A century—one hundred years—is a long time. However, there are ties to the past all around us that make events of a century ago closer than one might think.  

Maybe you are lucky enough to have parents, grandparents, or older acquaintances who bridge the gap. I still remember my grandmother’s story of shaking hands with Civil War veterans at a parade and being struck by the collapse of temporal distance. I could touch the same hand those veterans had touched, and they, in turn, had fired rifles during Civil War battles! Her story immediately made the past closer and emphasized that “a long time ago” is a relative expression.  

If you’re a history and/or pop culture buff and interested in the 1920s, the library has lots of materials to help take a walk down memory lane and bring the Jazz Age closer. What did people read? What about current events and culture?   

1920s Reading 

There were some amazing authors at work in the 1920s who produced an embarrassment of literary riches. D.H. Lawrence, Sinclair Lewis, Robert Frost, Theodore Dreiser, E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot Erich Maria Remarque, Willa Cather, Somerset Maugham…. Nertz! (1920s slang for “Amazing!”) Where to begin?  

Agatha Christie’s first published novel (and her first featuring detective Hercule Poirot), The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was released in 1920. When most of us think of flapper fiction we think of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, but we might also want to read his other works of the decade like This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (1922). Virginia Woolf produced Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and A Room of One’s Own (1929). Langston Hughes released his first collection of poems in The Weary Blues (1926). Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), and A Farewell to Arms (1929), kicked off America’s obsession with Papa that continues today.  

Prefer non-fiction? H.G. Wells made history popular with his serial Outline of History, published as a single volume in 1920. It undertook the humble task of chronicling the history of the world from the beginning of time to World War I and sold more than two million copies. That same year, Lytton Strachey’s sympathetic and melodramatic biography of Queen Victoria changed the way books of that genre were written. Emily Post’s behavior manual Etiquette premiered in 1922. Radical anarchist Emma Goldman published My Disillusionment with Russia in 1924.  

Modern Books About the 1920s 

Maybe you prefer the modern style of a book written recently, but would like a plot set in the 1920s. The library has you covered there too. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI reads like an improbable whodunit, but is actually non-fiction. It is being turned into a major motion picture starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro and directed by Martin Scorcese. The release date is projected for October 2023. The Radium Girls deals with the literal and figurative fallout from radioactive paint used by hundreds of young, female clock factory workers. They were promised that the paint was safe, even as they fell ill. Their battle for recognition and compensation was an important milestone in the struggle for workers’ rights. The Paris Wife chronicles the life of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson, and their life in bohemian 1920s Paris after their whirlwind courtship.