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The greatest year for books ever?

Several years including 1862, 1899 and 1950 could be considered literature’s very best. But one year towers above these, writes Jane Ciabattari.

The year 1925 was a golden moment in literary history. Ernest Hemingway’s first book, In Our Time, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby were all published that year. As were Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, among others. In fact, 1925 may well be literature’s greatest year.

But how could one even go about determining the finest 12 months in publishing history? Well, first, by searching for a cluster of landmark books: debut books or major masterpieces published that year. Next, by evaluating their lasting impact: do these books continue to enthrall readers and explore our human dilemmas and joys in memorable ways? And then by asking: did the books published in this year alter the course of literature? Did they influence literary form or content, or introduce key stylistic innovations?

Books that came out in 1862, for instance, included Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead, Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. But Gustave Flaubert’s novel of that year, Sallambo, set in Carthage during the 3rd Century BC, was no match for Madame Bovary. George Eliot’s historical novel Romola and Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm were also disappointments.

The year 1899 is another contender for literature’s best. Kate Chopin’s seminal work The Awakening was published then, as was Frank Norris’s McTeague and two Joseph Conrad classics – Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim (serialised in Blackwood’s Magazine). But Tolstoy’s last novel Resurrection, published also in 1899, was more shaped by his religious and political ideals than a powerful sense of character; and Henry James’ The Awkward Age was a failed experiment – a novel written almost entirely in dialogue.

And in 1950 there were published books from Isaac Asimov (I, Robot), Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles), Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train), Doris Lessing (The Grass Is Singing) and CS Lewis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). But other great fiction writers produced lesser works that year – Ernest Hemingway’s minor Across the River and into the Trees; Jack Kerouac’s The Town and the City, written under the influence of Thomas Wolfe; John Steinbeck’s poorly received play-in-novel-format Burning Bright and Evelyn Waugh’s only historical novel, the Empress Helena (Roman emperor Constantine’s Christian mother goes in search of relics of the Cross).

But 1925 brought something unique – a vibrant cultural outpouring, multiple landmark books and a paradigm shift in prose style. Literary work that year reflected a world in the aftermath of tremendous upheaval. The brutality of World War One, with some 16 million dead and 70 million mobilised to fight, had left its mark on the Lost Generation. In Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf created the indelible shell-shocked veteran Septimus Smith, “with hazel eyes which had that look of apprehension in them which makes complete strangers apprehensive too. The world has raised its whip; where will it descend?”

Looking inward

The solid external world of the realists and naturalists was giving way to the shifting perceptions of the modernist ‘I’. Mrs Dalloway, which covers one day as Clarissa Dalloway prepares for a party – and Septimus Smith for his demise – is a landmark modernist novel. Its narrative is rooted in the flow of consciousness, with dreams, fantasies and vague perceptions gaining unprecedented expression. Woolf’s stylistic breakthrough reflected a changing perception of reality. Proust was also all the rage at this moment, as Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Remembrance of Things Past’s third volume was just out. Woolf admired Proust’s “astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification”.

The year 1925 also contributed to the culmination of Gertrude Stein’s career. She had moved to Paris in 1903 and established a Saturday evening salon that eventually included Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound and Sherwood Anderson, as well as artists Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Stein responded to her immersion in the Parisian avant-garde by writing The Making of Americans, which was published in 1925, more than a decade after its completion. In over 900 pages of stream-of-consciousness, Stein tells of “the old people in a new world, the new people made out of the old,” and describes an American “space of time that is filled always filled with moving”. Early critics like Edmund Wilson couldn’t finish Stein’s complex web of repetition, but she has been credited with foreshadowing postmodernism and making key stylistic breakthroughs, including using the continuous present and a nearly musical word choice. As Anderson put it: “For me, the work of Gertrude Stein consists in a rebuilding, an entirely new recasting of life, in the city of words.”

Stein’s experiments with language influenced Hemingway’s signature sparseness. Beginning with the autobiographical Nick Adams stories in his first book, 1925’s In Our Time, his fiction is characterised by pared-down prose, with symbolic meaning lying beneath the surface. Nick witnesses birth and suicide as a young boy accompanying his father, a doctor, to deliver a baby in the Michigan woods. He is exposed to urban crime when two Chicago hitmen come to his small town. And as a war veteran trying to keep his memories at bay, he gravitates toward the familiar pleasures of camping and fishing: "He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him."

Modern times

The midpoint of the Roaring ‘20s was a time of rare prosperity and upward mobility in the United States. The stock market seemed destined to climb forever, and the American Dream seemed within the grasp of the masses. 1925 was special, though. In New York, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer and other writers of the Harlem Renaissance were given a definitive showcase that year in the anthology The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke. At the same time Harold Ross launched a revolutionary and risky weekly magazine called The New Yorker, which featured portraits of Manhattan socialites and their adventures and offered what would be a treasured showcase for short stories ever since.

F Scott Fitzgerald dubbed this flamboyant postwar American era “the Jazz Age”. Alcohol flowed freely despite Prohibition; flappers followed the sober suffragettes into a time of sexual freedom. New wealth was spreading the riches and opening doors to players like Fitzgerald’s immortal character Jay Gatsby, whose fortune was rumoured to be based on bootlegging. The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, gives a portrait both tawdry and touching, as Gatsby remakes himself in a doomed attempt to win the love of the wealthy Daisy Buchanan. The tarnished American Dream also was central that year to Theodore Dreiser’s naturalist masterpiece, An American Tragedy. Dreiser based the novel on a real criminal case, in which a young man murders his pregnant mistress in an attempt to marry into an upper class family, and is executed by electric chair. Also ripped from the headlines, Sinclair Lewis’s realistic 1925 novel Arrowsmith was a first in exploring the influence of science on American culture. Lewis wrote of the medical training, practice and ethical dilemmas facing a physician involved in high-level scientific research.

These books weren’t just original, even revolutionary, creations – they were helping to establish the very idea of modernity, to make sense of the times. Perhaps 1925 is literature’s most important year simply because no other 12-month span features such a dialogue between literature and real life. Certainly that’s the case in terms of how new technologies – the automobile, the cinema – shook up literary form in 1925. John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer introduced the cinematic narrative form to the novel. New York, presented in fragments as if it were a movie montage on the page, is the novel’s collective protagonist, the inhuman industrialised city presented as a flow of images and characters passing at high speed. "Declaration of war… rumble of drums... Commencement of hostilities in a long parade through the empty rain lashed streets,” Dos Passos writes. “Extra, extra, extra. Santa Claus shoots daughter he has tried to attack. Slays Self With Shotgun." Sinclair Lewis called Manhattan Transfer "the vast and blazing dawn we have awaited. It may be the foundation of a whole new school of fiction."

Was 1925 the greatest year in literature? The ultimate proof, 90 years later, is the shape-shifting the novel has undergone, still based on these early inspirations – and the continuing resonance of Nick Adams, Jay Gatsby and Clarissa Dalloway. These characters from a transformative time are still enthralling generations of new readers.

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janiedean · 5 years

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Why do you think the SW fandom is so knee-deep in SJ Calvinism? Because I understand wanting representation or being upset because a movie didn’t fulfill your expectations, but the “if you don’t ship X you’re racist” “if you don’t stan Y you’re bigoted” and the harassment over a disappointing movie is surprising just because of how pervasive it is. I was trying to find some St*rmpilot blogs to follow and the amount of hate is Yikes, especially the hate for Rose and the stans of a Certain Ship

eeeeeeh I think it’s because ep. 7 came out at the height of the... well, reaping the seeds the social justice calvinism had sown since 2014 so to speak? I mean, SW is hardly the one fandom where it happened (*cough* voltron and SU *cough*) but as SW is way broader in audience than those other shows that certainly didn’t help, but like, if you think on it, since 2013-ish (but I think before as well, I mean, I’ve been here since 2011 and already when I got here I felt like something was going very wrong when it came to politics-in-fandom-attitude), basically people on tumblr have progressively, when it came to fandoms:

pushed the idea that you have to over-analyze everything you consume through political lens;

pushed the idea that what you like and how you like it also has to be pushed through political lens and what you like says things about who you are as a person or your political leanings;

pushed the idea that if you care for something *problematic* just because you like it you’re excusing it;

pushed the idea that if you were problematic once you can’t ever not be problematic, you can’t change your mind and you can’t learn also because ‘it’s not my job to educate you’ so people either learn themselves or idek what but again, calvinism.

now obviously those politics are tumblr-politics which are also US centric like woah and are also high-school petty like woah, and since more or less then people have:

continuously other-ed lgbt people from *straight*/heterosexual people pushing a narrative where straight = bad and therefore putting it before anything automatically makes it a valid insult which added to the above means that if you ship het you’re already problematic regardless of whether you’re straight or not (and if you are.. lol);

pushed the performative feminism of Doom TM that says men and women should be equal but is like, an excuse to shit on men and on women who like men (see the rampant biphobia around and the whole ‘straight girls are so stupid if they’re into men they should try women’ discourse);

pushed the US terminology when it comes to the POC discourse, in the sense that everything works on the US-centered context where white people = white anglosaxon protestant, poc = everything else without realizing that in the rest of the world white does not equal wasp, that poc = black people only in most of europe (and no one who’s actually black or not white who lives in africa or asia and so on would describe themselves as poc because why the hell would you when your skin color/ethinicity is the norm where you live?), which also goes with the whole white passing debate which where I live would not exist but in that context is a mess because again, oscar i*saac is schroedinger’s poc (as in, he’s poc automatically for american standards because he’s latin-american but like he has the same skin tone as my mother and my mother in italy is white same as 90% of us, which means endless confusion) and assumed that all of us have to accept that terminology/context regardless of whether it’s valid in our countries;

kept on progressively putting minorities against each other in an endless loop of WHO HAS IT WORST/oppression olympics;

kept on progressively split hairs on issues that aren’t exactly, like, that important if there’s more urgent stuff to deal with because 90% of the activism here is performative;

made the 180° turn for which headcanons and shit are seen as, like, doing representation instead of, you know, supporting what rep is there never mind when people decide *one* ship is the right one and if another is canonized and it’s rep it gets thoroughly ignored;

pushed on a mindset for which if something isn’t perfect at the get-go then it’s canceled.

and so on.

like, all of that shit has been continuously not criticized because criticizing it especially if you don’t belong to a minority means that you’re out of line/discussing things that don’t concern you, but if you’re a minority and you criticize it then it’s suddenly YOU BETRAYED OUR CAUSE *INSERT SLUR HERE ABOUT PANDERING TO THE MAJORITY*, and the result exploded in toxic af fandoms, but like... if you look at the issues of the SW sequel trilogy fandom it’s all of that in a nutshell because:

k/ylo ren is automatically the worst because he’s white (horrible), a man (even worse), not canonically attractive (I didn’t touch on that topic bc I’m honestly not up for it mentally but lmao that counts too) and presumably heterosexual (or well, no one said he’s not but you know, since he’s a white dude on the bad side [supposedly] then we don’t give him the benefit of the doubt that he might be bi), so if you like ky/lo ren or relate to him you’re automatically problematic;

shipping re/ylo because automatically problematic because it’s a *straight* (evil) ship made of two white people (when there’s options to ship them both with people that aren’t white, so IT’S RACIST), they have an age gap (BAD BECAUSE POWER IMBALANCE) and it’s enemies to lovers, so it’s a context where people who don’t conceive redemption or that people can become better are basically crying problematic all the time, and the fact that people decided it’s *abusive* when it has like nothing that can equate it to a really abusive relationship says all;

ky/lux being the most popular slash ship immediately means that it’s the fault of the horrible straight (white) women fetishizing the (white) men on the dark side (when it’s most likely because for a while ky/lux was literally the only side of that fandom where people were chill/there wasn’t wank every other moment);

st/ormpilot has been declared The Right Ship because it’s two non-white men and it’s not straight which automatically turns into what I said before about hating other ships that would be rep anyway and feeds into the lowkey oppression olympics racism, because like if finn/rose becomes canon it’s still a mixed/biracial ship because he’s black and she’s asian....... except that it’s not the right ship for people who decided that finn has to be either with rey or poe (and guess what rey is white and poe is... schroedinger’s poc because oscar isaac in europe wouldn’t pass for *poc*), which to me has stank of lowkey racism since tlj came out because sorry but if ‘finn deserves better than rose’ or ‘finn should be with rey because if he doesn’t get rey then it’s unfair’ and the various other bullshit I read on the topic basically says that the white woman is *worthier* than the asian woman or that rose is a downgrade from rey which is fucking bullshit, rose isn’t even a bad character all the contrary. and that’s for the het side of it, but like then it’s not as good as stormpilot because it’s a straight ship (NOOOO THEY MADE FINN STRAIGHT/THEY’RE NOT MAKING THEM GAY THIS IS SUCH BULLSHIT = stuff I legit saw on the tag) and ngl I’m 100% sure that the fact that daisy is Standard Attractive and kelly marie t/ran is lovely but doesn't conform to the usual beauty standard western-viewers apply on asian women did play a role in there, but: what did I say before? the slash ship is automatically better than the het ship never mind that they’re both biracial and rose is actually a rep (asian girls who don’t adhere to stereotypical body shapes - and like, the rep for all body types and shapes should be valid for all women, not just white) that isn’t exactly popular especially in mainstream cinema, so people should be happy.... but since rose is Not A Dude and Not Rey and Not The Right Kind Of Representation For That Crowd, automatically rose is a shit character and deserves to be viciously hated on. and this is a thing done by people who most likely then turn on the other side and talk shit about horrible straight women who hate the only female character for getting in the way of their slash ship without realizing that their rose hate is exactly that. and of course since sto/rmpilot is the two good guys, if you ship that then you also have to hate re/ylo because how can you, a person who ships The Good Ship On The Light Side, support such a problematic enemies to lovers thing? yeah, right, hahaha.

this also tbqh also pairs up with how on tumblr people only recognize mental health issues/abuse victims when the narrative suits them - like, being a bad victim automatically means you lose sympathy and mental health issues are only valid if you aren’t ***privileged*** otherwise why would you have them, which shows transparently in how a lot of people absolutely deny that ky/lo ren is a) an abuse victim, b) obviously mentally ill however it is that he deals with it, but no, he has to be The Most Horrible In Existence Because Otherwise We Should Have Empathy For A Bad Guy Who Also Might Get Redeemed And Redemption Is Not Happening Ever Because Bad People Don’t Deserve it.

like, all of the issues sw sequel trilogy has when it comes to the fandom are direct consequences of the nonsensical social justice calvinism climate on tumblr dot com that no one took care to put a stop to since 2013 and of its ridiculous oppression olympics and pitting people against each other and that was my take. cheers.

(ps: I also ship sto/rmpilot like woah and it’s my otp but there’s a reason why I unfollowed most SP blogs I followed and why I don’t go into the tag anymore - I’m not here for the anti-rose racism dressed up as performative wokeness, I’m not here to get lectured about as a white person I fetishize poc gay men if I ship it - yes I read that too - and I’m not here to read a bunch of meta about how re/ylo is a bad ship and blah blah blah, so yeah. I feel you.) (pps: ky/lo ren isn’t even my favorite character and I care relatively but gdi the way the fandom approaches him is honestly mindboggling in that sense, and I don’t mean people who actually dislike him because fair reasons, I mean people who can’t recognize his abuse victim status and the precarious status of his mental health. like, not all abuse victims and mentally ill people are the right victim or come from the right background and you can be cool motive still murder and still recognize that he’s like that because he has issues, not because he was drawn that way. /bye)

#1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #i said my piece bye #reylo for ts #kylo ren for ts #sw wank for ts #i don't mean ppl shouldn't be uncomfortable with re/ylo or ky/lo btw #but like........... this level of vitriol is ridiculous #and the rose hate is dumb af #bye *shrug*#social justice calvinism #the first person whining about straight people feeling left out as last time this happened #is getting automatically blocked bye #Anonymous #ask post

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