Bevis Hillier – Key Books
In 1977 critic Bevis Hillier was a co-organiser of the Jubilee Exhibition at the Brighton Pavilion and as such was asked to organise an exhibition of the key books of the twenty-five year of the Queen’s reign. The following two lists are the works he chose (nearly all non-fiction, of course) and the suggestions from Sunday Times readers to supplement his list. A horrible Anglo-American bias but, que voulez-vous? Order is chronological.
His list
Simone de Beauvoir: Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex)
Aldous Huxley: The Doors of Perception
Benjamin Spock: Baby and Child Care
J D Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
Peter Wildeblood: Against the Law
Anthony Crosland: The Future of Socialism
Nancy Mitford: Noblesse Oblige
Richard Hoggart: The Uses of Literacy
Vance Packard: The Hidden Persuaders
Raymond Williams: Culture and Society
Michael Young: The Rise of the Meritocracy
C P Snow: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
R D Laing: The Divided Self
Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange
Joseph Heller: Catch-22
Rachel Carson: Silent Spring
John Robinson: Honest to God
Marshall McLuhan: Understanding Media
Eric Berne: Games People Play
Konrad Lorenz: On Aggression
Desmond Morris: The Naked Ape
Noam Chomsky: American Power and the Mandarins
James Watson: The Double Helix
Germaine Greer: The Female Eunuch
Richard Neville: Play Power
Benjamin Spock: Decent and Indecent
Richard Crossman: The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister
Angry Young Men Department
Leslie Paul: The Angry Young Men
Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim
John Wain: Hurry On Down
Colin Wilson: The Outsider
John Braine: Room at the Top
John Osborne: Look Back in Anger
Alan Sillitoe: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Readers’ list
H J Eysenck: Uses and Abuses of Psychology
Françoise Sagan: Bonjour Tristesse
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations
Allan Ginsburg: Howl
C S Lewis: Surprised by Joy
Herbert Marcuse: Eros and Civilization
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
Teilhard de Chardin: Le phénomène humain (The Phenomenon of Man)
Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
William H Whyte: The Organization Man
Jack Kerouac: On the Road
Karl Popper: Das Elend des Historizismus (Poverty of Historicism)
William Ross Ashby: An Introduction to Cybernetics
J K Galbraith: The Affluent Society
C Northcote Parkinson: Parkinson’s Law
William Burroughs: The Naked Lunch
Shelagh Delaney: A Taste of Honey
E.H. Gombrich: Art and Illusion
Laurie Lee: Cider with Rosie
Alan Sillitoe: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Hugh Thomas: The Establishment
Keith Waterhouse: Billy Liar
Jean-Paul Sartre: Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason)
Frantz Fanon: Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth)
Ludovic Kennedy: Ten Rillington Place
The New English Bible
Edward de Bono: Lateral Thinking
Ken Kesey: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Claude Lévi-Strauss: La pensée sauvage (The Savage Mind)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Один день Ивана Денисовича (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich)
John Le Carré: The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
Mary McCarthy: The Group
Karl Popper: Vermutungen und Widerlegungen (Conjectures and Refutations)
Herbert Marcuse: One Dimensional Man
Ralph Nader: Unsafe At Any Speed
Robert Ardrey: The Territorial Imperative
Truman Capote: In Cold Blood
H J Eysenck: Check Your Own IQ
Hubert Selby: Last Exit to Brooklyn
Rebecca West: The Birds Fall Down
Eldridge Cleaver: Soul On Ice
Quotations from Chairman Mao
Carlos Castaneda: Teachings of Don Juan
Quentin Crisp: The Naked Civil Servant
Gore Vidal: Myra Breckenridge
Thomas Wolfe: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Kenneth Clark: Civilisation
Theodore Roszak: Making of the Counter Culture
Timothy Leary: Politics of Ecstasy
Charles Reich: Greening of America
Jerry Rubin: Do It!
Alvin Toffler: Future Shock
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five
Dee Brown: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society
Kate Millett: Sexual Politics
Jacob Bronowski: The Ascent of Man
E. F. Schumacher: Small Is Beautiful
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Архипелага ГУЛАГ (Gulag Archipelago)
Erica Jong: Fear of Flying
Robert M. Pirsig: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance