Seven Selections for the Depression Era
We know lots of people are depressed at the moment, but our latest book list is not about mental illness. It’s about a range of books about the era around the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression and the years at the start of the second World War, a time that feels eerily familiar at the moment. From classics to lesser known gems, we’ve compiled a range of books in which the combination of hedonism, fatalism and downturn come together in stark and interesting ways.
Anita Loos – Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1925
Although its position in pop culture has been cemented by an influence on Hollywood, movie adaptations and the cultural lexicon, Anita Loos’ satirical novel is far more than an airport read. One of the most unassuming novels to capture the American obsession with glamour and acquisition, an evocation of the excess of early twentieth century jazz and prohibition age America, it’s no wonder it was one of the most popular books of the time.
Evelyn Waugh – Vile Bodies, 1930
Following an assortment of privileged characters through 1920s Mayfair, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, Evelyn Waugh’s acidly funny and experimental satire shows a new generation emerging in the years after the First World War. A book that is not just relevant for our age of digital influencers with the way it skewers vapidity and excess, it also feels like a familiar portrait of the English upper classes even a century later.
John Dos Passos – The 42nd Parallel, 1932
With his USA trilogy, which starts with The 42nd Parallel, John Dos Passos is said by many to have written the true great American novel. While Fitzgerald and Hemingway were cultivating their own, highly celebrated ‘little corners’, Dos Passos was cobbling together tales of several different protagonists, mini-biographies of historically significant individuals, newsreels of period headlines and snippets of pop culture alongside stream of consciousness, autobiographical interludes from the author’s life. An experimental, sprawling work that reflects so many sides of the era, the rise of capitalism and the pre-war period.
Bruno Schulz – The Street of Crocodiles, 1933
The ‘Street of Crocodiles’ in the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Bruno Schulz's uncommon boyhood and of the eerie side of his merchant family's life are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic. Schulz's untimely death at the hands of the Nazis stands as one of the great losses to modern literature, but he has been rediscovered as a true ‘writer’s writer’, and this is a collection of his most intimate work about madness, trade and life in Poland before the war.
Sinclair Lewis – It Can’t Happen Here, 1935
Set in a fictionalized version of the 1930s America, Sinclair Lewis’ dystopian novel follows an American politician who quickly rises to power to become the country's first outright dictator (in allusion to Hitler's rise to power in Germany), and a newspaper editor who becomes his most ardent critic. If the first half of that sounds familiar, you’re not alone – sales of the book hugely spiked after Trump’s first victory, and the book continues to be popular as the dystopia becomes more than real.
Antal Szerb – Journey by Moonlight, 1937
Considered the ‘consummate European novel of the inter-war period’ and one of Hungary’s classics, Szerb’s most famous work is an undoubted masterpiece of Modernist literature, a darkly comic novel cut through by sex and death, which traces the effects of a claustrophobic world on the life of one man. Following the honeymoon of a couple in Italy, and the way the past and society has various implications on their decisions, it hardly feels dated even so many years later.
Toni Morrison – Jazz, 1992
In the winter of 1926, when everybody sees only good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife attacks the girl’s corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession moves back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life with this incident at the center. Despite being written half a century after much of this list, Toni Morrison’s book also captures so much of the era from a perspective that was never considered at the time.
Check out some of these titles and explore many more on the Hammock Literary Map : our interactive, searchable database of award-winning authors from the last two centuries.