Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1944
1944 is the year of D-Day, of the liberation of Paris, of the last full year of a war that has been consuming the world since 1939. It is a year in which most serious writers are either at war, writing about war, or trying to write around it — to maintain the existence of a literature that is not entirely swallowed by the catastrophe. Somerset Maugham, at seventy, publishes what he calls his final serious novel: the story of a young American who survived the First World War and spent the decades since refusing to live in the way everyone expected him to. It sells over a million copies. In Buenos Aires, a blind librarian named Jorge Luis Borges publishes a collection of short stories that will not be read in English for nearly twenty years — and that will, when it finally arrives, permanently change what fiction was understood to be capable of. In Chicago, a thirty-nine-year-old playwright sees his first important play staged on December 26th, to sparse audiences who do not yet know they are watching the beginning of one of the great careers in American theatre. The war is almost over. The literature of the year is already preparing for what comes after.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction & Drama · Updated June 2026
The Razor's Edge
Larry Darrell is a young American aviator who returns from the First World War having lost his best friend — a man who died saving his life — and who cannot return to the comfortable upper-middle-class Chicago life that everyone assumes he will resume. His fiancée Isabel waits, then doesn't. His friends prosper, marry, lose their money in 1929, and gather themselves up. Maugham narrates the story in his own person across twenty-four years, watching Larry from a distance as he drifts through Paris, labours in a mine, retreats to a monastery, and finally goes to India in search of what he cannot name. The novel sold over a million copies within a few years of publication and spent weeks at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Maugham was seventy. It was his last major novel.
The Razor's Edge is the novel that Maugham considered his finest, and the one that most clearly states the question his best work always circled: what does a life of integrity actually look like when the available models — ambition, marriage, money, social position — are all inadequate? Larry Darrell is one of the most original characters in twentieth-century fiction precisely because he is not tormented or alienated in the conventional sense. He is simply serious, and the novel is about what seriousness costs when the world around you is not. The title comes from the Katha Upanishad: the sharp edge of a razor is difficult to cross — so the wise say the path to salvation is hard. Read it as a spiritual novel that refuses to be pious.
Strange Fruit
Tracy Deen is a white man in a small Georgia town in the 1920s who loves Nonnie Anderson, a Black woman he has known since childhood. The novel follows the consequences of that love — for Tracy, for Nonnie, for both their families, and for the community — in a society whose entire social order depends on the denial of exactly what Tracy and Nonnie feel. Smith named the novel after Billie Holiday's 1939 song about lynching. Published on February 29, 1944, it was banned in Boston, Detroit, and briefly held up by the U.S. Post Office, which refused to ship it. Eleanor Roosevelt personally lobbied for it to be unmailed. It spent twenty-two weeks at number one on the New York Times bestseller list and sold approximately one million copies in hardback.
Strange Fruit is the novel from 1944 that most directly confronted what American society refused to look at. Smith was a white Southerner who had grown up inside the system she was describing, which gives the novel a specificity and an authority that outside observers rarely achieve. She understood that racial segregation was not merely a political arrangement but a psychological one — that it required the constant suppression of ordinary human perception, and that the suppression was damaging to everyone it touched, including the people it nominally protected. The banning only confirmed her argument. The novel has been eclipsed by later work on the same subject, but it was writing this in 1944, when almost no one else was.
Ficciones
Seventeen short stories — most of them between five and fifteen pages — about labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, infinite books, parallel realities, and the nature of time. A library that contains every book that could ever be written. A map so detailed it is the same size as the territory it represents. A man who rewrites Don Quixote word for word, centuries later, and produces a different book. A lottery that gradually takes over every aspect of human life. Borges published Ficciones in Buenos Aires in 1944. It was not translated into English until 1962, when Grove Press published it alongside the companion collection Labyrinths. When it finally arrived in English, it changed what fiction was understood to be capable of — an influence felt in writers from John Barth and Donald Barthelme to Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Salman Rushdie.
Ficciones is the most formally radical book on this list and the one with the longest reach. Borges was not writing postmodern fiction in any programmatic sense — he was writing philosophical thought experiments in narrative form, using the machinery of genre fiction (the detective story, the adventure tale, the encyclopaedia entry) to explore questions about infinity, identity, time, and the nature of reality itself. The stories are short, precise, and completely unlike anything that preceded them. His influence is so thoroughly absorbed into contemporary fiction that it is easy to forget how strange and original the original was. Read Ficciones before you read anyone who has been influenced by it.
The Glass Menagerie
Tom Wingfield works in a shoe warehouse in St. Louis during the Depression and writes poetry at night. His mother Amanda — a faded Southern belle living in a world of carefully maintained illusion — pressures him constantly to bring home a gentleman caller for his sister Laura, who has retreated into a private world of glass animals and gramophone records after her failure to complete a business course. Tom narrates the play from memory, outside it, looking back. Williams drew directly on his own family: his mother, his lobotomised sister Rose, his own desire to escape. The play premiered in Chicago to sparse houses. The critics raved. By the time it moved to Broadway in March 1945, it was playing to full houses and running for 563 performances. It won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award.
The Glass Menagerie is one of those works that is so thoroughly absorbed into the culture that it is possible to underestimate how original it was. Williams invented the memory play as a form here — a drama narrated from outside its own time by a character who knows how it ends and who is trying to understand rather than to accuse. The lighting, the music, the projected titles, the explicit theatricality are all part of the argument: this is not realism, this is how memory works, which is always with distortion and longing. Laura's glass unicorn is one of the most precisely constructed symbols in American drama. And Williams was thirty-three when he wrote it.
Dangling Man
Joseph is a young man in Chicago waiting to be drafted. He has quit his job, his Canadian citizenship papers have delayed his induction, and he is left in a rented room with nothing to do — not working, not quite living, suspended between the life he had and the army that will take it from him. He keeps a journal. The journal is a sustained philosophical argument with himself about freedom, responsibility, and what it means to be a thinking person inside a world that does not particularly require thinking. The novel opens with a direct attack on Hemingway's hard-boiled aesthetic: most serious matters, Joseph writes, are closed to the hard-boiled. Bellow was thirty years old. He would win the Nobel Prize in Literature thirty-two years later.
Dangling Man is considered Bellow's apprentice work, and by his own later standards it is — the prose is not yet doing the extraordinary things it will do in The Adventures of Augie March or Herzog. But it matters precisely because of what it was doing in 1944, which was insisting that a novel could be intellectually serious, that a young Jewish American from Chicago could write in the tradition of the great European novel, that introspection was a literary value rather than a liability. The opening sentence is still one of the most combative opening sentences in American fiction. Read it as the announcement of a major career, then read Augie March.
The Leaning Tower and Other Stories
Nine stories, including the novella-length title piece: a young American painter named Charles Upton who goes to Berlin in the early 1930s, takes a room in a pension, and watches a world in the process of destroying itself. The title refers to a small plaster replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa that Charles accidentally breaks and his landlady has repaired — a small perfect image of something old and tilting and in the process of collapse. Porter had been publishing stories since the 1920s and was considered by her contemporaries — Eudora Welty, Edmund Wilson, Robert Penn Warren — to be the finest American short story writer of her generation.
The Leaning Tower is on this list as a corrective. Katherine Anne Porter is one of those writers whose reputation has contracted over time in inverse proportion to her actual quality. Her stories are more formally precise than Carver, more emotionally complex than most of what is called the American short story tradition, and more historically alert than almost anyone writing in the same decade. The title story is the finest fiction written in English about Germany in the years before the war — the specific texture of what it felt like to be inside a country choosing its catastrophe. Porter spent decades on her one novel, Ship of Fools, and it eclipsed everything. Go back to the stories.
A Haunted House and Other Short Stories
Eighteen short stories and sketches collected and published three years after Woolf's death in 1941. The pieces range across her career — from early experiments to the lyrical prose sketches she called "moments of being" — and include the title story: two pages in which a ghost couple move through a house looking for something they lost, and the living inhabitants feel their presence as a warmth. Leonard Woolf edited the collection from his wife's papers. It was the first posthumous publication of her fiction and introduced a generation of readers to her shorter, more concentrated work alongside the novels for which she was already famous.
A Haunted House belongs here both as a record of what Woolf was still doing in the years before her death — the short form allowed her a freedom from the sustained effort the novels demanded — and as a reminder of how wide her range was. The title story, at two pages, is one of the most complete demonstrations of her method: the movement between interior and exterior, past and present, the living and the dead, all held together by the rhythm of the prose rather than by plot. For readers who find the novels too long or too sustained, this is the right door in. And for readers who love the novels, it shows what she was making between them.
Where to start
If you want the novel that most directly asks what a good life looks like
→ Read The Razor's Edge. Maugham's last major novel — his own favourite — about a young man who refuses to live in the way everyone expects him to. A million people read it in 1944. It has not dated.
If you want the book that changed fiction permanently
→ Read Ficciones. Borges was writing this in Buenos Aires while the war consumed Europe, and the world did not catch up with him for nearly twenty years. Every postmodern novel you have read is downstream of this collection.
If you want the American play that invented the memory form
→ Read The Glass Menagerie. Williams at thirty-three, drawing directly on his own family, making something precise and devastating and entirely new. The most autobiographical work on this list and the most formally original.
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“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened.& rdquo; — Epigraph to The Razor's Edge
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