The Decade That Roared
These works are essential to appreciating American literature of the
1920s.

BY JEFFREY HART
Saturday, June 16, 2007 12:01 a.m.

1. "The Shores of Light" by Edmund Wilson (Farrar, Straus, 1952).

This is the best introduction to the literature of the 1920s and one of
the best of Edmund Wilson's many books. It's exciting to see him
consider important writers as they first appear. For example, in 1924 he
noticed the emergence of Ernest Hemingway with the private publication
in Paris of two small pamphlets, "Three Stories and Ten Poems" and "In
Our Time." Dismissing the poems, Wilson understood that Hemingway's
prose was "of the first distinction . . . at its best as a limpid shaft
into deep waters." Wilson concludes "The Shores of Light" with a 50-page
remembrance of Edna St. Vincent Millay, recalling her as she was when
she came down from Vassar College to Greenwich Village, "running around
the corner of Macdougal Street, flushed and laughing 'like a nymph.' "
In Millay's poetry collection "A Few Figs From Thistles" (1920), "Second
Fig" is only a couplet, but it epitomizes her independence and
brilliance, playing off a New Testament verse. "Safe upon the solid rock
the ugly houses stand: / Come and see my shining palace built upon the
sand!" The Twenties had arrived.

2. "This Side of Paradise" by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Scribner, 1920).

Though everyone reads "The Great Gatsby," F. Scott Fitzgerald's "This
Side of Paradise" is largely forgotten. Lionel Trilling once told me
that when he read it he thought: "That's the way to go to college." He
compared the novel with Goethe's "Sorrows of Young Werther." Both evoke
the special intensity and pain of first love, and each was written when
the author was very young. When Werther loses Lotte to a clod, he kills
himself. But when Amory, Fitzgerald's hero, loses his golden girl,
Rosalind Connage, he merely drowns himself in a bottle. In this first
Fitzgerald novel, we see the emergence of his elegiac, lyrical style,
with its dying-fall rhythm: Amory's mother, Beatrice, "absorbed the sort
of education that will be quite impossible ever again."

3. "An American Tragedy" by Theodore Dreiser (Boni & Liveright, 1925).

Ezra Pound, impresario of modernism, demanded that writers "make it
new." But Theodore Dreiser stayed with the older naturalism of Balzac
and others even as he portrayed a rapidly changing country. A prose poet
of the city and money, Dreiser could also create a sense of urban
loneliness. In "An American Tragedy," a naive young man from Kansas
City, the tragic Clyde Griffiths--his first name suggests celluloid
collars and sleeve garters--is dazzled by the "society" he finds in the
fictional Lycurgus, N.Y. He has gone to work there as the foreman of a
factory owned by a wealthy uncle. Even as Clyde begins an affair with
factory girl Roberta Alden, he is entranced by socialite Sondra Finchley
and longs to join her rarefied world. When Roberta becomes pregnant and
she presses Clyde to marry her, his desperate ambition plays itself out
in a famous scene of lake-borne murder. It is Clyde's ordinariness that
evokes pity and fear, his "democratic" tragedy that powerfully engages
us.

4. "Winesburg, Ohio" by Sherwood Anderson (B.W. Huebsch, 1919).

"Winesburg, Ohio" stands at the gateway to the 1920s and foreshadows a
great deal that is important. Hardly anyone reads Sherwood Anderson now,
but the cycle of stories that constitute "Winesburg, Ohio" deserves
serious re-consideration. Writing with the voice of a natural
storyteller, Anderson relates a series of episodes, but the book is
hardly episodic. Instead, it is tied together and strengthened by a
common theme: the difficulty that people have communicating with one
another, except for moments of profound understanding--epiphanies, in
the sense that James Joyce used the term. Gertrude Stein's "Three Lives"
showed Anderson the uses of simplicity, speech rhythms and repetition,
and he skillfully deployed them all in this minor masterpiece.

5. "A Farewell to Arms" by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner, 1929).

In my opinion, this is Hemingway's best novel, written with a style and
lyrical force that is apparent from the famous opening: "In the late
summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across
the river and the plain to the mountains. . . . Troops went by the house
and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the
trees." Catherine Barkley, Hemingway's greatest heroine, is an English
nurse's aid in Italy during World War I. Her fianci, a British officer,
has been killed on the Somme, blown to bits. Then a wounded man, an
American ambulance driver named Frederic Henry, is brought into the
hospital where Catherine works, and they find a certain solace in each
other. As she later lies dying in childbirth and Frederic tries to
comfort her with empty words, she passes the British officer's
discipline on to him. " 'I'm going to die,' she said; then waited and
said, 'I hate it.' " Her resolution in the face of death--she "holds her
line under the maximum exposure," as Hemingway put it
elsewhere--reflected the writer's own stylistic and moral imperative.

Mr. Hart, an emeritus professor of English at Dartmouth College, is the
author of "Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe" (2001) and "The
Making of the American Conservative Mind" (2005).