All the books Billy Joel mentions in ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’
Many artists have grown to hate their own biggest hit, but few have required as much effort in the first place as Billy Joel‘s 1989 hit ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’. And, in fairness, it doesn’t deserve the hate it gets from its creator. He pored over the history books to bring us a linear snapshot of 20th-century history in a blitzkrieg tantamount to a new age rap.
It came about after he was in a studio with John Lennon’s son, Sean Ono Lennon, and overheard him saying to a friend that it was a terrible time to be growing up. Joel figured that he probably said something very similar when he was young, too. So, he settled upon the notion that the world has been a mess for a while now, perhaps forever, and he got to work gazing through the history books.
Naturally, literature has its place in his diatribe. Billy Joel is, after all, one of the most literary songwriters of recent times. His songs always aim to defy platitudes and pick up on specific observations on human life, whether that be the folks frequenting an Italian restaurant, the wisdom his father dispensed about growing old with dignity in Vienna, or this decidedly factual philosophy of history.
As it happens, the 20th century was a time when the book once more was yielded as a weapon of sorts. As William S. Burroughs famously wrote: “Artists, to my mind, are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.” With pop culture meaning that the bourgeoisie’s stronghold of art was wrestled away, outspoken texts really did make a mark.
These are the historically significant novels that Joel touches upon in ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’. Granted, it is not an extensive library, but he had plenty of other things, such as the President being assassinated, the Vietnam War, Sputnik, birth control, and Woodstock, to squeeze in, too. However, if anything, that makes the few iconic works that he did squeeze in all the more pertinent, at least in Joel’s eyes.
So, from On The Road to Doctor Zhivago, this is the reading list of ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’, a song loved and loathed in near-equal measure, with its own writer belonging in the latter camp.
All the books Billy Joel mentions in ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’:
- Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon – the book on which The King and I is based.
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger – the controversial teen angst novel.
- Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie – the classic children’s novel.
- Peyton Place by Grace Metalious – the uber-liberal novel that became a best-seller and kickstarted the sexual liberation movement.
- Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak – the Russian romance epic that journeys through the hardships of the 20th Century.
- On The Road by Jack Kerouac – the classic beat novel that prised the following testimony from Bob Dylan: “It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.”
- The Bridge Over the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle – the novel on which the Oscar-winning David Lean film was based.
- Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace – the novel on which the Oscar-winning William Wyler film was based.
- Psycho by Robert Bloch – the novel on which Alfred Hitchcoch’s classic slasher film was based (Joel even throws in the strings from the soundtrack as a nod).
- Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein – the controversial sci-fi novel that looks at humanity from afar and examines its ideologies and apparent sexual repressions.
