Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1938
1938 is the year of Munich, the year Chamberlain returns from Germany with a piece of paper and calls it peace. The Spanish Civil War is in its final months. Austria has been absorbed into the Reich. The literature of 1938 knows something that the politicians have decided not to know — it is a literature that can feel the catastrophe building and is trying to say things before the saying becomes impossible. George Orwell returns from Spain and publishes the account of what he saw there: the way the left ate itself, the way idealism becomes a vehicle for the same violence it claims to oppose. A thirty-two-year-old French philosophy teacher publishes his first novel in Paris — a book about a man who cannot stop feeling that existence itself is absurd and unnecessary, that will not be translated into English for twenty years and that will eventually be recognised as the foundational work of existentialist fiction. Daphne du Maurier publishes the gothic novel that has not been out of print since. Thornton Wilder opens a play with no scenery, no curtain, and a stage manager who addresses the audience directly about death, and wins the Pulitzer Prize. These are books written inside a world that is about to break, by writers who can feel the pressure before it ruptures.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction, Drama & Nonfiction · Updated June 2026
Rebecca
A young, nameless woman marries the wealthy widower Maxim de Winter and comes to live at his great Cornish estate, Manderley — a house still entirely organised around the presence of his first wife, Rebecca, who drowned the previous year. The housekeeper Mrs Danvers worshipped Rebecca and will not allow her memory to die. The novel is narrated from an unspecified future in which the narrator already knows how everything ended, giving it a quality of elegy from the first page. Du Maurier published it in August 1938; it became one of the most widely-read novels of the year on both sides of the Atlantic and has never gone out of print. Alfred Hitchcock directed the 1940 film with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. The opening sentence — "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" — is one of the most famous in twentieth-century English fiction.
Rebecca works simultaneously as a gripping gothic thriller and as a precise psychological study of insecurity, obsession, and the specific damage that a predecessor can do to a marriage and a self. The narrator's lack of a name is not an oversight — it is the novel's central argument: she has come into a house where someone else's identity is so overwhelming that her own cannot take hold. Mrs Danvers is one of the great villains in English fiction, not because she commits violence but because her devotion to a dead woman is itself a form of destruction. Read it knowing du Maurier was thirty-one when she wrote it.
Our Town
Grover's Corners, New Hampshire. The Stage Manager — who is also the narrator, also a kind of god, also Thornton Wilder for the two weeks he played the role himself — addresses the audience directly and introduces the town: its daily life, its marriages, its deaths. The play covers three acts across twelve years, from 1901 to 1913. There is no scenery. There are no props except a few chairs and ladders. The dead sit in rows upstage and watch. In the third act, Emily Webb, who has died in childbirth, is allowed to return for one day of her life. She chooses an ordinary day. She cannot bear what she sees. Our Town premiered at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton on January 22, 1938, moved to Broadway in February, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Edward Albee called it "the greatest American play ever written." It is the most frequently performed American play in history.
Our Town is the play that most honestly confronts what the American theatrical tradition finds hardest to say: that daily life — breakfast, school, work, marriage — is the thing, and that the tragedy is not in its interruption but in the failure to notice it while it is happening. Wilder's formal choices are not arbitrary minimalism; the emptiness of the stage is the argument. The dead can see what the living cannot. Emily's return for a single ordinary day — "Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you" — is one of the most affecting moments in American drama and one of the most quietly radical. Read it as a text, not as a memory of a high school production.
Nausea
Antoine Roquentin is a historian living in the fictional northern French coastal town of Bouville, ostensibly researching a biography of an eighteenth-century political figure. He keeps a diary. The diary records an increasingly acute sense that the things around him — a pebble on the beach, the root of a chestnut tree, his own hand, a glass of beer — have become strange, contingent, unnecessary: that they exist without justification, without any reason to be there rather than not. He calls the feeling the Nausea. Sartre originally titled the novel Melancholia, after Dürer's engraving; Gallimard changed the title before publication. He was thirty-two and teaching at a lycée in Le Havre when it was published in 1938. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964 and declined it, saying a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution.
Nausea is the novel that most completely demonstrates what existentialist thought feels like from the inside — not as a philosophical position to be argued for, but as an experience of consciousness that cannot be shaken off. Roquentin's crisis is not depression and not madness; it is the experience of perceiving the pure contingency of existence without the usual social and linguistic filters that make it bearable. Sartre later said it was his finest novel, and critics who know his entire work tend to agree. The scene with the chestnut tree root is one of the most precise accounts of an existential crisis in literature. Read it alongside The Myth of Sisyphus, which is the philosophical companion piece written by Camus four years later in direct response.
Homage to Catalonia
Orwell went to Spain in December 1936 to fight for the Republican cause and spent six months on the Aragon front before being shot through the throat by a Fascist sniper. What he found in Spain was not the idealistic revolutionary coalition he expected but a brutal factional conflict in which Stalinist parties were systematically destroying their non-Stalinist allies — murdering, imprisoning, and slandering the anarchists and the POUM, the independent Marxist party in whose militia Orwell had fought. He came back to England and wrote Homage to Catalonia as an honest account of what he had seen. It was published in April 1938. The initial print run was 1,500 copies; fewer than 700 sold in Orwell's lifetime. It is now recognised as one of the essential books in the English political tradition.
Homage to Catalonia is the book that made Orwell the writer he became. The experience of seeing the left lie about itself — of watching the Stalinist press publish accounts of what had happened in Barcelona that bore no relation to what Orwell had actually witnessed — was the formative experience of his political and literary life. Everything in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four grows from the question that Homage to Catalonia raised: how do you resist the falsification of reality when the falsification is being carried out by the people whose cause you share? It sold 700 copies in his lifetime. Know that and read it.
Brighton Rock
Pinkie Brown is seventeen years old, a gang leader in the Brighton underworld, a Catholic who believes in Hell and damnation and commits murders with the cold efficiency of someone who has already decided he is damned. The novel follows his attempts to cover up a murder by marrying a young woman named Rose — the only witness — and the parallel investigation of Ida Arnold, a breezy, secular woman with no religious beliefs whatever, who pursues him on the straightforwardly human grounds that murder is wrong and should be punished. Greene later called Brighton Rock his first serious novel, distinguishing it from the "entertainments" he had published before. It was adapted into a film in 1947 with Richard Attenborough and again in 2010.
Brighton Rock is the novel that most clearly demonstrates what made Greene different from every other British crime novelist of his era: his understanding that the tension between the criminal and the law is less interesting than the tension between damnation and grace. Pinkie is one of the most disturbing characters in twentieth-century English fiction not despite his Catholicism but because of it — because he believes in Hell and commits murders anyway, because his theology is more serious than any of the novel's ostensibly respectable characters. Ida Arnold, who catches him without any supernatural framework whatsoever, is the novel's moral counter-argument. The final pages are among the most carefully constructed endings in English fiction.
The Yearling
Jody Baxter is a twelve-year-old boy living with his parents in the scrubland of northern Florida in the years after the Civil War. His father Penny is a gentle, resourceful man who loves the wilderness; his mother Ora is hard, practical, and grief-worn. When a doe is killed to save Penny's life from a rattlesnake, Jody adopts the orphaned fawn and names him Flag. The novel follows a year of this life — the hunting, the farming, the floods and frosts and the specific texture of the Florida backwoods — and the question that accumulates from early on and cannot be avoided: what happens when Flag grows too large to be kept. Rawlings had been living in Cross Creek, Florida for a decade when she wrote it. The Yearling spent twelve weeks at number one on the New York Times bestseller list and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1939.
The Yearling is the novel most frequently dismissed by the literary culture and most consistently loved by the people who actually read it. Rawlings was writing about a child's relationship to an animal and to a landscape with the same seriousness that Faulkner was writing about the South — the wilderness of northern Florida is as precisely realised as Yoknapatawpha County, and Jody's loss at the end of the novel is handled without a gram of sentimentality. The ending is one of the most honest accounts of what growing up actually requires — the specific act of surrender that childhood cannot hold off. Read it without condescension.
Address Unknown
A series of letters between two men: Max Eisenstein, a Jewish art dealer living in San Francisco, and Martin Schulse, his German business partner who has returned to Munich with his family in 1932. The letters cover two years — from November 1932 to March 1934 — and chart Martin's gradual absorption into the Nazi movement and his corresponding transformation from a cultured cosmopolitan into an instrument of the state that murders Max's sister. Taylor first published it as a short story in Story magazine in 1938, where it became an immediate sensation. It was published in book form in 1939, banned in Nazi Germany, and sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the United States and much of Europe. Taylor published it under the name Kressmann Taylor to disguise the fact that it was written by a woman.
Address Unknown is the shortest book on this list — it can be read in under an hour — and the most immediately devastating. The epistolary form, which restricts everything to letters and omits all narration, means the reader must infer the catastrophe from within the correspondence itself: from the way Martin's language changes, from what he begins to omit, from the growing gap between the man who wrote the first letter and the man writing the last ones. It was written in 1938, as the catastrophe was building in plain sight, and it demonstrates something that the newspapers of the time mostly could not: that the transformation of an ordinary, cultivated man into a collaborator is not a mystery but a process, and that the process is visible to anyone willing to look at it clearly.
Where to start
If you want the book that has never stopped being read since 1938
→ Read Rebecca. Du Maurier's gothic novel about a woman who cannot escape the shadow of her husband's first wife has not been out of print in eighty-five years. The opening sentence is the most famous in twentieth-century English fiction. The ending will stay with you.
If you want the book that made Orwell the writer he became
→ Read Homage to Catalonia. Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republic and came back having watched the left lie about itself in real time. Everything in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four grows from the question this book raised. It sold 700 copies in his lifetime.
If you want the most devastating short book of the year
→ Read Address Unknown. Taylor's epistolary novella — letters between a Jewish American and his German business partner across 1932 to 1934 — can be read in an hour and demonstrates how an ordinary man becomes a collaborator more clearly than almost any other text written during the period it describes.
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“Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.” — Thornton Wilder, Our Town
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