Best Books of 1974?

In his personal round-up at the NYT, critic John Leonard discusses how the book review section came to their selections before adding some of his favorites, including works by his critical brethren (Elizabeth Hardwick’s Seduction and Betrayal, Irving Howe’s The Critical Point, and Dwight Macdonald’s  Discriminations). For fiction, Leonard includes heavy hitters like Vladimir Nabokov (Look at the Harlequins) and Philip Roth’s My Life as a Man, two novels I haven’t ever heard of until now. He also praises James Welch’s Winter in the Blood and Gail Godwin’s The Odd Woman.

Godwin’s The Odd Woman also appears on the American Library Associations’s list of notable books for 1974, along with other titles duplicated in the NYT list. The ALA list also includes Wendell Berry’s The Memory of Old Jack in their slim fiction selection, and Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair in their nonfiction selection. (I don’t think we would count Zen as a work of nonfiction today, right?)

The Booker Prize winners and finalists for 1974 offer a less USAcentric list: Nadine Gordimer (The Conservationist) and Stanley Middleton (Holiday) split the prize for the first time ever. The shortlist included Kingsley Amis’s Ending Up, Beryl Bainbridge’s The Bottle Factory Outing, and C.P. Snow’s In Their Wisdom.

In other literary prize news of the day, Michael Shaara’s 1974 Civil War novel The Killer Angels won the Pulitzer for Fiction in 1975. In 1974, no Pulitzer was awarded; infamously, the Pulitzer board opted not to follow the jury’s recommendation to give the prize to Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow.

Like the Booker, the 1975 National Book Award split its fiction prize as well: Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers shared the prize with Thomas Williams’ The Hair of Harold Roux. Virginia Hamilton’s M.C. Higgins, The Great won the NBA for children’s literature. Hamilton’s book also won the Newberry Medal that year.

The Nebula Awards short list for the best novels of 1974 included Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, T.J. Bass’s The Godwhale, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed—which won top honors. (I am likely to give The Dispossessed top honors too by the time I get to the end of this post.)

J.G. Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island did not make Nebula’s short list, but to be fair it’s not really sci-fi. But it is pretty good. (Also, not a sci-fi, but an island book, Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island was published in 1974). Leonora Carrington’s excellent surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet also is sci-fi adjacent, but is again overlooked. Oddball novels in general I suppose have to find their way to a cult—fifty years later, novels like Gerald Murnane’s Tamarisk Row, Ishmael Reed’s The Last Days of Louisiana Red, and Fran Ross’s Oreo have all found wider and more dedicated audiences in the last half century.

Speaking of cult books: Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders was published in 1974. Bugliosi’s book was part of a select library we passed surreptitiously around in high school (along with Stephen Davis’s Led Zeppelin biography Hammer of the Gods, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Go Ask Alice, and Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—the aforementioned Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair and Kerouac’s On the Road were part of the underground informal book loan, but I never really cottoned to them). Eve Babitz’s Eve’s Hollywood—published too in 1974—could have been in that secret library if we had known about it.

And 1974 spit out some books would-be hipsters would likely eschew, Peter Benchley’s beach read Jaws and Stephen King’s Carrie. (Both novels spawned fantastic films.)

As I mentioned above, 1974 was a standout year it seems for children and adolescent literature–Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, Virginia Hamilton’s M.C. Higgins the Great, and Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, of course, but also James Lincoln Collier’s My Brother Sam Is Dead, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wind in the Door, and Judy Blume’s Blubber. I loved all of these.

A few other books of note: J. M. Coetzee’s debut Dusklands (haven’t read it), Muriel Spark’s The Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark (read it when I was devouring Spark in 2020), Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (haven’t read it), and James Herbert’s The Rats (guess who read their mom’s copy of this novel in secret when he was about ten years old?).

I have undoubtedly missed many, many books of note that were published in 1974. I wonder how available, say in 1999 at the 25-year mark, a novel like Ross’s Oreo or Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet might have been. Again, my fun in this project comes down to a basic idea I have about literature—we really don’t know what books will retain their importance (or gain importance) until decades after their publication. None of this is to discount year-end lists of new books—I had four on my list this year!—I just aim to say something like: Books aren’t time capsules, they are time machines.

My list of the best books of 1974:

Blubber, Judy Blume

The Chocolate War, Robert Cormier

Concrete Island, J.G. Ballard

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin