My selection of six defining books set in the 1970s era-now regarded as historical fiction-cross continents and heritages, and each explores how characters rise up to meet challenges and conflict as they confront cultural and other differences and explore challenges inherent during that time, many of which, with their central truths, continue to resonate with me as I revisit them. There’s an accountability in place that calls upon authors to invent fictional aspects around a central truth. All fiction grows out of human events whether real or imagined, but historical fiction pays closer attention to the facts that create those events in terms of time, setting and character. Fifty years in the past, it’s no longer what we once thought of as cutting edge, despite having been the era of women’s rights, gay rights, Watergate, the Vietnam War, and bell bottoms.įlash forward to today, and books set in the 70s still recall dramatic stories in American and world history that resonate in powerful ways.
It’s almost shocking to believe that what was once the electric literature of the 1970s has now become historical fiction.
