history
television
music
movies & celebrities
books & comedy
cars & races
sports
gadgets & toys

    
1960s Books

Fiction 1968

Cancer Ward

Alexander Solzhenitsyn tells the story of having a horrible disease, in a horrible hospital, in a horrible town in Stalin's horrible Soviet Union.

Armies of the Night

Norman Mailer won a Pulitzer Prize for this non-fiction novel which chronicled the 1967 peace march on the Pentagon where he was arrested. The book also acted as a jumping board for his 1969 run for Mayor of New York under the banner of Throw the Rascals In!.

Electric Kool Aid Acid Test

We discover Tom Wolfe who covers the cross country shenanigans of the day-glo bus (named the Further) ride of the Merry Pranksters led by Ken Kesey with driver Neil Cassidy who took lots of LSD on the trip.

Myra Breckinridge

Gore Vidal covers lots of ground in this novel of feminism, sexism, silicon, transgender and Hollywood all wrapped up with a pink dildo. It is sexually so far over the top that it became an immediate best seller and a popular 1970 movie starring Rachel Welch.

Arthur Hailey - Airport

John Updike - Couples

John le Carré - A Small Town in Germany

Helen McInnes - The Salzburg Connection

Lloyd Alexander - The High King
Isaac Asimov - Asimov's Mysteries
James Blish - Black Easter
Nelson Bond - Nightmares and Daydreams
Elizabeth Bowen - Eva Trout
Richard Brautigan - In Watermelon Sugar
Anthony Burgess - Enderby Outside
Martin Caidin - The God Machine
Taylor Caldwell - Testimony of Two Men
Arthur C. Clarke - 2001: A Space Odyssey
Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Allen Drury - Preserve and Protect
Lawrence Durrell - Tunc
Michael Harrison - The Exploits of Chevalier Dupin
Georgette Heyer - Cousin Kate
Barry Hines - A Kestrel for a Knave
Dorothy M. Johnson - Indian Country
James Jones - The Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories
Ruth Manning-Sanders - A Book of Mermaids
Robert Markham - Colonel Sun
Brian Moore - I Am Mary Dunne
Anthony Powell - The Military Philosophers
Jean Rhys - Tigers Are Better-Looking
Mordecai Richler - Cocksure

More on each new book of 1968 at Wikipedia

Literary News 1968

Tom Wolfe publishes two books on the same day, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Pump House Gang. Both books go on to become best-sellers and cement Wolfe's status as one of the generation's leading social critics, chroniclers of the counterculture of the 1960s and practitioners of New Journalism. This kind of writing mixing the novel with journalism should be also credited to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1965), Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels (1967), and the previous mentioned Armies of the Night (1968) by Norman Mailer.

Dean R. Koontz publishes his first novel, Star Quest.

Pulitzer prize for fiction awarded to: William Styron Confessions of Nat Turner

Pulitzer prize for non- fiction awarded to: Will and Ariel Durant for Rousseau And Revolution. Their 10th and final volume of The Story Of Civilization.

Nobel Prize for Literature - Yasunari Kawabata

Non Fiction 1968

Chariots of the Gods

Erich von Däniken takes us around the world into anceint cultures to prove we have been visited by flying saucers and alien intelligence. Is this in the correct category of non-fiction. Perhaps only L. Ron Hubbard knows for sure.

The Money Game by Adam Smith

Adam Smith, capitalism's' 18th century forefather, is the pseudonym used by George Goodman. It became a best seller as economics 101 written in a genial and understandable format. Goodman is perhaps best remembered for his emmy winning TV series on PBS, Adam Smith's Money World which premiered in 1984.

Charles Rembar - The End of Obscenity: The trials of Lady Chatterley, Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill

James D. Watson - The Double Helix

William Manchester - The Arms of Krupp: 1597-1968

Comedy 1968

Revenge, Bill Cosby's wins the Grammy for best comedy album for the 6th straight year in a row.

A compilation of Woody Allen's comedy club appearances from 1964 to 1968