Parade Magazine 75 best books of the last 75 years

The 75 Best Books of the Past 75 Years---  PARADE MAGAZINE

Parade asked award-winning author Ann Patchett, whose novels include Bel Canto, The Magician’s Assistant and Commonwealth (coming out in September), to help us celebrate our 75th anniversary by picking the best 75 books of the past 75 years. Here are her picks—chosen with the help of the staff at her bookstore, Parnassus Books in Nashville. Read more about Patchett’s choices at Parade.com/patchett.

1940s

_*_ A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

_*_ Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

__ The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

__ All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

1950s

__ The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

__ Foundation by Isaac Asimov

_*_ Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

__ Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

_*_ The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

_*_ Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

__ The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler

_*_ A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O’Connor

_*_ Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

__ Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

__ The Civil War, Volumes 1–3, by Shelby Foote

__ The Once and Future King by T.H. White

__ Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger

1960s

_*_ Night by Elie Wiesel

__ The Rabbit Angstrom novels by John Updike

__ Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child

_*_ To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

__ The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

_*_ The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

__ One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

__ Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

__ The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

_*_ A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

__ The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman

_*_ Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

__ The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley

_*_ In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

__ The Double Helix by James D. Watson

_*_ Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

1970s

__ Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown

__ Burr by Gore Vidal

__ Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

__ Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

_*_ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

1980s

__ The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty

_*_ Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

__ Maus by Art Spiegelman

_*_ A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

__ So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

__ A Perfect Spy by John le Carré

1990s

_*_ The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

__ All Over but the Shoutin’ by Rick Bragg

_*_ The Secret History by Donna Tartt

_*_ The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields

__ The Collected Stories by Grace Paley

__ Last Train to Memphis by Peter Guralnick

_*_ The Color of Water by James McBride

_*_ The Harry Potter novels by J.K. Rowling

__ American Pastoral by Philip Roth

_*_ Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

_*_ On Writing by Stephen King

_*_ Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

2000s

__* The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

_*_ Old Filth by Jane Gardam

__ Collected Poems by Jane Kenyon

__ Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

_*_ Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

__ Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

__ We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion

__ What Is the What by Dave Eggers

__ Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat

_*_ The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

_*_ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

_*_ The Lion and the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney

__ Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

2010s

_*_ New Selected Stories by Alice Munro

__ Collected Poems by Jack Gilbert

__ The Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn

_*_ My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

_*_ When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

_*_ Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

*= books I have read as of winter 2021