1959 Popular Books and Bestsellers

1959 Books & Bestsellers

1959 Fiction Top Ten Books

(according to Publisher’s Weekly)
1. Exodus by Leon Uris
2. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
3. Hawaii by James Michener
4. Advise and Consent by Allen Drury
5. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
6. The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene L. Burdick
7. Dear and Glorious Physician by Taylor Caldwell
8. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
9. Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris by Paul Gallico
10. Poor No More by Robert Ruark

1959 Non-Fiction Books

1. Twixt Twelve and Twenty by Pat Boone
2. Folk Medicine by D.C. Jarvis
3. For 2¢ Plain by Harry Golden
4. The Status Seekers by Vance Packard
5. Act One by Moss Hart
6. Charley Weaver’s Letters from Mamma by Cliff Arquette
7. The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
8. The General Foods Kitchens Cookbook by the GFK Editors
9. Only in America by Harry Golden
10. Mine Enemy Grows Older by Alexander King

1959 Notable Literature

Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
The Two Cultures by C. P. Snow
The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills
The Tradition of the New by Harold Rosenberg
James Joyce by Richard Ellmann
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown
The Tragedy of American Diplomacy by William Appleman Williams

1959 Book of the Month Club Selections

The Coming of the New Deal by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr
The Scientists by Eleazar Lipsky
Elizabeth the Great by Elizabeth Jenkins
The Gold of Troy by Robert Payne
Mountolive by Lawrence Durrell
Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing
The Third Choice by Elizabeth Janeway
The Years with Ross by James Thurber
The Lion by Joseph Kessel
The Tents of Wickedness by Peter De Vries
Image of America by R.L. Bruckberger
Advise and Consent by Allen Drury
John Paul Jones by Samuel Eliot Morison
The War Lover by John Hersey
In the Days of McKinley by Margaret Leech
Hawaii by James A. Michener
1959 Nobel Prize in Literature
Most Popular Books of 1959, according to GoodReads
Scroll to Top