The year was 1947. If India was waking up to a new reality, the world was too coming out of the war years and the Holocaust. The literary world was bursting forth with ideas existentialism, for instance and also rummaging through the war rubble to find new ways of expression. Some of the books published around the world in 1947.
Diary of Anne Frank: Forced to go into hiding during the holocaust, Anne Frank and her family spent 25 months during World War II in rooms above her father8217;s Amsterdam office. After being betrayed to the Nazis, Anne and her family were deported to concentration camps, where she died, aged 15. Her diary, saved by a family helper Miep Gies, has been translated into 67 languages, and is one of the most widely read books in the world.
Doctor Faustus: Theological student-turned-composer Adrian Leverkuhn makes a pact with the devil for 24 years of musical genius in exchange for his soul. Thomas Mann makes a symbolic commentary on the destructive course Germany took to World War II.
Dark Carnival: Sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury gathers many of his best stories and publishes them as Dark Carnival, his first short story collection.
The seeds of Ralph Ellison8217;s The Invisible Man are sown, the first part of which is published in the October issue of Horizon. The completed novel is published seven years later in 1952.
Italo Calvino writes The Path to the Nest of Spiders, the story of a boy from the slums who joins the partisans. It sells 6,000 copies, an unusually high number at that time.
American essayist, editor, foreign policy expert Walter Lippmann pens The Cold War, which the Pulitzer Prize citation 1958 would praise for its power of news analysis.
Algeria-born Albert Camus8217;s most famous novel may be The Outsider, where he showcases the absurdity of human existence. In La Peste The Plague, he revolts against the absurd world. An allegory of the German occupation of France, Dr Rieux who attends plague-stricken citizens of Oran, speaks for Camus: 8220;We refuse to despair of mankind. Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men, we still want to serve them.8221;
You will probably not remember this one: Somerset Maugham8217;s Creatures of Circumstance is out this year, long after his best, Of Human Bondage, Moon and Sixpence, Razor8217;s Edge8230;
8220;Angry young man8221; and Martin Amis8217; father Kingsley Amis8217; first collection of poems Bright November is published.
Oh, and the Nobel Prize for Literature goes to Andre Paul Guillaume Gide, 78. The Nobel citation says: 8220;More than any of his contemporaries, Gide has been a man of contrasts8230; working tirelessly at opposite poles in order to strike flashing sparks. This is why his work gives the appearance of an uninterrupted dialogue in which faith constantly struggles against doubt8230; discipline against the need for freedom.8221; No, he wasn8217;t to be 8220;ranked among the peaceful stay-at-homes of literature8221;.
Born in 1947: Paul Auster, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Salman Rushdie.
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