Seventieth anniversaries. 1955 was a very good year.
Looking beyond the centenaries.
There will be a lot of attention in 2025 for the centenary books: Carry On Jeeves, The Great Gatsby, The Trial, Mrs Dalloway. Hopefully someone will make room to praise The Painted Veil, too. The book I love most from 1925, naturally, is Virginia Woolf’s Common Reader. It’s also a big anniversary for Jane Austen, who deserves all the praise she gets and then some.
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But, as I wrote last year, there are many splendid seventieth anniversaries this year too. The 1950s was a vintage decade for literature—fiction and non-fiction. It is the decade of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith and Truman Capote. It is the time of The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956) and The Borrowers (1952), of The Organisation Man (1956), The Cat in the Hat (1957), Things Fall Apart (1958), and Atlas Shrugged (1957).
And what a year for literature was 1955! Anthony Powell published The Acceptance World, third in the Dance to the Music of Time series. Waugh published Officers and Gentlemen, second in the Sword of Honour trilogy. Tolkien published Return of the King. Golding published The Inheritors, a really excellent novel. C.S. Lewis published The Magician’s Nephew, perhaps the best children’s book ever written, as well as Surprised by Joy.
The list of masterpieces is longer yet. Nabokov: Lolita. Highsmith: The Talented Mr. Ripley. Rulfo: Pedro Paramo. Elizabeth Bowen and Ivy Compton-Burnett published as well.
It was also the year of Tristes Tropiques, Notes of a Native Son, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Leaf Storm, The Quiet American, Hilary’s account of climbing Everest, Graves’ Greek Myths, Kenneth Rexroth’s 100 Poems from the Japanese, Beezus and Ramona, Larkin’s The Less Deceived, and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, by Sloan Wilson.
1955 is also the year of Laurence Olivier’s Richard III, the premier of Waiting for Godot, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A View from the Bridge, and the British films The Ladykillers, and The Lady and the Tramp.
1955 was a significant year in American history: it was the year of Claudette Colvin, Rosa Parks and Emmett Till. It was also the year of Ray Kroc’s first McDonald’s restaurant. And it was an important year for science: the polio vaccine was approved, the citation index was proposed, approval was given for the first artificial satellite, the number of chromosomes was confirmed, Mendelevium was synthesised, and important predictions were made about climate change.
We should pay more attention to platinum anniversaries like these. So much that happened in 1955 remains important to us now.
As a soviet student, I grew up in foreign literature, mainly American and English. James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, Graham Green's Quiet American, Somerset Maugham, every novel -were very popular in my 1955-1960 in Russia. Also, Hemingway came a little later to me. Our translators worked very fast. The rest of the novelists I read only here because they were banned in Soviet Russia for political or individualistic points of view. Thank you for your article. It was so nostalgic to me.
It was also a heck of a year in theatre! Orson Welles’ play Moby Dick—Rehearsed premiered in London in 1955. It starred Welles, Christopher Lee, and the much underrated Patrick McGoohan. Hate I missed it.