A year with an unusual range
Some years in literature are remembered for one movement. 1967 is better described as a year of several very different books arriving at once. A Colombian family saga that would change world fiction appeared in Buenos Aires. An American novel about slavery set off a bitter argument. A teenager’s story of rival gangs became a standard text for young readers, and a horror novel about a pregnant woman in New York became a bestseller. They have little in common except the year, but together they show a literary world in motion.
This article is about fiction. The year’s essays, polemics and political tracts belong to a different tradition, that of books and ideas, and are left aside here.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad was published in Buenos Aires in mid-1967 by the publisher Editorial Sudamericana. The author, a Colombian then living in Mexico City, had reportedly spent a long period working on it, supported by his wife, Mercedes. The first printing is often said to have been about 8,000 copies, and it sold out quickly, with further editions following; the exact numbers are less important than the pattern, which was an immediate and enormous readership across the Spanish-speaking world.
The book follows several generations of the Buendía family in the invented town of Macondo, mixing family history, civil war, politics, love and the supernatural in a calm, matter-of-fact voice. This approach is the heart of what is called magical realism, in which extraordinary events are narrated as ordinary ones. García Márquez did not invent the approach, and other Latin American writers had used related methods, but this novel made it famous. Gregory Rabassa’s English translation appeared in 1970, and García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.
The novel belonged to what is usually called the Latin American “Boom,” a period in which writers such as Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes reached international readers. In the same year, the Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias won the Nobel Prize in Literature, another sign of how much attention the region’s literature was drawing.
The Confessions of Nat Turner
In the United States, William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner came out in October. It is a first-person novel based on the 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1968. Many readers admired its ambition and its prose. It also drew sharp criticism, especially from Black writers and critics, who objected to Styron’s imagining of Turner’s inner life and to a white novelist taking on that voice. A collection of responses by ten Black writers appeared in 1968. The dispute is a good example of how writing about race had become inseparable from the politics of the moment, in the year of Newark and Detroit.
American fiction beyond the headlines
Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer, the story of a Jewish handyman wrongly accused of murder in tsarist Russia, was published in 1966 and won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in spring 1967, so it belongs to the year’s conversation even though its first publication was earlier. Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, about two Jewish boys in Brooklyn whose fathers hold opposing religious views, was published in 1967 and has remained a school favourite.
S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, about class divisions between two teenage groups, appeared in 1967, and it is often credited with helping to establish the serious novel for young adults. Hinton wrote much of it while still in her teens. Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, published the same year, showed that a suspense novel could sell in huge numbers and be turned quickly into a film.
Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam?, published in 1967, was a strange, aggressive novel about a hunting trip in Alaska that never describes the war directly. Mailer’s more famous account of the Pentagon protest, The Armies of the Night, came out in 1968 and is outside this year’s list. Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, a short, whimsical book that found a following among counterculture readers, also appeared in 1967.
Books from behind the Iron Curtain
In the Soviet Union, a heavily cut version of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita was serialised in the magazine Moskva from late 1966 into 1967. Bulgakov had written it decades earlier and died in 1940, and the novel’s satire of Soviet life and its mix of the devilish and the everyday made it a sensation among readers. Its appearance, even in cut form, was a notable event in Soviet cultural life.
The writers’ moment
What links these books, and what makes 1967 a good year for readers, is the sense of writers working at the edge of existing forms. Alongside the novelists, a group of nonfiction writers were bringing fiction techniques to reporting, a trend later labelled the New Journalism writers, and the themes of race, war, youth and belief ran through nearly all of them. Some of these titles have faded; others, like García Márquez’s saga, are still read in classrooms around the world. Reading them in sequence is a good way to understand how many different conversations were taking place at the same time.