Every now and then, a novel captures its era so perfectly that it becomes a windowth century's most dynamic decades. The world was coming out of a devastating war, a new kind of capitalism was rearing its head, and many writers saw an opportunity to express their disillusionment with societal issues such as racism present. For others, it was a fresh chance to celebrate sexual liberation, or the pursuit of pleasure that engendered the Jazz Age.
So, without further ado, here are 9 books, each of which played some part in defining the roaring 20s.
A ravishing tale about desire and betrayal in upper-class New York, Edith Wharton's literary groundbreaker won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, making her the first woman ever to do so. It tells the story of Newland Archer, an aristocratic young lawyer, and his boring but beautiful bride-to-be May Welland, as they prepare for their wedding.
But when May’s exotic cousin Ellen materialises from Europe, having fled her failed marriage to a Polish count, Archer's loins are activated by her worldly ways. He must make a choice: should he bow to societal strictures and marry a woman who bores him half to sleep, or to a femme fatale to whose flame he is intoxicatingly drawn?
If there was a single work that could give TS Eliot cause to question his own talents, it was Ulysses . Published a mere week after he put out The Waste Land , Eliot – like everyone else who read it – was sledgehammered by its genius. 'Ulysses ,' Eliot would tell Virginia Woolf, 'destroyed the whole of the 19th century. It left Joyce himself with nothing to write another book on. It showed up the futility of all the English styles.'
Banned, burned and bowdlerised, the sprawling novel shattered convention in its style, substance and sexual explicitness. Considered by some a full-frontal assault on literary tradition, it follows ad salesman Leopold Bloom as he wanders about Dublin across a single day. Warm and witty, wacky and wise, it is a uniquely intimate exploration of what it means to be a human – and is as influential today as in 1922, when Eliot said it had 'the importance of a scientific discovery.'
Cane
A cornerstone of the Harlem Renaissance (more on which later), Toomer's Cane is a novel stitched together by a series of interwoven vignettes that poignantly capture the experiences of black Americans of his time. Probably its best-known section is the poem 'Harvest Song,' which opens with the haunting line: 'I am a reaper whose muscles set at sundown.'
Sales of the book were modest at the time, but his influence over the Harlem Renaissance was such that the sociologist Charles S. Johnson, called it 'the most astonishingly brilliant beginning of any Negro writer of his generation.' In echoes of Langston's call to arms, above, he always pushed back when labelled a 'Negro writer' because he identified first as an 'American', forbidding his publisher from mentioning his race in the book ('My racial composition and my position in the world are realities which I alone may determine'). It was crucial in bringing the African American experience into focus for American culture.
This has proved the ultimate decline-of-empire classic, backdropped by the British Raj and the Indian independence movement in the 1920s. When Adela Quested and her ageing travelling companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they are put out by its repressed and prejudice atmosphere. So they set out to find the 'real India'. They engage the charming and respectable Dr Aziz as their guide, but after a mysterious incident at the Marabar caves, he is thrust into the eye of a scandal that grips both British and Indian sides of the imperial coin.
It was, said celebrated Indian novelist Anita Desai, Forster's 'great book... masterly in its prescience and its lucidity.'
More than once has Fitzgerald's masterpiece about the delusion of decadence in the age of excess been branded 'the greatest of great American novels'. Which says a lot for a book that can be read in a day. It's brilliance, in part, lies in its brevity.
Echoing Noel Coward's words in 1925, when he sang, 'Cocktails and laughter, but what comes after?' Fitzgerald used The Great Gatsby to call out the unbridled hedonism of the Jazz Age, which roared through the 1920s, and led to the devastating economic crash of the 1930s. 'I was within and without,' says protagonist Nick, 'simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.'
Reviews upon its publication, however, were mixed. Influential critic HL Mencken said it was 'in form no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that.' And yet, history proved it a piece of prescient genius, a book woozy on its own foresight, not to mention its gorgeously taught, lyrical prose.
'We are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature,' Virginia Woolf told an audience a year before she published Mrs Dalloway , her fourth novel, to rapturous critical reception in 1925. She may not have been talking about her own work, but for the 95 years since its publication, it has been near universally credited with changing the game of writing about the philosophy of life, high society, and most of all, the psychology of feminism.
Written in the same stream-of-consciousness style pioneered by Joyce in Ulysses , it follows Clarissa Dalloway, a high-society hostess in post-war England as she prepares to throw a lavish party, across a single day. 'Mrs. Dalloway was the first novel to split the atom,' The Hours author Michael Cunningham famously wrote. 'It is one of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century.'
Kafka wrote the trial between 1914 and 1915, but it wasn't published until 1925, a year after he died (mainly because his chronic self-esteem issues led him to make his best friend promise to burn his manuscripts after his death. Fortunately for the world, the friend ignored his dying wish). The Trial is a dark, melancholy story of confusion and existential dread, about a man suddenly arrested for a crime that's never revealed to him.
The novel was one among a small oeuvre that compelled the poet WH Auden to call Kafka 'the Dante of the 20th century'. The book, in short, encapsulated the growing fears of the time surrounding totalitarian oppression, alienation and bureaucracy in the modern world. And it's influence on contemporary thinking was profound. We're all conflicted, torn between worlds, trapped in situations from which we can't escape. The Trial embodies that modern malaise, and even spawned a word for it (we all know it): Kafkaesque .
Lady Chatterley's Lover was the book that shattered British squeamishness about sex into pieces (institutionally, at least). Telling the story of an affair between a young, married aristocrat and her also-married gamekeeper, it became notorious for its graphic descriptions of sex and seductive language, four-letter words and other forms of nighttime naughtiness (though it doesn't always happen after dark, here).
It was first published privately in Florence, then in France, but was not released in Britain for a full 32 years after DH Lawrence wrote it, following a landmark obscenity trial that became one of the most important cases in British literary and social history. It has since been anointed a 'sacred text' for British democracy and freedom of expression.
Passing is not just about a black woman who lives her life 'passing' as a white woman. It's also about secrecy and hypocrisy and the universally human fear of being 'found out'. It was a very important book of the time, when conversations about race, class and gender were beginning to open up, despite prejudice still seeming, to many, a stone-set human right.
The story follows Irene and Clare, two mixed-race friends who reunite in a Chicago hotel after years of not seeing each other. Clare, Irene learns, has been living as a white woman with a racist husband who has no idea of his wife's background. Clare, on the other hand, remained in the African-American community but refuses to acknowledge the racism that holds back her family's happiness. They soon become consumed by the other's chosen path – until events conspire to make them confront their lies.
