From The Literary Hub:
Some books are flashes in the pan, read for entertainment and then left on a bus seat for the next lucky person to pick up and enjoy, forgotten by most after their season has passed. Others stick around, are read and re-read, are taught and discussed. sometimes due to great artistry, sometimes due to luck, and sometimes because they manage to recognize and capture some element of the culture of the time.
In the moment, you often can’t tell which books are which. The Great Gatsby wasn’t a bestseller upon its release, but we now see it as emblematic of a certain American sensibility in the 1920s. Of course, hindsight can also distort the senses; the canon looms and obscures.
. . . .
I’ve simply selected books that, if read together, would give a fair picture of the landscape of literary culture for that decade—both as it was and as it is remembered. Finally, two process notes: I’ve limited myself to one book for author over the entire 12-part list, so you may see certain works skipped over in favor of others, even if both are important (for instance, I ignored Dubliners yesterday so I could include Ulysses today).
. . . .
Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)
Christie’s first published novel—and the first to feature her mega-famous creation Hercule Poirot—was released to wide acclaim (somewhat surprised acclaim, considering it was a first novel by an unknown) in 1920, helping to usher in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, not to mention the enduring love affair that millions of fans would have with Christie’s work. According to the flap copy of the first edition, Christie wrote it after accepting a bet—that she couldn’t write a mystery novel in which the reader could spot the murderer before the detective. Everyone agrees that she won. Now she’s one of the best selling, widely translated, and most influential novelists of all time—but it all started here.
. . . .
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way (1922)
If any book could challenge Ulysses for the top spot in literary history, it’s Proust’s seven-volume masterpiece about memory, In Search of Lost Time, the first book of which was translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and published in English for the first time in 1922. In fact, in 2013 Edmund White called it “the most respected novel of the 20th century,” and noted that “in the last 30 years Proust has superseded Joyce.” Either way, like Ulysses, it is a widely influential, much-discussed, probably under-read, classic exemplar of the decade in literature, a text that reverberates through to much of our art today.
. . . .
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
You could argue (or at least I would) that To the Lighthouse (1927) is the more formally exciting—and even the better—book, that Orlando (1928) is decidedly more fun, and that A Room of One’s Own (1929) is the most widely and continually influential (or at least glibly quoted) but I think it’s safe to say that Mrs. Dalloway is the most loved. At least, that’s my read after surveying the Literary Hub office, the internet, and the members of my own personal family. It was also very well regarded in its time—in a contemporary review in the New York Times, John W. Crawford wrote:
Among Mrs. Woolf’s contemporaries, there are not a few who have brought to the traditional forms of fiction, and the stated modes of writing, idioms which cannot but enlarge the resources of speech and the uses of narrative. Virginia Woolf is almost alone, however, in the intricate yet clear art of her composition. . . . Clarissa is . . . conceived so brilliantly, dimensioned so thoroughly and documented so absolutely that her type, in the words of Constantin Stanislavsky, might be said to have been done ”inviolably and for all time.”
Despite all the competition, Mrs. Dalloway is a standout work in a standout career, a hallmark of the Modernist movement, and a splendid, wrenching, subtle psychological novel, beloved in its day and beloved now.
Link to the rest at The Literary Hub