For me, it was a book called ‘The Outsiders’ by S.E Hinton. It is known as a literary classic these days, but it was quite hard hitting when it was released back in the 1960s.
In a nut shell; It is about a group of semi-impoverished greaser friends growing up in 1960s Tulsa, Oklahoma, and all the life challenges they face, and how they react to prejudice against them whilst coping with family issues.
It was the first book that made me realise that some people in society don’t get it easy growing up, and I discovered what it meant to live on the ‘wrong side of town’ and what societal prejudice was. The outsiders was the first novel I read that brought up hard subjects like; domestic violence, alcoholism, street gang violence etc.
It was the first book to shatter my naive way of thinking about the world, at 13 years old! It is still one of my favourite stories to this day, and for all its slightly dark themes, I love the compassionate friendship and brotherhood that is displayed in this book!
Lord of the Flies.
It blew my mind, and when I put it down, I kind of thought that maybe the most important things to know about the world are in it. More than thirty years later, and I haven’t really changed my mind.
You might be interested in what happened during the real-life Lord of the Flies, which actually turned into a communist paradise rather than the capitalist hellscape depicted in Golding’s famous novel.
What part of LOTF had anything to do with capitalism?
The part where children individualistically destroy one another for their own private gain rather than working together for the common good (i.e., communism).
That has nothing to do with capitalism.
How so?
That’s not how logic works. I don’t have to explain how a punchline is not like Saturn’s rings. What you describe has absolutely nothing to do with capitalism.
Because you can’t.
Lord of the Flies didn’t do much for me because it was just a not very far off metaphor for my life growing up in suburban Texas. The only difference is the slight exaggeration that they weren’t killing kids outright, but if they could have they would have.