The Gnostic Gospels
Collection of early Christian and Gnostic texts discovered near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi in 1945.Thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar were found by a local farmer named Muhammed al-Samman
1940s
Cry, the Beloved Country
Novel by Alan Paton, published in 1948. American publisher Bennett Cerf remarked at that year’s meeting of the American Booksellers Association that there had been “only three novels published since the first of the year that were worth reading Cry, The Beloved Country, The Ides of March, and The Naked and the Dead.”Two cinema adaptations of the book have been made, the first in 1951 and the second in 1995. The novel was also adapted as a musical called Lost in the Stars , with a book by the American writer Maxwell Anderson and music composed by the German emigre Kurt Weill.
Death of a Salesman
1949 stage play written by American playwright Arthur Miller
The Pursuit of Love
Novel by Nancy Mitford, first published in 1945. It is the first in a trilogy about an upper-class English family in the interwar period focusing on the romantic life of Linda Radlett, as narrated by her cousin, Fanny Logan
West with the Night
1942 memoir by Beryl Markham, chronicling her experiences growing up in Kenya in the early 1900s, leading to celebrated careers as a racehorse trainer and bush pilot there
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Debut novel by the American author Carson McCullers; she was 23 at the time of publication
The Seven Storey Mountain
1948 autobiography of Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk and priest who was a noted author in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Merton finished the book in 1946 at the age of 31, five years after entering Gethsemani Abbey near Bardstown, Kentucky
Man Meets Dog
Zoological book for the general audience, written by the Austrian scientist Konrad Lorenz in 1949. The first English-language edition appeared in 1954.The original German title is So kam der Mensch auf den Hund, which could be literally translated as “How man ended up with dog”. The German title is also a play on the phrase “Auf den Hund kommen”, which is a common idiom in German-speaking countries and probably comes from the old days when farmers with economic problems had to sell their livestock animals and ended up with only the dog.
Under the Volcano
Novel by English writer Malcolm Lowry published in 1947. The novel tells the story of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic British consul in the small Mexican town of Quauhnahuac, on the Day of the Dead in November 1939. The book takes its name from the two volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl, that overshadow Quauhnahuac and the characters
Eastern Approaches
Memoir of the early career of Fitzroy Maclean