40's/50's fiction

[Waylander]

Any recommendations for fiction set in the 40's and 50's? Sort of like what Dickens did for the 19th century? Preferably in Britain or America, gripping plots, intriguing characters and relationships, if genre then more literary than pulp (not out of snobbery, just want to read something different). For example, Peyton Place is sort of what I would call "social fiction", a bit like social history, but with a story and plot. Anything in that vein would be great.

Edit:
To help a bit more, Donna Tart's The Goldfinch looks at modern life through the plot of the story. That's what I'm looking for in the era specified. Also, can be both modern of contemporary, but contemporary fiction would give a better sense of place.

[issybird]

Interesting question. I want to give it more thought, but off the top of my head I'll suggest John O'Hara, Louis Auchincloss and Laura Z Hobson in the US.

[DrNefario]

Modern books set in the 40s/50s, or contemporary books written in the 40s/50s? Here are a few of the former I have enjoyed:

Small Island - Andrea Levy (1948, with flashbacks) - Orange Prize winner
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon (covers a longer time period) - Pulitzer winner
The Separation - Christopher Priest (Mainly just WW2, semi-alt-history) - Clarke Award winner

[Catlady]

Harriette Simpson Arnow's The Dollmaker.
Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything.
Nelson Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm.
Evan Hunter's The Blackboard Jungle.

[Bookpossum]

Having just got hooked on her, the early books of Doris Lessing were written in the 1950s and set in that time.

[Rizla]

Raymond Chandler.

[mitford13]

Evan S. Connell's Mr. Bridge/Mrs. Bridge
Richard Yates
Muriel Spark - A Far Cry from Kensington

[Pulpmeister]

This is an interesting period, because of course the War loomed large throughout. There is a vast number of contemporary novels of the War itself, and then there was a post-War wave of memoirs as well as novels inspired by the writers' war experiences. Even when not part of the novel, the war often colours the background, with protagonists who are veterans.

There were numerous 40s and 50s action thrillers such as The Angry Mountain by Hammond Innes, which takes place after the war, with a disabled ex-WW2 pilot as the protagonist. There was the sudden emergence from the magazines of SF novels in book form. Lots of crime novels, some of them very dark, as by David Goodis, Jim Thompson and Cornell Woolrich, plus the emergence of John D MacDonald, who, before he created Travis McGee, wrote dozens of stand alone crime novels such as The Brass Cupcake.

As for "mainstream fiction" of the period, I read a lot of it long ago, and it's nearly all vanished from my memory. Some lingers: Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, Giovanni Guareschi's Don Camillo stories, Meyer Levin's Compulsion, Burdick and Lederer's The Ugly American. Was "Not as a Stranger" by Morton Thompson in the 50s? I vaguely recall that one.

Try googling "Novels of the 1950s" and see what was hot at the time.

[BenG]

Herman Wouk: The Caine Mutiny, Marjorie Morningstar, Youngblood Hawke

Also Vin Packer. I used to see her books in the bookstores a lot, but I've never read any. They seemed to be on the pulpy side about juvenile deliquents and such.