The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is the debut 1940 novel by American author Carson McCullers. Written in Charlotte, North Carolina, in houses on Central Avenue and East Boulevard, it is about a deaf man named John Singer and the people he encounters in a 1930s mill town in the U.S. state of Georgia. It created a literary sensation on publication, enjoying a meteoric rise to the top of the bestseller lists in 1940 and was the first in a string of works by McCullers to give voice to the rejected, forgotten, mistreated and oppressed. The novel was chosen as a selection for Oprah's Book Club in 2004.
Facial Justice is a dystopian novel by L. P. Hartley, published in 1960. The novel depicts a post-apocalyptic society that has sought to banish privilege and envy, to the extent that people will even have their faces surgically altered in order to appear neither too beautiful nor too ugly. The novel was included in Anthony Burgess's Ninety-nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939: A Personal Choice. Burgess described the novel as "A brilliant projection of tendencies apparent in the post-war British welfare state ...
The Power and the Glory (1940) is a novel by British author Graham Greene. This novel has also been published in the US under the name The Labyrinthine Ways. In 2005, the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to present. Many novelists consider the novel to be Greene's masterpiece, as John Updike claimed in his introduction to the 1990 reprint of the novel. Upon its publication, William Golding claimed Greene had "captured the conscience of the twentieth century man like no other." It is one of President of America Barack Obama's favourite books.
East of Eden is a novel by Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck, published in September 1952. Set in the rich farmland of California's Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families -- the Trasks and the Hamiltons -- whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Reuploaded by decabristka
The Long Goodbye is a 1953 novel by Raymond Chandler, centered on his famous detective Philip Marlowe. While some consider it not on the level of The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely, others rank it as the best of his work. Chandler himself, in a letter to a friend, called the novel "my best book" and recalled the agony of writing it while his wife was terminally ill. The novel is notable for using hard-boiled detective fiction as a vehicle for social criticism, as well as for including autobiographical elements from Chandler's life. In 1955, the novel received the Edgar Award for Best Novel.
