The British Novel in 1960

Abstract

Among the novels published in a single year were: Kingsley Amis’s Take a Girl Like You; Lynne Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped Room; Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving; Anthony Burgess’s The Right to an Answer and The Doctor is Sick; Lawrence Durrell’s Clea; David Lodge’s The Picturegoers; Colin MacInnes’s Mr Love and Justice; Anthony Powell’s Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant; C.P. Snow’s The Affair; Muriel Spark’s The Bachelors and The Ballad of Peckham Rye; David Storey’s This Sporting Life and Flight into Camden; and Raymond Williams’s Border Country. My present aim is to take a high-level and bird’s eye view of the productions of a single year, and to see what possibly interesting features the landscape presents. But why 1960? The reason is partly personal: in that year I started reviewing novels, and in fact reviewed some of the titles above; beyond that, I read most of the other books soon after they were published. 1960 was, too, a year in which several novelists who had emerged in the 1950s developed and consolidated their achievements, and when some significant first novels came out. It was also a highly productive year, when novelists such as Burgess, Spark and Storey published two novels each. And all the novels on the list are currently in print. People are evidently still reading them, although I suspect that in some cases the readers may be the captive audiences of courses on the modern novel; significantly, Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving is available in the UK only in a high school edition.