FICTION: THEMES
Dad Novels: 1960s
11 books
The books a certain kind of American father read in the decade of Kennedy, the missile crisis, and the culture cracking open. Heller and Updike carry the literary weight; MacLean, Hailey, and Levin carry the pure entertainment that kept dads up past midnight. Capote's In Cold Blood invented true crime here, and Portis's True Grit is the most purely enjoyable novel of the bunch. It's a snapshot of what a well-read man kept on the nightstand when the sixties were still deciding what they'd become. Start with To Kill a Mockingbird as a father, not a student — it's a different book — then True Grit for the fun.
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To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
You read this in eighth grade. You understood maybe half of it. Atticus Finch was a good man who did the right thing and that seemed like the whole point. Read it again now that you're a father. The book is not about Atticus — it's about Scout watching her father, trying to understand what kind of man he is and whether she can be that kind of person too. That's a completely different novel than the one you read at fourteen, and a significantly more powerful one. Lee won the Pulitzer in 1961 and never published another novel, which given the quality of this one seems like the right call. The 1962 Gregory Peck film is one of the finest adaptations ever made. This is the mandatory summer reread on this list.
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Seven Days in May
Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II
The year is 1974. An unpopular American president has just signed a nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — a war hero, enormously popular — has decided the president is wrong and intends to do something about it. A Marine colonel stumbles onto the plan and has seven days to stop it. Knebel and Bailey wrote this in 1962, months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the result is the most plausible American coup novel ever written. Rod Serling adapted it for the screen in 1964 with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in a film that President Kennedy personally helped facilitate. Nothing on any other list in this series does what this novel does — the threat comes from inside the house.
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Catch-22
Joseph Heller
Yossarian is a WWII bombardier stationed on a Mediterranean island who has concluded, reasonably, that everyone is trying to kill him — the Germans, certainly, but also his own commanding officers, who keep raising the number of missions required before a man can go home. The problem is the catch. Catch-22 states that a man is crazy if he keeps flying missions, and can be grounded if he asks — but asking proves he's sane, so he has to keep flying. Heller wrote the funniest serious novel in American literature and also one of the most accurate portraits of institutional absurdity ever put on paper. The 1970 Mike Nichols film is worth watching. The 2019 Hulu miniseries is better. Neither captures the book entirely, which is as it should be.
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Where Eagles Dare
Alistair MacLean
A team of Allied commandos is dropped into the Bavarian Alps in the middle of winter to rescue an American general from an impregnable castle before he can be interrogated. What follows is two hundred pages of action sequences, double crosses, triple crosses, and Clint Eastwood shooting a remarkable number of Germans. MacLean wrote this directly as a screenplay treatment and it shows — the pacing is cinematic, the twists keep coming, and nobody stops to have feelings about any of it. The 1968 film starring Eastwood and Richard Burton is one of the great Saturday afternoon movies and among the most faithful book-to-film adaptations of the era. If you want more MacLean, The Guns of Navarone is where he started and operates on the same frequency.
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Airport
Arthur Hailey
A massive snowstorm is paralyzing Lincoln International Airport in Chicago. The airport manager is trying to keep the runways open. His brother-in-law is commanding a flight with a bomb on board. A stowaway grandmother keeps getting found and released. Hailey runs a dozen storylines simultaneously across one night and somehow keeps all of them moving. Airport is not a great novel — Hailey would be the first to tell you — but it is a spectacularly well-engineered piece of entertainment that spawned an entire disaster movie genre and kept dads up past midnight reading about ground operations management with genuine investment. The 1970 film starring Burt Lancaster and Dean Martin is equally shameless and equally fun. This is the deliberate pulp entry on this list and makes no apologies for it.
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Rabbit, Run
John Updike
Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is twenty-six years old, a former high school basketball star, and completely suffocating in his domestic life. One night he gets in his car and drives. Then he comes back. Then he runs again. Updike spent four subsequent novels following Rabbit across the rest of the twentieth century, but this first one — lean, uncomfortable, and ruthlessly observed — is the one that earns its place on a dad list precisely because it's so difficult to read as a father. Rabbit is not a villain. He's not even particularly unusual. That's the problem. The novel asks what a man owes his family versus what he owes himself and refuses to answer cleanly. Nothing else on this list or the others will make you more uncomfortable in quite this specific way.
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In Cold Blood
Truman Capote
On November 15, 1959, two men broke into a farmhouse in Holcomb, Kansas and murdered the Clutter family — a well-liked farmer, his wife, and their two teenage children. There was no apparent motive. Capote spent six years reporting this book, befriending the killers on death row, and inventing the true crime genre in the process. The result is one of the great American books of the twentieth century — meticulously reported, novelistically structured, and deeply strange in its empathy for everyone involved, including the killers. The deliberate nonfiction outlier on this list, the same slot Colin Powell holds on the 90s list and The Right Stuff holds on the 70s list, except this one is darker than either of those by a considerable distance. The 2005 film Capote, about the writing of the book, is worth watching after.
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The Deep Blue Goodbye
John D. MacDonald
Travis McGee lives on a houseboat called the Busted Flush in Fort Lauderdale, which he won in a poker game. He's a salvage consultant — meaning he recovers things people have lost, for a percentage. A young woman has lost something to a man named Junior Allen, a genuinely frightening piece of work, and McGee goes to get it back. MacDonald launched twenty-one Travis McGee novels between 1964 and 1985, color-coded by title, and this is the first. McGee is the great unsung dad series character — funny, physical, morally serious about women in ways that feel surprising for the era, and completely at home in the specific sweaty atmosphere of mid-century Florida. If you read this on a weekend and want more, go directly to Darker Than Amber, which is McGee at his most relentless.
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Exodus
Leon Uris
The founding of Israel told through the eyes of a Haganah commander, an American nurse, and a boatload of Holocaust survivors trying to run a British blockade to reach Palestine in 1947. Uris was the Michener of his era — a writer of enormous, fast-moving historical epics that dads devoured in a weekend and then pressed on their friends. Exodus was the bestselling novel of 1959 and the Paul Newman film in 1960 kept it on nightstands throughout the early 60s. It argues a case — Uris was a committed Zionist and doesn't pretend otherwise — and that perspective should be noted going in. Mila 18, his novel about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, is the more serious and arguably better book. But Exodus is the entry point and the one that earns its place here.
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True Grit
Charles Portis
Mattie Ross is fourteen years old. Her father has been shot dead by a hired hand named Tom Chaney. She wants him hanged. She interviews three U.S. marshals, selects the meanest one — a one-eyed, hard-drinking, morally flexible man named Rooster Cogburn — negotiates his fee down to her satisfaction, and rides into Indian Territory after Chaney herself. Portis wrote one of the funniest and most purely enjoyable American novels of the decade and gets a fraction of the credit he deserves for it. The 1969 John Wayne film won Wayne his only Oscar. The 2010 Coen Brothers version is closer to the book's tone — drier, funnier, more honest about what Mattie is. Under 250 pages. Clears in two sittings. The most fun you will have with any book on this list.
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Rosemary's Baby
Ira Levin
Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse move into a gothic Manhattan apartment building over the objections of their friend, who dies before he can explain his reservations. The elderly neighbors are unusually warm and attentive. Guy's acting career suddenly takes off. Rosemary gets pregnant and starts feeling worse and worse while everyone around her insists she's fine. Levin wrote urban paranoia the way Hitchcock shot it — withholding just enough information that you keep reading against your better judgment. The 1968 Roman Polanski film is one of the great horror films and unusually faithful to the source material. Levin also wrote The Boys from Brazil, which appears as an alternative on the 70s Dad list, and The Stepford Wives — between the three of them he produced a body of work that defined a specific flavor of American paranoia that belongs entirely to this era.