WThe Carpentered Hen is the first poetry collection and first published book by John Updike, published by Harper in 1958.
WA Coney Island of the Mind is a collection of poetry by Lawrence Ferlinghetti originally published in 1958. It contains some of Ferlinghetti’s most famous poems, such as “I Am Waiting” and “Junkman's Obbligato”, which were created for jazz accompaniment. There are approximately a million copies in print of A Coney Island, and the book has been translated into over a dozen languages. It remains one of the best-selling and most popular books of poetry ever published. Because some of the material had been previously published, the first edition of Coney Island bears both a 1955 and a 1958 copyright.
WNight is a 1960 book by Elie Wiesel about his experience with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, at the height of the Holocaust toward the end of the Second World War. In just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, Wiesel writes about the death of God and his own increasing disgust with humanity, reflected in the inversion of the parent–child relationship as his father declines to a helpless state and Wiesel becomes his resentful teenage caregiver. "If only I could get rid of this dead weight ... Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever." In Night everything is inverted, every value destroyed. "Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends", a kapo tells him. "Everyone lives and dies for himself alone."
WThe Object-Lesson (1958) is a picture book by Edward Gorey. A work of surrealist art and literature, it is typical of Gorey's avant-garde style of storytelling, with Victorian and Edwardian-esque line drawings and settings, each described with a sentence fragment which adds to a larger continuous narrative. The pictures and text combine to tell a strange and obscure story. Although internally consistent, coherent, and structured, the story has a disjointed and disorienting quality, with melancholic and morbidly humorous effects.
WOnce There Was a War, published in 1958, is a collection of articles written by John Steinbeck while he was a special war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune from June to December 1943.
WThe Rise of the Meritocracy is a book by British sociologist and politician Michael Dunlop Young which was first published in 1958. It describes a dystopian society in a future United Kingdom in which intelligence and merit have become the central tenet of society, replacing previous divisions of social class and creating a society stratified between a merited power-holding elite and a disenfranchised underclass of the less merited. The essay satirised the Tripartite System of education that was being practised at the time. The book was rejected by the Fabian Society and then by 11 publishers before being accepted by Thames and Hudson.
WThe Service Book and Hymnal (SBH) was used by most of the Lutheran church bodies in the United States that today compose the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) prior to the publishing of the Lutheran Book of Worship (LBW) of 1978. In ELCA circles, historically, the Service Book and Hymnal has been called the "red book" while the Lutheran Book of Worship has been called the "green book." The newest ELCA hymnal, Evangelical Lutheran Worship (ELW) is also red in color, and has apparently been dubbed "the cranberry book".
WSpells and Philtres is a collection of poems by Clark Ashton Smith. It was released in 1958 and was the author's fifth book and second collection of poetry to be published by Arkham House. It was released in an edition of 519 copies. The book was a second stop-gap volume following The Dark Chateau. It represented Smith's poetry while the more extensive Selected Poems was being prepared which did not ultimately appear until 1971. The collection also includes several translations of French and Spanish poems. Clérigo Herrero, however, is not a real person and the poem is actually a composition of Smith's.