Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1940
1940 is the year France falls, Dunkirk happens, and the Blitz begins. It is the year Ernest Hemingway publishes For Whom the Bell Tolls, his longest and most ambitious novel, written in thirteen months in Cuba and Sun Valley while the Spanish Civil War that inspired it was already over and the larger war it predicted was already underway. It is the year Graham Greene publishes The Power and the Glory, the novel that establishes him as one of the finest English prose writers of the century, in a Mexico busy persecuting priests. Arthur Koestler, recently released from a French internment camp, publishes Darkness at Noon — an account of a Stalinist show trial that became one of the most important political novels of the twentieth century — in London in December. Carson McCullers, twenty-two years old, publishes her first novel. Richard Wright publishes Native Son and makes it impossible for American literature to ignore what it has been ignoring. 1940 is a year in which the world is on fire and the writers are watching, and the best books of the year are the ones that understood what was burning and why.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Updated June 2026
Fiction · American · Political
Darkness at Noon
Rubashov is an old Bolshevik — a man who made the Revolution, served it without reservation, and is now sitting in a Soviet prison cell awaiting his trial. The accusation is counter-revolutionary activity. The accusation is false. Over the course of three hearings, conducted by his former comrade Gletkin, Rubashov will confess to it anyway, and the novel is about why: about the logic of a system in which the Party is always right because it represents History, and therefore any individual who disagrees with the Party is objectively wrong, regardless of the facts. Koestler had been a Communist; he had been in a Spanish prison under sentence of death during the Civil War; he had watched what Stalinism actually was. He wrote the novel in German while hiding in Paris, finished it just before the German invasion, and escaped to England with the manuscript. It was published in London in December 1940.
Darkness at Noon is the finest political novel of the twentieth century and one of the most important books written in any language in the 1940s. Koestler understood, from the inside, the specific logic by which a man could be made to confess to crimes he had not committed — not through torture alone but through a philosophical system that made resistance to the Party seem not just dangerous but irrational. The interrogation scenes between Rubashov and Gletkin are among the most sustained pieces of intellectual drama in modern prose. George Orwell called it one of the few books that genuinely changed his understanding of how power works. Read it before 1984, which it influenced directly.
Fiction · American · Race
Native Son
Bigger Thomas is a twenty-year-old Black man in 1930s Chicago who takes a job as a chauffeur for a wealthy white family. In a moment of panic, he accidentally kills their daughter. The novel follows what comes after: his flight, his capture, his trial, and the arguments his lawyer makes on his behalf — arguments that are not really about Bigger’s guilt but about what America has made of the people it has trapped in poverty and contempt. Wright wrote it as a deliberate counter to the sentimental tradition of Black American fiction, and as a challenge to white liberal readers who wanted the comfortable story rather than the true one. It was the first book by a Black American writer to be selected by the Book of the Month Club, which required Wright to excise a passage about Bigger’s sexuality. It sold 215,000 copies in its first three weeks.
Native Son is the novel that made it impossible for American literature to maintain the evasions it had been maintaining. Wright was not writing a protest novel in the conventional sense — he was writing about a young man whose inner life the culture had refused to acknowledge as an inner life, and whose violence was the direct product of what had been done to him. Bigger Thomas is not a victim and not a hero; he is a human being, fully imagined, and the refusal to reduce him to a symbol is the novel’s most radical act. Ralph Ellison called it the most important American novel of its decade. Read it with The Bluest Eye to understand what Morrison inherited and what she revised.
Fiction · British · Catholic
The Power and the Glory
In a Mexican state where the Catholic Church has been outlawed, a whisky priest — he has a daughter, he is a drunk, he is the last priest in the region — is being hunted by a lieutenant of police who believes, with genuine conviction, that the Church is the enemy of the poor and that he is doing God’s work by destroying it. The priest knows he is a bad man and a bad priest. He cannot stop being a priest. He keeps administering the sacraments in secret, in hiding, as the lieutenant closes in. Greene wrote it after a six-week trip to Chiapas and Tabasco in 1938, commissioned by his publisher, under conditions of considerable personal difficulty. The Catholic Church initially placed it on its index of forbidden books, which Greene considered a recommendation.
The Power and the Glory is the novel that established Greene as one of the finest English prose stylists of the century and one of the most serious novelists of faith. What makes it remarkable is that it does not take the easy side: the lieutenant is not a villain, and the priest is not a saint, and Greene refuses to resolve the tension between them into a simple argument about religion or politics. Both men believe they are serving something larger than themselves. Both are right and both are wrong. The novel asks what holiness looks like when it is stripped of everything that usually accompanies it, and the answer is one of the strangest and most convincing in modern fiction.
Fiction · American · War
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Robert Jordan is an American demolitions expert fighting with the Republican guerrillas in the Spanish Civil War. He has been assigned to blow up a bridge behind enemy lines to support a Republican offensive. The novel takes place over three days, in the mountains above Segovia, as Jordan plans the operation, falls in love with a young woman named Maria, and waits. Hemingway spent seventeen months in Spain as a correspondent during the war, and the novel draws on everything he saw and many people he knew. It was his longest book and his biggest commercial success — half a million copies sold in its first year — and it brought him back to critical attention after the failure of To Have and Have Not.
For Whom the Bell Tolls is the Hemingway novel that most fully uses the compressed style he had invented in ways that go beyond the style. The three-day structure is deliberately constricted — Jordan knows from the beginning that the operation may cost him his life, and the novel is about what a man does with the time he has when he knows how little of it remains. The love story is not incidental; it is the thing that makes everything else matter. The ending is one of the most precisely constructed closing sequences in American fiction. Read it as the novel in which Hemingway finally used everything he knew.
Fiction · American · Southern Gothic · Debut
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
John Singer is a deaf-mute living in a small Georgia mill town in the late 1930s. Around him orbit four people — a teenage girl named Mick who wants to be a musician, a Black doctor named Copeland, a labour organiser named Blount, a café owner named Biff — each of whom tells Singer things they cannot tell anyone else, and each of whom misunderstands him completely. Singer himself is the novel’s silent centre, writing letters in his room each night to his deaf-mute friend Spiros Antonapoulos, who has been placed in a state institution. McCullers wrote it in two years between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one, having moved from Georgia to New York with her husband and her manuscript. It was published on her twenty-third birthday.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is one of the great American novels about loneliness and the impossibility of communication — about the gap between what we mean and what we are heard to say, and about what people do with needs that no available listener can meet. McCullers was twenty-three, writing about a mill town she had spent her childhood trying to escape, and the combination of formal maturity and raw personal investment produces something that most first novelists do not come near. The four characters surrounding Singer are each, in their own way, asking to be understood; the tragedy is that the one they have chosen to hear them cannot hear at all. Read it before her second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, to understand the full range of what she was doing.
Nonfiction · Autobiography · British
The Road to Wigan Pier
In 1936, Victor Gollancz commissioned Orwell to spend two months in the north of England investigating conditions in the mining communities of Lancashire and Yorkshire, then write about what he found. The first half of the book is documentary: the lodging houses, the mining families, the work underground, the food, the unemployment. It is some of the finest social reportage in the English language. The second half is a long, uncomfortable, sometimes infuriating essay in which Orwell attacks the English middle-class Left — the socialists who want a better world for the workers but find the actual workers too smelly and too uninteresting to spend time with. Gollancz published it with a preface dissociating the Left Book Club from the second half. The Penguin paperback edition of 1940 brought it to its widest readership.
The Road to Wigan Pier belongs on this list because Orwell was doing in 1937 what the best writers of 1940 were doing: refusing to substitute ideology for observation. The first half is a model of how to write about poverty — specific, precise, present, without sentimentality or superiority. The second half is Orwell at his most combative and most honest about the contradictions in his own position. Read it as the book that explains why Orwell mattered: not because he was consistent but because he was always looking at the thing itself rather than at the version of it that confirmed what he already believed.
Fiction · French · Absurdist
The Outsider
Meursault is a French Algerian clerk whose mother has just died. He is not sad. He takes a girlfriend. He goes swimming. He kills an Arab on a beach, for reasons that are and are not comprehensible, in the midday heat. At his trial, he is condemned not for the murder but for his failure to perform appropriate grief at his mother’s funeral. Camus wrote L’Étranger in 1940, in Algiers and Paris, alongside the philosophical essays that became The Myth of Sisyphus. The two books were published in the same year, 1942, and together constitute the founding documents of literary existentialism. Camus was twenty-eight.
The Outsider belongs on a list of 1940 books because that is when it was written, and because its concerns — the absurdity of social performance, the gap between what a person feels and what they are required to feel, the violence of systems that punish honesty — are the concerns of the moment that produced it. France was about to fall; the social contract was revealing its contingency; the requirement to perform feeling you did not have was about to become a survival skill. Camus understood all of this, and he wrote a novel about a man who could not perform and what it cost him. Read it alongside Darkness at Noon: two very different accounts of a man destroyed by a system that needs him to confess.
Where to start
If you want the finest political novel of the twentieth century
→ Read Darkness at Noon. Koestler understood from the inside how a man could be made to confess to crimes he did not commit — not through torture alone but through a philosophical system that made resistance seem irrational. George Orwell called it one of the few books that genuinely changed his understanding of how power works.
If you want the novel that made American literature face what it had been refusing to look at
→ Read Native Son. Richard Wright gave Bigger Thomas a full inner life and insisted the reader inhabit it. It remains the most important American novel of its decade.
If you want the book that holds up best purely as prose
→ Read The Power and the Glory. Greene at the height of his powers, writing about a bad priest in a bad situation with a clarity and a moral seriousness that English fiction had not often managed before.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1940
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From the bookshelf
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” — John Donne, epigraph to For Whom the Bell Tolls
If this list resonated with you, you’ll find more books like these on my personal bookshelf — hand-picked for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
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