1927: To the Lighthouse

Author/Editor: Virginia Woolf

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To the Lighthouse, Virginal Woolf’s 1927 novel, is sometimes cited as the apogee of high modernism.

But it’s also a beautiful piece of work about about the movement and evanescence of life, a book about how a moment can be important, though vanishingly transient. Here, the character Lily Briscoe has such a moment:

With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.

1928: The European Scrap Book- The Years Golden Harvest of Thought and Achievement

Author/Editor: George Bernard Shaw

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A literary and intellectual time capsule, The European Scrapbook: The Year’s Golden Harvest of Thought and Achievement is a collection of short articles and images documenting the year 1928. Literature, philosophy, social issues, political issues, and cultural matters are all represented to create a snapshot of European life. In hindsight, some passages particularly stand out, such as an article discussing the rapid scientific progress which cautioned again the “dangers of another world war with new and more terrible weapons”. The titles of some other pieces hint at an increasingly global awareness: “Christ Depicted on the Japanese Stage”, “Why I Shot a Chinese General”, and “Debunking the Mexican Indian”. There are also numerous treatises on the American experience and culture, illustrating America’s emergence on the world stage.

What makes this collection of perspectives so fascinating is the context in which they were written. Europe was experiencing an economic boom alongside political upheaval in Italy and Germany, prompting a new examination of the status quo. Yet the world was on the eve of the Great Depression. The result is a snapshot of Europe at a crossroads and, as such, is best appreciated in retrospect.  Coincidentally, there is an entire chapter devoted to George Bernard Shaw’s new book, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism! ( see year 1927)

The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism & Capitalism

Author/Editor: George Bernard Shaw

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The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism” was published in 1927, when George Bernard Shaw was at the very pinnacle of his success as a playwright. The book was intended to be a political primer for the “intelligent woman.”  The books is dedicated to his sister in law Mary Stewart Cholmondely the intelligent woman to whose question this book is the best answer I can make.  In the forward to American readers, Shaw states: “I have been asked whether there are any intelligent women in America. There must be; for politically the men there are such futile gossips that the United States could not possibly carry on unless there were some sort of practical intelligence back of them.  But I will let you into a secret which bears on this point.  By this book I shall get at the American men through the American women.”   At the conclusion of the book there is an  Appendix, Instead of a Bibliography and Shaw writes:   “This book is so long that I can hardly think that any woman will want to reach much more about Socialism and Capitalism for some time.  Besides, a bibliography is supposed to be an acknowledgment by the author of the books from which his own book was compiled.  Now this book is not a compilation;  it is all out of my own head.  It was started by a lady asking me to write her a letter explaining Socialism.

1929: The Stump Farm – A Chronicle of Pioneering

Author/Editor: Hilda Rose

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Letters, diaries and memoirs provide a snapshot of a life. Their personal voice appeals to our interest in history.  Stump Farm is one such book.   Hilda Rose was a writer and schoolteacher who lived in the wilderness in Alberta, Canada.  The books shares correspondence with friend Margaret Emerson that paints a vivid picture of the life on the farm.

Entry from December 12, 1919  I expected cold weather, though not so early.  The drops of water I spill on the floor freeze at once.  Why, my milk freezes on the table with the hot stove going…..

January 24, 1923.  .. I thought I would get some traps and try for some furs up therel live like an Indian; shoot and fish and trap.  Boy ( her son) will soon be quite a lad and able to help me.  His education won’t be neglected, for one of my greatest pleasures is teaching him.  I have a map of the world pinned up on the wall.  I have Grey’s Anatomy and he just loves it.  At the table when I have cooked a hen he gravely tells Daddy to give him the femur or the radius and ulna.

1930: As I Lay Dying

Author: William Faulkner

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Told in a “stream of consciousness” writing style, As I Lay Dying describes a woman’s death and her family’s journey to Jefferson, Mississippi to bury her. The story is told by multiple narrators, including the dead woman herself, which illustrate various motivations and internal struggles that each of the characters experience. In this novel, William Faulkner first introduces Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, which serves as the setting for many of his later works.

Faulkner claims to have written As I Lay Dying in six weeks and did not change a word after writing it.

1931: L’Art Religieux

Author/Editor: Emile Male

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Emile Male was a noted French art historian and is widely recognized for his contributions to the study of the history of art and his contributions to the scholarship of medieval and byzantine art.  This volume ( one in a series) is based on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Toulouse and still to this day is considered to be one of the seminal documents of medieval and byzantine art. According to the Dictionary of Art Historians, “ Mâle was one a of group of pioneering art historians, who, along with the German-speaking (but methodologically different) Adolph Goldschmidt, Alois Riegl, and Wilhelm Vöge, were responsible for transforming art history from a fledging discipline into an internationally respected field of study. His books were widely appreciated during his lifetime, inspiring generations of art historians to study French iconography as a core explication of medieval art. He was among the first to recognize eastern influences in medieval art.” ( retrieved September 24, 2012 from http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/malee.htm)

1932: Brave New World

Author/Editor: Aldous Huxley

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Brave New World was published in 1932, and explored a new totalitarianism world in which mind control,  mass (re)production, and pleasure are combine to create a state where “…the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude,” (Huxley, 1946 foreword).

In the thirties, Huxley lived in a milieu that was still feeling the aftereffects of the Great War, beginning to fear the development of totalitarian states in Europe, and on the cusp of the Second World War. These anxieties were recombined with disgust at the shallow pursuit of pleasure which Huxley felt he observed in a trip to America, and are perhaps at the root of the dilemmas he explores in Brave New World.

Brave New World is a resilient novel. Reading it 80 years after its publication, many of the questions and problems raised by Huxley remain unresolved.

1933: The Thin Man

Author: Dashiell Hammett

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The blend of hard-boiled detective fiction and screwball comedy of The Thin Man seemed like a perfect representative for 1933.

Dashiell Hammet’s The Thin Man was his last novel. Hammet, along with Raymond Chandler, was one of the pioneers of the hard-boiled detective novel which has so influenced American popular culture. The Thin Man was a bit of a departure, in its relative lightness, but some of the essential hard-boiled characteristics remain.

The Thin Man was adapted as a film in 1934, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, whose chemistry and capacity to improvise irreverently  were so popular that the single novel led to a half dozen movies altogether, made throughout the 30’s and 40’s.

1934: A Handful of Dust

Author/Editor: Evelyn Waugh

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Evelyn Waugh’s satirical novel about the pretentious and insipid world of the London aristocracy has been named as one of the best books of the twentieth century by both Time magazine and Modern Library. Chronicling the demise of the marriage between Tony and Brenda Last, A Handful of Dust depicts the English elite’s struggle to maintain their precarious place in society during the Great Depression.

The title of the book comes from a poem by T.S. Eliot:

“I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

1935: The Witch of Wall Street: Hetty Green

Author/Editor: Boyden Sparkes & Samuel Taylor Moore

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The Witch of Wall Street: Hetty Green is a biography of Henrietta Green, at one time the richest woman in America. She was a shrewd business woman and anecdotes of her frugality border on the ridiculous (such as she ordered only the hems of her dress to be washed to save on soap). She also prided herself on her fair approach to lending and investing; she is quoted as saying, “… the … thing I am proudest of in my whole business life is that I do not take, that I never took in all my life, and never, never! will take, one single penny more than 6% on any loan or any contract”.  For many years she worn the same black dress and bonnet and this combined with her sharp tongue and strong personality, earned her the title, The Witch of Wall Street.

This account of Hetty Green’s life examines her influences and portrays not just her public character, but also her family life and personal story.

1936: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

Author/Editor: John Maynard Keynes

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As an economics student in the early 80’s, this book (or at least excerpts of it) were required reading in several of my classes. During those Reagan years, Keynesian thought was a bit out of favor in the political arena. The work was nevertheless a cornerstone work of economic thought that had to be dealt with by my generation of undergraduate economists. My familiarity with any of its contents has long since past. But in the ongoing debates about unemployment, national debt and the economy, Keynes continues to be the one economist (along with Bernake) that you’re either for, or against.