20th Century > 1950s
A Painted House
by John Grisham
Until that September of 1952, Luke Chandler had never kept a secret or told a single lie. But in the long, hot summer of his seventh year, two groups of migrant workers--and two very dangerous men--came through the Arkansas Delta to work the Chandler cotton farm. And suddenly mysteries are flooding Luke's world. A brutal murder leaves the town seething in gossip and suspicion. And as young Luke watches the world around him, he unravels secrets that could shatter lives.
Cities of the Plain
by Cormac McCarthy
The setting is New Mexico in 1952, where John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are working as ranch hands. To the North lie the proving grounds of Alamogordo; to the South, the twin cities of El Paso and Juarez, Mexico. Their life is made up of trail drives and horse auctions and stories told by campfire light. It is a life that is about to change forever, and John Grady and Billy both know it.
Year: 1998
Genre: 1950s
The Blackboard Jungle
by Evan Hunter
After serving his country in World War II, Richard Dadier decides to become an English teacher--and for the sin of wanting to make a difference, he's hired at North Manual Trades High School. A tough vocational school in the East Bronx, Manual Trades is home to angry, unruly teenagers exiled from New York City's regular public schools. On his first day, Dadier endures relentless mockery and ridicule and makes an enemy of the student body by rescuing a female colleague from a vicious attack.
Year: 1954
Genre: 1950s, Crime Fiction
The Bridge at Andau
by James A. Michener
For five brief, glorious days in the autumn of 1956, the Hungarian revolution gave its people a glimpse at a different kind of future--until, at four o'clock in the morning on a Sunday in November, the citizens of Budapest awoke to the shattering sound of Russian tanks ravaging their streets. The revolution was over. But freedom beckoned in the form of a small footbridge at Andau, one of the most important crossings in the world, as the soul of a nation fled across its unsteady planks.
Year: 1957
Genre: 1950s
The Fifties
by David Halberstam
The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the ten years that David Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. It is the decade of Joe McCarthy and the young Martin Luther King, the Korean War and Levittown, Jack Kerouac and Elvis Presley. Halberstam not only gives us the titans of the age. Here is a portrait of a time of conflict, at once an age of astonishing material affluence and a period of great political anxiety.
Year: 1993
Genre: 1950s
The Right Stuff
by Tom Wolfe
Millions of words have poured forth about man's trip to the moon, but until now few people have had a sense of the most engrossing side of the adventure; namely, what went on in the minds of the astronauts themselves - in space, on the moon, and even during certain odysseys on earth. It is this, the inner life of the astronauts, that Tom Wolfe describes with his almost uncanny empathetic powers, that made The Right Stuff a classic.
Year: 1979
Genre: 1950s, 1960s, Historical, Non-fiction