An interesting article appeared this weekend in the news source The Guardian, in which the opinion was offered that 1925 was the greatest year in literary history. “It was a very good year,” the article states. “Ernest Hemingway took his first literary steps with the collection of short stories In Our Time; Virginia Woolf published Mrs. Dalloway; and F. Scott Fitzgerald brought out The Great Gatsby. All that happened in 1925, as did the publication of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith.” Quite an impressive list for a singular year in literary history!
However, I wondered if other years could make a similarly strong case. Here are a few that I think deserve close consideration:
1899: Major works appeared from Frank Norris, Anton Chekhov, Kate Chopin, Joseph Conrad, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henrik Ibsen, as well as a world-changing book by Sigmund Freud.
1916: Major works appeared from James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Susan Glaspell, Sherwood Anderson, and William Dean Howells, along with a fairly well-known book on relativity theory from Albert Einstein.
1920: Major works appeared from F. Scott Fitzgerald, D. H. Lawrence, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Sherwood Anderson, Robert Frost, Eugene O’Neill, Ezra Pound, as well as another influential text from Sigmund Freud.
1929: Major works appeared from William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, Graham Greene, Nella Larsen, Sinclair Lewis, W.B. Yeats, and Virginia Woolf.
1936: Major works appeared from William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, Daphne du Maurier, John Dos Passos, Ayn Rand, John Steinbeck, Clare Booth Luce, Dylan Thomas, along with a new text on economics from John Maynard Keynes.
1949: Major works appeared from George Orwell, Arthur Miller, Graham Greene, Shirley Jackson, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Joseph Campbell, and as well as texts on gender dynamics from Margaret Mead and Simone de Beauvoir.
1962: Major works appeared from Ken Kesey, Anthony Burgess, Vladimir Nabokov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Doris Lessing, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, James Baldwin, William Carlos Williams, John Steinbeck, Rachel Carson, and Milton Friedman.
While I do have a personal affection for Modernist-era texts, it is nearly undeniable that some of the most interesting and influential works were published during this time period. Ezra Pound’s famous call for artists to “Make it new!” spurred a creativity and productivity unlike anything seen before, and we are still feeling its effects to this day. While I may agree with the article’s claim regarding the significance of 1925, the entire era was pretty great for literature.
What literary year do you think deserves a place in this discussion?
However, I wondered if other years could make a similarly strong case. Here are a few that I think deserve close consideration:
1899: Major works appeared from Frank Norris, Anton Chekhov, Kate Chopin, Joseph Conrad, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henrik Ibsen, as well as a world-changing book by Sigmund Freud.
1916: Major works appeared from James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Susan Glaspell, Sherwood Anderson, and William Dean Howells, along with a fairly well-known book on relativity theory from Albert Einstein.
1920: Major works appeared from F. Scott Fitzgerald, D. H. Lawrence, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Sherwood Anderson, Robert Frost, Eugene O’Neill, Ezra Pound, as well as another influential text from Sigmund Freud.
1929: Major works appeared from William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque, Graham Greene, Nella Larsen, Sinclair Lewis, W.B. Yeats, and Virginia Woolf.
1936: Major works appeared from William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, Daphne du Maurier, John Dos Passos, Ayn Rand, John Steinbeck, Clare Booth Luce, Dylan Thomas, along with a new text on economics from John Maynard Keynes.
1949: Major works appeared from George Orwell, Arthur Miller, Graham Greene, Shirley Jackson, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Joseph Campbell, and as well as texts on gender dynamics from Margaret Mead and Simone de Beauvoir.
1962: Major works appeared from Ken Kesey, Anthony Burgess, Vladimir Nabokov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Doris Lessing, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, James Baldwin, William Carlos Williams, John Steinbeck, Rachel Carson, and Milton Friedman.
While I do have a personal affection for Modernist-era texts, it is nearly undeniable that some of the most interesting and influential works were published during this time period. Ezra Pound’s famous call for artists to “Make it new!” spurred a creativity and productivity unlike anything seen before, and we are still feeling its effects to this day. While I may agree with the article’s claim regarding the significance of 1925, the entire era was pretty great for literature.
What literary year do you think deserves a place in this discussion?