Seventieth anniversaries. 1954 in English literature and beyond.

A vintage year in a vintage decade.

Several sterling literary careers got underway in 1954. Iris Murdoch published her first novel, Under the Net, which makes 2024 both the seventieth anniversary of her first novel and the twenty-fifth anniversary of her death. It was also when Kingsley Amis and William Golding started publishing, with Lucky Jim and Lord of the Flies. Penelope Mortimer’s debut A Villa in Summer came out, as did Isobel English’s The Key that Rusts. 1954 was also a vintage year for ongoing success. Novelists like C.S. Lewis, Rosemary Sutcliff, and Elizabeth Jenkins, published some of their best work (The Horse and his Boy, The Eagle of the Ninth, The Tortoise and the Hare). And of course it was the year of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. (It was also the year of Under Milk Wood and the first celebration of Bloomsday in Dublin.)

The fifties was a remarkable literary decade more broadly, with novels like Hackenfeller’s Ape by Brigid Brophy (1953), A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen (1955), and the Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West (1956). Iris Murdoch’s novels The Sandcastle (1957) and The Flight from the Enchanter (1956) are well-worth reading. The fifties is also the decade of The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956) and The Borrowers (1952). It when Graham Greene published The End of the Affair (1951) and The Quiet American (1955). Outside of Britain, works like The Catcher in the Rye, I, Robot, On The Road, Charlotte’s Web, Things Fall Apart, and Doctor Zhivago were published. It is the decade of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith and Truman Capote. And the list goes on.

If you are looking for books to read in 2024, you could do worse than celebrate a few platinum anniversaries, or pick up some of the other classics from that time. And if you want to go further back, the 1850s was even more extraordinary…