So what is the Golden Age, and why should we care which novels were published decades ago by a bunch of old dead white men? So I would say Golden Age lies between Pulp Age and Silver Age (or new science fiction). Since I abhor politically correct lists, or efforts to shoehorn in an author or novel simply because it is popular to do so in the current year, this list is going to focus only on novels as they merit such notoriety. For the purposes of this list, I’m only considering novels published between 1940 and 1959, leaving the era before that to the Pulp list and Silver Age list, both of which I will write in the next few weeks.

– Leigh Brackett – 1951

Leigh Brackett is probably best known these days as one of the co-authors of the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back. However, she had a career in sci-fi dating back decades before joining the Star Wars team. This novel is the story of a man who is caught up in a struggle between Martians and humans. The protagonist Rick is foretold to become the ruler of Mars, however, he is captured by Martians and forced to work the mines.

– Theodore Sturgeon – 1953This is a novel that perhaps (I’m not that well read on the Golden Age of sci-fi, if there are others leave us a comment) was one of the earliest examples of a writer examining the next step in human evolution. It is the story of six people who can blend their powers together to become more than human and act as a single creature. Though the people are not necessarily mutants, it is hard to imagine the X-Men without a novel like this.

– Isaac Asimov – 1950Perhaps my favorite Asimov book. This is a collection of short stories centering on the theme of human/robot interaction. It gave the world the three laws of robotics which sci-fi authors have been playing with and thinking about ever since.

– Arthur C. Clarke – 1952

This novel speaks to me as I read about the immigration debate going on in the West today. The story is about an alien race invading and overtaking Earth imposing a utopia on us, but at the cost of everything it means to be human, our culture and our identity. It seems to me this novel could be seen as an examination of the civic nationalist postilion on immigration: illegal bad, legal good as long as they assimilate. However, the civ nats don’t seem to recognize that without identity and heritage a utopia is meaningless. Even change towards a utopia (Marxism anyone? “The wrong side of history”) is examined. Perhaps Clarke understood the perils of immigration more than many do today.

– Ray Bradbury – 1953Probably the most famous book to come out of the Golden Age of sci-fi. Bradbury wrote the book in the basement of the UCLA library on a typewriter that cost him 10 cents per hour to use. He wrote fast understanding that his limited funds meant he didn’t have time to overthink and over analyze his novel. Good advice for any writer or artist. Fahrenheit 451 is about a fireman whose job it is to burn books. All books. Books are banned in the future (guess he didn’t think about e-readers. High school English teachers BTFO). However, the knowledge has been preserved as an underground society has taken to memorizing a book each. This book deserves to be more than mandatory reading in an increasingly meaningless school curriculum.

These are my top five Ernest Hemingway books.

5. For Whom the Bell Tolls

Published in 1940 Hemingway set his story among the Spanish Civil War as this is one of the times in his life when he had become more politically oriented than he had been previously. Maybe it was age, maybe he just made peace with his demons, but Bell is one of his best – and I say that even as someone who doesn’t share most of Hemingway’s politics. The protagonist Robert Jordan is a volunteer guerrilla dynamite man sent to blow a bridge. Jordan’s relationship with Maria, the young woman who lost her family to and was raped by one of Franco’s units shows us a Hemingway we don’t often see, mature and capable of dealing with death, trauma, and loss the way he did not in his previous (and in my opinion better) novels.

4. A Moveable Feast

This is the story of Hemingway’s life in Paris in the 1920s as a struggling apprentice writer. It also delves into his relationship with his first wife Hadley Richardson. I’m including it here because it’s a pretty good read but more so because it speaks to something we at Uprising have tried to hammer into novice writers (not that we’re old pros, but hey there is something to be said for authoring three books). You need to find your own voice. That means you’ll need to struggle against the better and worse aspects of your nature. You’ll need to “find your tribe” of people you would live and die for. You need to make sure you are writing books only you can write. Feast is great in that it’s probably the best advice on the writing life anyone can get, even nearly one hundred years later.

3. The Old Man and the Sea

A short and to the point novel. To some it is actually a novella. The Old Man and the Sea gave Hemingway the critical recognition he had earned decades before. It’s not his best, but it’s Hemingway through to the core. This is the story of a Cuban fisherman struggling against his catch as it drags him to sea and nearly costs him his life. It speaks to the soul of men, not the soul of man. This is a book for everyone but it should be in the hands of every young boy who says he doesn’t like reading.

2. The Sun Also Rises

This is a novel who because of the Jewish nature of one of the main characters being portrayed as negative (a self-hating Jew), couldn’t be published and probably not even written today. Sun is a novel of another time. In generations to come it will be looked at not only as a piece of great American literature, but as a primary source itself, especially among psychologists. This is the story of a man and woman, Jake and Brett, who’ve lost what it means to be a man and a woman, though it is never explicitly spelled out in the story we know neither can function as they were intended, and thus can never truly be together in the traditional sense of the word. The closing still haunts me

Brett tells Jake as the car drives away, and as we the reader come to understand why they cannot be together, “We could have had such a damn good time together.” To which he responds “Yes, isn’t it pretty to think so?”

1. A Farewell to Arms

This is, in my opinion, the quintessential World War I novel, at least on the American side. All Quite on the Western Front and Storm of Steel have it locked down from the German point of view, but in A Farewell to Arms Hemingway gave the world a glimpse into the heart of a soldier who lost the thing he loved most in the world, his innocence. To me this book reads like a love letter to Agnes von Kurowsky, the woman I believe he loved so deeply and completely that he never recovered from that love. His life was a string of broken hearts simply because he could not find anyone he loved as deeply as Agnes.

In A Farewell to Arms Hemingway shows the world what he went through both in body and soul. This is the story of a man struggling to admit that each day of the war strips a little more of his humanity, until he meets a young nurse (based on Agnes von Kurowsky) named Catherine. Henry and Catherine fall in love and attempt to escape Italy into Switzerland. I won’t ruin the plot or ending as it is one of the few times in my life I cried reading a book or watching a movie, but it is so worth making sure you understand the first chapter in all its prophetic beauty. I cannot recommend Arms more strongly to anyone.

Today Heinlein is spoken of with reverence but it is increasingly common to see the great mind of sci-fi spoken of with contempt and sometimes with jealousy. The current crop of Hugo winners know they have nothing on the Grand Master of All Science Fiction. Heinlein explored ideas. Today’s winners explore the shallow end of the pool, afraid to take off their water wings for fear of what they might find. The fact that John Scalzi’s Red Shirts won a Hugo for best novel is proof the award has become meaningless.

And yet, there was a time when people wrote because of a love of ideas, story, and character. Heinlein was the best of the best. And these five novels, while not a complete representation of his ability, are the novels that left a lasting impression on me.

5. Have Space Suit Will Travel

is Heinlein’s greatest juvenile novel. It’s written for young men, but it is not written in such a way that an adult would throw it away if they first encountered the book at say age thirty. The story centers on a young man named Kip who wins an old space suit in a contest. He is contacted by two beings calling themselves Peewee and the Mother Thing. They run into conflict with a race of aliens whose planet the society rotates out of 3D space sans mother star and genociding the entire species. It’s really a fun book and worth every dollar if you have a young son who doesn’t enjoy reading. My grandmother got this for me when I was about ten and I’ve been hooked on Heinlein ever since.

4. Time Enough for Love

has live a very interesting, long life, and at the outset of the book he is willing to end it all. He is bored with life in a way that only Anne Rice’s Lestat could rival. Long agrees to tell several stories of his life to avoid his own death. The stories pull us through a range of human emotions. But the most controversial (and thus most praised by left wing critics) aspect is the debate on incest. This book contains moral reprobation but without becoming morally reprobate itself. It’s one of his best books, but also one you should not read until you understand what real human love it.

3. Starship Troopers

If you grew up in the ‘90s chances are you saw the Starship Troopers before you ever heard of the . This isn’t a bad thing to me. The adaptation is a funny campy take on fascism. Maybe we could call it the world’s only existing example of Fashsploitation. In Heinlein’s superior novel of the same name we find one major difference. Philosophy. The film which starred a much younger Neil Patrick Harris and a few other minor stars you might know if you’re from that era, was missing the intellectual depth of Heinlein’s book. In fact the book spends most of its length discussing the philosophy of war, voting rights, equality, and the nature of humanity. The story and its ideas are so deep and interesting that I’d dub the novel, along with the two that follow on this list, as scalziproof. There just isn’t any way to rip off Starship Troopers without looking like a complete moron, and Scalzi is at least smart enough to know not to delve into deep thoughts about things like war. I’d highly recommend the novel to anyone interested in what a great sci-fi war novel could be. To me, it is Ernst Jünger set in space.

2. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

This is the book that got my libertarian going well before I ever read  or . In we encounter some of the most fascinating and deep characters Heinlein ever put on paper. The book is a masterpiece in terms of content and style. This is the story of a penal colony on the Moon inhabited by Loonies who seek for themselves independence and liberty. The story introduces us to Mike a supercomputer with mysterious motivations for supporting the rebelling academic, computer technician and professional agitator. In fact Wyoh can be understood (at least to me) as the first in the line of modern female heroines who’ve been stripped of their femininity such as Buffy, Sarah Conner, and pretty much every female in an action movie these days. But this is not Heinlein’s best novel.

1. Stranger in a Strange Land

Heinlein at his best. In he created one of my favorite characters in literature. This is a story of a man learning to grok what it means to be human though he is human. It’s an outsider look at the world of America in the midst of the Cold War. The novel is set after the Third World War and looks at religion as being an incredibly powerful tool in the hands of the wrong people.

I believe there is a right age to read a novel. For me, Stranger should be read in the early to mid-twenties. I was about fourteen when I first read it and didn’t understand much, but I knew I liked it. Then while in grad school and working at a book store I picked up a copy as my free mass market paperback book of the week and read it over the span of about three days. There was so much Heinlein put into his novel about love, politics, law, philosophy and the search for the meaning of what it means to be human. In fact his definition of human is one that in my opinion runs against his objectively libertarian politics. Smith cannot be fully human because he has no “tribe” he has no people. All he knows is Mars. In a way I would say this may have been the world’s first Identitarian novel. Absolutely worth reading.

I’ve written in the past about the pros and cons of an English degree and an MFA, so I’ll make this in the same vein. I’m not telling you to major in history if you want to be a writer, but I’m going to tell you my thoughts on my historical education and on the historical education I gave to others as a grad student. First, the pros.

If you want to write you’re going to need experience writing and a history degree, even at the undergraduate level, is nothing if not rigorous when it comes to writing. My freshman western civ class required a fifteen page paper on the Roman Civil War. Frankly, I didn’t do that much writing again until grad school where we were expected to produce twenty to thirty page papers every semester. The heart of history is writing, and writing in a clear style. Now, this isn’t to say historical writing is necessarily good. In fact you can get some bad writing habits out of a history program. Most of it is very dry and is full of circumlocutions such as “many believe that….” “it may be possible that….” “often we can see…” and you get the idea. Historical writing is vague, and that is because the historian wants to be right. Academics are a proud bunch and proving one wrong will wound their pride in a way you’ve probably not seen in the real world.

Second, you’ll learn to do research. That’s important because as a writer of fiction you’ll have to acquaint yourself with things you’re not necessarily knowledgeable about. In fact here at Uprising we often talk about research and how you can write what you know, by learning what you don’t know then writing about it. You can educate yourself on other cultures, places, geography and so forth. Whether you want to write historical fiction, genre fiction such as sci-fi, or steamy romance, you’ll have to learn about things you’re not really familiar with. Want to write about hot sexy pirates who abduct chubby single mothers who are then forced to choose between sexy pirate man and the rescuer from the Royal Navy? Might want to brush up on naval history. Might I suggest you start with Alfred Mahan? (Actually that’s not a bad place to start if you want to understand naval history).

Third, history is really the only place you can read biography. Here is the thing, biography is a big category and it’s not really taught outside of history departments. Maybe the English department or a foreign language department will cover something like the life of Shakespeare or Tolstoy but they’re not going to go in depth into the lives of the authors of their books. You’ll only really study the lives of great men in a history department. Want to understand power, try taking a class on the lives of the Roman emperors. Philosophy might cover a little about the lives of philosophers, but you won’t study them the way you will in history. The same can be said for a sub discipline of biography called hagiography (the study of the lives of the saints). If you want to understand Thomas Aquinas, and really you should because he was a fascinating mind and one of the smartest people to ever live, you’ll only do that in a history class.

Fourth, you’ll learn about different aspects of human society. This can also be studied in anthropology or economics, but you won’t really have the breadth of knowledge that comes from studying Christian theology in the Age of Reason in relation to Adam Smith in an economics class. Economics can be handy, but it’s not really going to give you much information regarding how to understand the world in relation to other aspects of life. Economists and theologians and philosophers tend to think in terms of their own discipline. That’s not bad, but it’s not really what you’ll want if you’re trying to build a world with a coherent economy, political system, theology, and magic system all tied together. History will work your brain in a way other areas just don’t.

Fifth, history is one of the only places in college where you will encounter the study of conflict, specifically war. If you’re lucky enough to go to a college with a military history program take advantage of it. The most valuable things I’ve ever learned in school were from my military history classes, especially the medieval military classes. Think all wars are caused by religion? Go study Europe in the middle ages and tell me what you think. (Hint: it’s mostly about consolidation of power or resources). But at the heart of writing is conflict. If you don’t study it you’ll never understand it. If your college offers a class on World War II or Vietnam (ahem… it’s probably full of pro-commie propaganda) take it. You’ll probably not read books on conflict anywhere else except perhaps a psychology class, and that will be very different than learning about war. And let’s face it, a lot of fiction deals with war. You need to learn military history.

Finally, you’ll learn historiography. That’s a big word that means the history of the writing of an area of history. More simply, it’s the study of a field of history by looking at what others have written about it. Historiography will teach you the single most important thing you can do for world building, how to create a history for your world. You’ll learn that by taking your senior historiography class seriously and putting in the elbow grease to understand something like the historiography of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire and its relationship to Serbia in the late nineteenth century.

There are cons as well. I wouldn’t send you eagerly into a history program without warning you of the poison that also comes with this major.

First, your professors are hardcore Marxists and some are actual communists. I’m not exaggerating. There is a thing called Marxist historiography that your professors all studied in grad school and they probably take it very seriously. Marxism is at the heart of most historical fields these days. It’s a teleological worldview. That means your professors believe the world is heading to a utopia where all will have according to their need and others will provide according to their ability. Many will gloss over the evils of communism and the failures of socialism. They actually believe that real communism has never been tried. My freshman western civ II class ended with our professor telling us that communism was inevitable and resistance is futile.

Second, your professors hate you. Well, really they hate themselves for becoming professors. They really started out wanting a middle class lifestyle and then ended up making less than most manual laborers whom they look down their noses at. This translates into hating you because you’re not wasted your life yet. They also hate the fact that you will probably make more than they will. See, having their minds poisoned by Marxist bullshit makes professors believe they deserve to be paid according to a thing called the labor theory of value. I.E. they should be paid based on their inherent worth, rather than on market demands. Unfortunately for professors there are ten PhDs waiting to take their place should they ever retire, so the market doesn’t really grant them much of a salary. Go to your local college look at the cars in the faculty parking of business or engineering then look at the faculty parking for the humanities. One looks like a Lexus dealership one looks like an Audi dealership one looks like that place Clark Griswold bought his station wagon from in  I’ll leave it to you to figure out which is which.

Third, your professors are not as smart as they would like you to believe. Well, most of them aren’t anyway. I’ve met a few who were insanely brilliant. My MA director, James Reckner, went from having no college degree to having a PhD in five years. That’s what he had to do to take advantage of his GI Bill. He’s that brilliant. But most professors aren’t really smart, they’re just autistic. They get interested in one little aspect of one subject and study it for forty years. As a consequence they don’t really know much about the rest of the world, and yet when they teach undergraduates they will actually pretend they know things they don’t, then will shame you for asking questions rather than admitting they don’t know something. I’ve seen it happen too many times. Even grad students do this. It really goes back to pride of academics. They simply cannot be wrong about anything, and if you challenge them on their knowledge they take it personally. That’s why they grade down conservative students. You’re very existence is a threat to their personal self-worth.

Lastly, if you’re not mentally strong, you’ll become one of them. I’m not saying this to scare you off, but you need to be secure in your understanding of the world and secure in your values before you engage with these people. Few undergrads are mentally tough enough to survive four or five years of Marxist propaganda without at the very least assuming their basic premises. You’ll hear Europe and America being treated as the bad guys while all the other people of the world are the good guys resisting the Fascist Imperialist rayciss white devils of Europe who are out to rape and plunder the lands of others. You’ll hear of women being oppressed, and men being evil, especially Christian men and the Church. You’ll see your professors tell you you’re gender is inherently bad, you’re bad for being white, you’re bad for believing in transcendent moral values instead of moral relativism, and you’ll probably be forced to take at least a few courses in “critical theory.” Get used to hearing the terms hegemon and subaltern as well. The humanities, especially history, are infested with the notion that being a weak victim is empowering and moral while being great is a bad thing. You’ll hear that power dynamics between the hegemon (those with power, whites, males, and religious people – usually) and the subaltern, (those without, women, PoC, gays etc…) are shifting thanks to social justice, and you’ll see common sense turned on its head. In the end, you’ll be pressured to accept the premises of Marxism and critical theory uncritically and with extreme pressure. If you resist your grades will be in jeopardy as will be your scholarships and social standing. Most nineteen and twenty year old students simply can’t endure that much pressure and you’ll likely end up writing SJW fiction.

So that’s basically it for my pros and cons of majoring in history. I hope it didn’t scare you too much, remember it’s basically just the opinion of a guy who studies military history. I know what I’m talking about, so either listen or don’t. But I really hope you do, as I’d like to one day read what you write, especially if you are a fan of Uprising Review.

Historical works aren’t necessarily the bestselling books on the market. That would probably be romance. Or maybe self-improvement books sell better. These days it also looks like home-schooling books are doing very well. But I’m a history lover. That’s what I studied in school, and that’s what I enjoy reading and writing. So this is a list of the five best history or historical fiction, books there are. In my opinion.

5. – Umberto Eco

Eco isn’t one of my favorite authors for his incredible literary style, but rather because you feel like you’re getting a glimpse into the past when reading his works. He is an academic, which in truth helped push me to an academic career, but he is more than just an academic. He is a thinker, which you can’t say of all professors or even PhDs though they would like it to be true. In The Name of the Rose Eco created a medieval mystery so good and so fascinating you feel more intelligent just for having read it. But unlike a TED talk which just makes you feel intelligent for a few hours, Eco’s book actually makes you smarter for having read it. That’s the power of this work. It has inspired me to study history and write interesting versions of the past since I read it ten years ago.

4. – Sir Walter Scott

Ivanhoe made Scott rich enough to buy his own castle. He was the JK Rowling of his day, only I have a feeling no one will read her books two hundred years from now. Ivanhoe is fundamentally a novel about values and becoming who you were meant to be though the cleansing fire of battle and love. This is said to be a historical romance, but by today’s standards that’s not exactly true. There is romance yes but it’s not two pirates fighting over one damsel in distress. This is romance as Scott imagined romance would have taken place in medieval England. Wilfred of Ivanhoe, the protagonist, is tasked with returning honor to his father’s name all while winning the hand of Rowena. The love in this novel is a love earned by being a man, not by virtue of fate.

3. – Cormac McCarthy

Some people will say this doesn’t belong in a list of historical books. I disagree. McCarthy was writing about the past and as such it is both a western and a historical novel. Perhaps that is part of what has created an enduring mythos of the Texas and Western frontiers. They are both historical and geographical. But there is also a cultural aspect to the western and historical novel. That is probably why they are still read, when done well. The line I always return to in Blood Meridian is “it makes no difference what man thinks of war. War endures. Before man there was war, waiting. The ultimate trade awaiting the ultimate practitioner.” This book has shaped my understanding of military history and all conflict since I first read of the Judge and the Kid.

2. – Ernst Jünger

Jünger is one of the most fascinating people in modern German literature. His novel Storm of Steel is his best known work, and probably the easiest to find in English. He was a military man who self-published Storm in 1920 and it slowly grew to make him a famous author. So even nearly one hundred years ago great authors were starting out as self-published. His life politically was also interesting. He was offered a seat in the Reichstag as a member of the National Socialist party, yet he turned it down, despite being a prominent nationalist. Jünger is to me an inspirational figure as a writer and man. He is someone who understood nationalism doesn’t necessarily lead to Nazism. Indeed he was on the periphery of the Stauffenberg bomb plot. Jünger was also admired by Julius Evola, a man whose writing I’ve also been influenced by. As an author he was also influential in the development of magical realism, and the idea of the sovereign individual.

But what of the novel? What make it worth reading? Glad you asked. Storm of Steel is in many ways the novel All Quiet on the Western Front should have and could have been. It lacks any real philosophizing, but still manages to be about an idea. That of what a man would die for. And despite the pomp of dying for national ideals, Jünger makes it clear that soldiers die for and fight for each other. And it is love of the brother that is at the heart of nationalism.

1. – Erich Maria Remarque

Okay, one and two were keeping me up wondering which one goes where. Frankly, I decided Remarque’s work is better as it had a more lasting impression on me, and contributed more to my understanding of the early twentieth century, and to my understanding of World War I than The Storm of Steel did.

The book concerns both the physical and psychological impact of war on the individual. Remarque was in some way reminiscent of Hemingway. Perhaps this novel was his way of reconnecting with a world, that he makes it clear in the novel, is now disconnected from him – and many other soldiers returning home from the trenches. I discovered Quiet through my reading of Hemingway, especially his Nick Adams’ stories. Big Two-Hearted River comes to mind when I think of the feel this novel has for me.

Well that’s my five. And if you like these leave a comment. I’m also thinking of things like, the five best novels for nationalists, the five best novels that reject modernity, and the five best books you’re afraid of your friends knowing you love. And don’t forget to click on the associate links to get to Amazon. We have to pay our authors some how.

The only people who should major in English are those wanting to obtain an MA in English and then teach. For most writers English simply isn’t the major they should be in.

Which brings us to the question of whether you should get the MFA.

If you’ve done undergrad right and didn’t go into too much debt and didn’t waste your time getting a degree that ends with the word “studies” then congratulations. You did a pretty good job at college.

So here is the bottom line: some of your favorite authors have an MFA, and some don’t. You can Google lists of who has an MFA and who doesn’t so I won’t belabor the point here, but the fact that some have it and some don’t  means exactly one thing: it’s a personal choice and that choice is largely dependent on what you intend to get out of the MFA.

The MFA can be of use if you want to work in the professional world of writing. It can be a credential that will allow you to work for a publisher, help you gain traffic on a blog, or even get a job as a guest blogger in the ever increasing lit-sphere. An MFA will allow you to teach other students. It might get your foot in the door with a publisher if you have a completed manuscript and are a recent grad. But that’s about it.

If any of that appeals to you, then maybe an MFA is what you need. Though this brings us to another question, perhaps a more important question. What should a writer major in at university?

I have a BA in geology, an MA in history, an MBA and have way too much time invested in a PhD in history. History improved my writing in a way no other academic class or department did. But then I had some excellent professors who taught me to write. I also read writing as dry as an academics bones and knew I didn’t want to write books for ten other academics, and I read writers like Norman Davies, Barbara Tuchman, Thomas F. Madden, and others. They demonstrated to me that history didn’t have to be tedious. It would be, for me, entertainment. And so today I write mostly historical adventures. I pride myself on my ability to create deep characters, complex plots, and (usually) accurate historical settings. History is a good major for a writer. But you have to be prepared to teach it to make a living.

This is why my advice on what to major in is largely dependent upon what you, the writer in training, would like to do while working to make a living off your words. STEM careers are hot right now, but that will fade as automation takes the place of computer programmers (and this is already happening according to friends in the industry and in Japan).

Ultimately, what you major in at university will be important only in that it should help you attain your goal of being a writer. Maybe it will be a way to support yourself, maybe it will put you in the publishing industry, but one thing I believe is that college isn’t necessary to write. And that should be the first question you ask yourself: do I even need a degree anymore?