 ratings — published 1958
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)
by (shelved 105 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.82 — 179,603 ratings — published 2009
The Crucible (Paperback)
by (shelved 98 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.61 — 467,649 ratings — published 1953
Night (Paperback)
by (shelved 98 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.38 — 1,374,759 ratings — published 1956
Waiting for Godot (Paperback)
by (shelved 95 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.84 — 224,062 ratings — published 1951
Foundation (Foundation, #1)
by (shelved 94 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.17 — 601,225 ratings — published 1951
The Talented Mr. Ripley (Ripley, #1)
by (shelved 90 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.95 — 120,022 ratings — published 1955
The Martian Chronicles (Mass Market Paperback)
by (shelved 90 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.16 — 287,840 ratings — published 1950
Mexican Gothic (Hardcover)
by (shelved 82 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.66 — 448,250 ratings — published 2020
The Quiet American (Paperback)
by (shelved 82 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.98 — 72,499 ratings — published 1955
Prince Caspian (Chronicles of Narnia, #2)
by (shelved 80 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.98 — 488,990 ratings — published 1951
The Magician’s Nephew (Chronicles of Narnia, #6)
by (shelved 79 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.06 — 613,090 ratings — published 1955
The Price of Salt (Paperback)
by (shelved 75 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.02 — 85,887 ratings — published 1952
I, Robot (Robot, #0.1)
by (shelved 75 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.21 — 381,905 ratings — published 1950
Lessons in Chemistry (Paperback)
by (shelved 72 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.28 — 1,814,508 ratings — published 2022
Brooklyn (Eilis Lacey, #1)
by (shelved 71 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.75 — 162,394 ratings — published 2009
The Lord of the Rings (Paperback)
by (shelved 71 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.54 — 735,345 ratings — published 1959
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Chronicles of Narnia, #3)
by (shelved 71 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.09 — 511,014 ratings — published 1952
Go Tell It on the Mountain (Paperback)
by (shelved 70 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.06 — 83,531 ratings — published 1953
The Briar Club (Hardcover)
by (shelved 69 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.28 — 277,467 ratings — published 2024
The Lincoln Highway (Hardcover)
by (shelved 68 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.22 — 315,562 ratings — published 2021
The Sirens of Titan (Paperback)
by (shelved 68 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.15 — 159,484 ratings — published 1959
The Horse and His Boy (Chronicles of Narnia, #5)
by (shelved 67 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.91 — 395,766 ratings — published 1954
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (Hardcover)
by (shelved 66 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.39 — 4,179,203 ratings — published 2017
A Raisin in the Sun (Hardcover)
by (shelved 66 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.85 — 111,943 ratings — published 1959
A Separate Peace (Paperback)
by (shelved 66 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.60 — 233,333 ratings — published 1959
Naked Lunch: The Restored Text (Paperback)
by (shelved 65 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.46 — 99,185 ratings — published 1959
Where the Crawdads Sing (ebook)
by (shelved 65 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.37 — 3,672,766 ratings — published 2018
The Silver Chair (Chronicles of Narnia, #4)
by (shelved 65 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.96 — 333,629 ratings — published 1953
Nine Stories (Paperback)
by (shelved 63 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.18 — 155,331 ratings — published 1953
Go Set a Watchman (Hardcover)
by (shelved 61 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.31 — 292,444 ratings — published 2015
Doctor Zhivago (Paperback)
by (shelved 61 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.01 — 103,717 ratings — published 1957
The Day of the Triffids (Paperback)
by (shelved 61 times as 1950s)
avg rating 4.01 — 118,248 ratings — published 1951
Revolutionary Road (Paperback)
by (shelved 60 times as 1950s)
avg rating 3.93 — 94,002 ratings — published 1961
“Then, it was easier to build the need for love and sex into the end-all purpose of life, avoiding personal commitment to truth in a catch-all commitment to "home" and "family." . . . . Irwin Shaw, who once goaded the American conscience on the great issues of war and peace and racial prejudice now wrote about sex and adultery; Norman Mailer and the young beatnik writers confined their revolutionary spirit to sex and kicks and drugs and advertising themselves in four-letter words. It was easier and more fashionable for writers to think about psychology than politics, about private motives than public purposes. Painters retreated into an abstract expressionism that flaunted discipline and glorified the evasion of meaning. Dramatists reduced human purpose to bitter, pretentious nonsense: "the theater of the absurd." Freudian thought gave this whole process of escape its dimension of endless, tantalizing, intellectual mystery: process within process, meaning hidden within meaning, until meaning itself disappeared and the hopeless, dull outside world hardly existed at all. As a drama critic said, in a rare note of revulsion at the stage world of Tennessee Williams, it was as if no reality remained for man except his sexual perversions, and the fact that he loved and hated his mother.”
― The Feminine Mystique
― The Feminine Mystique
“Think of everything cliché you know about the 1950s: housewives spent their days vacuuming with martinis in hand and a look of existential horror in their eyes, and every home was outfitted with a TV set.”
― Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History
― Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History
