These classic ’60s books shout from the shelves to be read again (2024)

“Art hurts. Art urges voyages–/ and it is easier to stay at home,/ the nice beer ready.”

This is poet Gwendolyn Brooks at her best, stinging sentiment followed by a swig of damning, ordinary detail from the fridge. We’ve worked hard for a drink that shuts out the world. The lines are taken from her collection “In the Mecca,” a National Book Award finalist in 1969. An adjacent thought from another poet, Elizabeth Bishop, in “Questions of Travel” (1966 finalist): “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?”

Writing is both the staying at home and the difficult voyage, which makes it particularly useful for time travel. And from mushrooms to the moon, no decade in the United States is more known for its mind-expanding trips than the 1960s. Despite that era’s iconic male voices (you may have read a few), its women writers have moved me most in influencing my work: Bishop, Brooks, Hannah Arendt, Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Harper Lee, Flannery O’Connor, Susan Sontag — and names that, sadly, don’t ring as loudly today, like Alice Kimball Smith.

With intimate assurance and often radical insight, these authors took up a looming anxiety of the postwar and Cold War era: What does community mean? Another way of asking this is: Where does home end and “elsewhere” begin, and how does that define one’s responsibilities? These were provocative, even brave, questions to pose as a woman in 1960s America; it makes these books that much more relevant and alive to us lucky enough to read them today.

In her environmental cri de coeur “Silent Spring” (1963 finalist), Carson illustrated the interconnectivity of life via unforgettable images, like an owl in convulsions after eating a shrew that in turn ate earthworms that in turn ate decomposed leaves that had fallen from a tree sprayed with chemicals for Dutch elm disease.“Most of us walk unseeing through the world, unaware alike of its beauties, its wonders, and the strange and sometimes terrible intensity of the lives that are being lived about us,” Carson wrote. She was describing how, venturing out into the garden at night with a flashlight, we’d be amazed and horrified at the vicious balance of nature. But that sentence could just as easily have come from Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1962 finalist), in which Jacobs argued that we need to understand and celebrate urban complexity, and make sure that complexity is not demolished in the name of profits for the few. A city needs to be for everybody, but also: Everybody makes a city great.

I’m struck by how these classics from Carson and Jacobs can be read in succession as pendant volumes of community activism. In that era of fervent capitalist nation-building, they were daring warnings of democracy’s fragility, the importance of living with and trusting strangers. Carson’s most radical move was calling out a different kind of life cycle, one in which scientists’ research was funded by the very industry their findings were supposed to regulate.

It wasn’t just nonfiction writers who captured the “strange and sometimes terrible intensity” of the lives around us. That’s also reflected with cold brilliance in O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1966 finalist), her blunt portrait of the rural South. (Bishop almost made a pilgrimage to see O’Connor in Milledgeville, Ga., where the writer famously lived on a farm with her peaco*cks, but timing thwarted the visit; instead, Bishop sent her a cross in a bottle.) Like so many of the writers in this remarkable decade, O’Connor showed people in a rapidly changing landscape where a community is under threat. She knew a good title and she always stuck the landing, often with a violent death that shattered a character’s self-righteousness. I’ve never flinched so much while reading. She spared no one, including herself, if unintentionally: We can feel O’Connor working through her questions about the fallibility of her White, Catholic views, which maintained their own ingrained bigotry. What does it mean to be a good Christian when everyone’s life feels preordained? Published just a year after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the ban on segregation, “Everything That Rises” is a reminder of racism’s rooted legacy in daily thinking — our most intimate language — especially in characters who are trying to perform a kind of morality. Scenes like the one on the bus in the title story, or in the doctor’s waiting room in “Revelation,” are primers for the barbarous truth that can hide in idle conversation.

O’Connor famously called Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” (1961 finalist) a children’s book. (It’s true that it has maintained its central place in the national consciousness through its pervasiveness on high school reading lists, and some of its most powerful scenes take place in the schoolyard.) Though its tone could not be more different than “Everything That Rises,” it’s also a work of fiction teeming with neighborhood life in the still-segregated South and concerned with our moral responsibilities to the community around us. The judgment in Lee’s book is tied more to the law and its democratic processes than to the Bible, but Lee gives Atticus Finch a radically empathetic vision of religious intensity.

Defining and modeling empathy around community had different stakes for different writers. “In the Mecca” was a fulcrum for Brooks: It was her final book with a major trade publisher before she chose to work only with smaller, Black-run presses — a powerful statement coming from a Pulitzer Prize winner who had just been appointed poet laureate of Illinois. Like Jacobs’s book, “In the Mecca” is about the death of American cities (here, Chicago) through neglect, racism and poor planning, but also about the life in them, through their people and art.

Arendt’s “Men in Dark Times” (1969 finalist) ties community to responsibility, or our knowing turn away from it: “More and more people in the countries of the Western world, which since the decline of the ancient world has regarded freedom from politics as one of the basic freedoms, make use of this freedom and have retreated from the world and their obligations within it,” she wrote. In arguing for the necessity of a community of thinkers in the worst of times, Arendt read across media and history, a dexterity of thinking shared by Sontag, who embraced the Doors and Dostoevsky. Both Arendt and Sontag describe what is happening in plain sight and language, the “luminousness of the thing in itself,” as Sontag describes it, “of things being what they are.” Sontag identified the bliss in aesthetics; she claimed to see a film a day during this decade. Her essay collection “Against Interpretation” (1967 finalist) is brimming with evenings out experiencing things, followed by evenings in describing them (including a merry takedown of Ernest Hemingway). Her sentences are alive with unresolved, still-in-process thinking; the collection ends just before she turned to writing against the Vietnam War.

Arendt’s thought was rooted in World War II and the culture it arrested, the future conflicts it had already failed to stem. In her essay on the German writer Walter Benjamin, exiled from his home country by war, Arendt seems to implicitly pick up Jacobs’s treatise on the importance of a city’s sidewalk life, extending the strangers we meet there to the homeless and stateless who might still find some place to gather. When Arendt writes that technology has made surprising communities, so that every country is “the almost immediate neighbor of every other country, and every man feels the shock of events which take place at the other side of the globe,” social media is the premonition. She, of course, is talking about atomic weapons.

One of the more fascinating and now less-known books of this era is Alice Kimball Smith’s “A Peril and a Hope” (1966 finalist), which examines, sometimes in hour-by-hour detail, how scientists involved in the Manhattan Project tried to manage the impact of the nuclear bomb during its development and in the years just following its use in World War II. (Smith later co-edited an anthology of Robert Oppenheimer’s letters.) Her book is ultimately about the failure of two distinct communities — science and politics — to find a common language through which to understand each other. Though scientists were not in consensus, many of them wanted the United States to be transparent with other countries about its nuclear capabilities — the original hope was that the mere demonstration of an atomic bomb, like the test in the Nevada desert, would persuade our enemies to surrender. Where does home end and the “other” begin?

I admire the small but profound choices of emphasis these writers made. In “Silent Spring,” Carson gave “housewives” the same weight as scientists, citing numerous letters they wrote to newspapers, town councils and ornithologists noting the effects of insecticides and weed killers on wildlife in their neighborhoods. Women may have barely been represented among the scientists employed in the atomic project, but that didn’t stop Smith from writing that community’s definitive story. (Despite having earned a doctorate, Smith is still mostly identified as the wife of one of the Manhattan Project scientists, underscoring why she was better positioned than most to understand the perils of secrecy. Her book is out of print and difficult to access, even in libraries.)

The 1960s cemented a certain intellectual curiosity and urgency around the environment, race and war, subjects that remain the sources of the deepest schisms in our communities. It’s hard not to feel these books shouting from the shelves to be read again for what they can tell us about their time and our own, as the present continuously, swiftly becomes history. Think of microplastics in our water and forever chemicals in our organic salads; the “epidemic” of loneliness diagnosed by the surgeon general, whose recommended treatment directly maps to Jacobs’s prescriptions for a city block; the ongoing racism across the country that turns back small gains made since 2020; Russia’s investment in atomic satellites and deployment of “tactical” nuclear weapons; the uprooting, starvation and death of tens of thousands of children in Gaza and elsewhere.

These writers have shown me that it’s better to step into the mire, to be not at peace with the world but constantly making something of it. That something can be small and local. It can be beautiful and pleasurable in spite of — even because of — what is at stake. Or as Brooks put it, “Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the/ whirlwind.”

Prudence Peiffer is the author of “The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever.”