A year of arguments in print
Books in 1967 did not stand apart from the news. The same year that brought the Six-Day War, the rebellions in Newark and Detroit and a growing antiwar movement also brought a run of publications that tried to explain what was happening and what ought to follow. Some were sold in huge numbers; others circulated among small groups and only became famous later. This survey takes a wide view, picks out the most important titles and ideas, and leaves the deeper treatment of the best-known examples to the individual articles on this site.
It is worth noting at the outset that 1967 was not a year when one book defined the mood. The nearest equivalent to a shared text was probably not a book at all but a record album. Reading was fragmented by nation, politics and taste, and the same shelf could hold Mao’s quotations, a thriller and a manual on transcendental meditation.
Race, justice and the limits of reform
The most urgent arguments in American publishing concerned race. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton’s Black Power, published in 1967, took a slogan that had alarmed many white Americans and set out its meaning as a programme of political and economic self-determination, including a careful account of institutional racism. Martin Luther King Jr. answered in part with Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, which called for economic justice and warned that the legal victories of the civil rights movement were incomplete.
Two other titles from that autumn belong in the same conversation. William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, published in October, retold a nineteenth-century slave revolt in the first person and won a Pulitzer Prize the following year. It also provoked a sharp response from Black critics, who argued that a white author had misrepresented the history; the debate became a major literary controversy. Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, also from 1967, was a large and combative study of Black cultural and political life that reached a smaller audience at first but became influential.
Media, image and consumer society
A second cluster of books asked how modern media and affluence were changing people. Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Massage, designed with Quentin Fiore, turned his theory that media reshape society into a picture-heavy paperback that sold widely. In France, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle argued that a world of commodities and images had turned living into watching, and Raoul Vaneigem’s Traité de savoir-vivre made related arguments in a more passionate voice.
The economist John Kenneth Galbraith offered a more mainstream version of the same concern in The New Industrial State, published in 1967, which argued that large corporations plan and shape demand rather than simply respond to it. The zoologist Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, also from 1967, applied animal-behaviour language to human life and became an unlikely popular success. The two books have little in common, but both belong to a year in which many writers were asking what kind of creature the modern consumer was.
Fiction: from Macondo to the suburbs
Fiction in 1967 included works of lasting reach. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude appeared in Buenos Aires and became the best-known example of magical realism, helping to bring the Latin American Boom to a global audience. In Soviet Russia, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, written decades earlier, was published in a censored version in a magazine in late 1966 and early 1967, which reached readers who had never expected to see it in print.
Popular fiction had its own moment. Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, a horror novel set in a New York apartment building, appeared in 1967 and was a bestseller. Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, a short, whimsical book that reached readers in San Francisco and beyond, fit the mood of the American counterculture, though it was less political than some of the period’s writing. For a wider list, our piece on 1967 novels covers more of the year’s fiction.
Theory, philosophy and the French moment
In Paris, 1967 was an unusually productive year for theory. Jacques Derrida published three books in that year: Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena. They became foundational for what was later known as deconstruction, although their reach in the English-speaking world came after a delay. Roland Barthes’s essay “The Death of the Author,” appearing in 1967, argued that the meaning of a text should not be tied to its writer’s intentions. These ideas were circulating in a small intellectual world and had little immediate popular effect, but they would shape university literary study for decades.
Political theory travelled further and faster. Régis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution?, an account of guerrilla strategy based on the Cuban example, was published in 1967, and Debray was arrested in Bolivia that spring. When Che Guevara was killed in October, the idea of the guerrilla as hero was at its height. In China, copies of Mao’s quotations circulated by the million during the Cultural Revolution, and they were exported and read abroad as a symbol of revolt.
The journalism that read like fiction
Nonfiction was changing too. Writers such as Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Gay Talese were using techniques borrowed from the novel, a trend discussed in our piece on New Journalism writers. Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, which appeared in 1968, brought this approach to a central event of the antiwar movement, the October 1967 march on the Pentagon, and told it through his own participation. Its book-length experiment came just after the year it describes, which is a useful reminder that some of the best books about 1967 were written after it.
Magazines mattered at least as much as books. The underground press, from the Berkeley Barb to the East Village Other, carried news and arguments that mainstream papers ignored, and in November 1967 the first issue of Rolling Stone magazine appeared in San Francisco. Many readers met these ideas in cheap newsprint rather than in hardbacks.
What the reading of 1967 tells us
Three patterns stand out from this survey. First, the year’s best-known books are mostly about power: who has it, how it is exercised through institutions and images, and how it might be redistributed. Second, many of them mix genres, with fiction using history, history using fiction, and design doing work usually left to words. Third, much of what became canonical was barely noticed at the time, and some of the year’s biggest sellers have faded.
Readers who want to go further will find that the effects of these books were uneven. Some prompted immediate political action; others took years to find their audience. The student movement of 1968 drew on several of them, but also on a wider mood that no book fully captured. Seen from today, the legacy of 1967 in print is less a single story than a set of arguments that remained open, about race and economic justice, about media and the self, and about the authority of those who write.