Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1936
1936 is the year the Spanish Civil War begins, the year Hitler hosts the Berlin Olympics while quietly continuing to rearm, the year the Great Depression has entered its seventh year with no clear end in sight. It is also, strangely, one of the great years for the American historical imagination — two enormous, completely opposed accounts of the Civil War South appear within months of each other, one a romance that becomes the best-selling novel in American publishing history, the other a fragmented, devastating tragedy that refuses every comfort the first one offers. A Georgia journalist named Margaret Mitchell, recovering from an ankle injury, finishes the only novel she will ever publish and sells more copies of it than anyone in American history had sold of any novel before. In Oxford, Mississippi, William Faulkner publishes the book he and many of his readers will come to consider his masterpiece — the same historical material as Mitchell’s, told by unreliable narrators decades later, refusing any of the romance. Meanwhile, in England, a Cambridge economist publishes a book that will reorganise how governments understand recessions, unemployment, and their own power to intervene.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Updated June 2026
Gone with the Wind
Scarlett O’Hara is the spoiled, manipulative, and fiercely resourceful daughter of a wealthy Georgia plantation owner, and the novel follows her from the antebellum South through the Civil War and into Reconstruction, as the world that produced her is destroyed by the war and its aftermath. Mitchell began writing it in 1926 while recovering from injuries, working on a Remington typewriter her husband had given her, and worked on the manuscript in secret for nearly a decade before a Macmillan editor discovered it in 1935. Published on June 30, 1936, it became the best-selling American novel in publishing history, sold over a million copies in its first six months during the depths of the Depression, and won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. More than thirty million copies have been printed worldwide.
Gone with the Wind is on this list as a complicated but unavoidable cultural fact rather than as an unqualified recommendation. Its narrative power is real — Mitchell’s command of pace and character, particularly in the novel’s first half, explains why it has remained continuously in print for ninety years. But its romanticised, whitewashed depiction of slavery and the antebellum South has been criticised since its publication, and that criticism is correct and important: the novel actively obscures the violence its setting depended on. Read it as Faulkner’s contemporaries did — alongside Absalom, Absalom!, published the same year, which addresses exactly the same history and refuses every comfort that Mitchell’s novel offers.
Absalom, Absalom!
Thomas Sutpen is a poor white man from West Virginia who arrives in Mississippi determined to build a plantation dynasty through sheer will, and the novel reconstructs his rise and catastrophic fall through multiple unreliable narrators decades after his death — primarily Quentin Compson, retelling the story to his Harvard roommate Shreve, who continually adds his own speculation to fill the gaps. The title refers to the biblical story of King David’s grief over his rebellious son. Sutpen’s fatal refusal to acknowledge his part-Black son sets the entire tragedy in motion. The novel contains, according to the 1983 Guinness Book of World Records, the longest sentence in English-language literature at 1,288 words.
Absalom, Absalom! is the novel that most thoroughly demonstrates what Faulkner meant when he said the past is never dead, it is not even past. The fractured narration is not a stylistic flourish; it is the novel’s argument: that the truth of Southern history can never be retrieved whole, only assembled and re-assembled, generation after generation, by people who were not there and who carry their own desires into the reconstruction. Faulkner explicitly refuses the romance that Gone with the Wind, published the same year, offers about the same historical material. Sutpen’s central sin — his treatment of slavery and his own mixed-race son as instruments rather than people — is presented as the curse from which the entire South cannot escape. This is difficult, demanding fiction. It rewards the difficulty completely.
It Can’t Happen Here
Buzz Windrip is a folksy, populist American senator who wins the presidency on a platform of economic nationalism, traditional values, and contempt for the press and the political establishment — and who, once in office, dismantles American democracy with the willing cooperation of citizens convinced it could never happen to them. The novel follows Doremus Jessup, a small-town Vermont newspaper editor, as he watches the country he believed in disappear, and as he is gradually drawn into resistance. Lewis, who had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, wrote the novel as an explicit warning about the susceptibility of American democracy to the same authoritarian movements then consolidating power in Italy and Germany.
It Can’t Happen Here is the most explicitly political novel on this list, and it has had one of the strangest afterlives of any American book: largely forgotten for decades, then repeatedly rediscovered and read as freshly relevant during successive moments of democratic anxiety. Lewis’s central insight — that authoritarianism in America would not announce itself with foreign symbols but would arrive wrapped in folksy populism, nostalgia, and the claim to be defending ordinary people against elites — remains the novel’s most unsettling and most durable observation. It is not Lewis’s best-written novel; the prose is functional rather than exceptional. But its argument has proven more durable than its style.
Eyeless in Gaza
Anthony Beavis is an English intellectual whose life is traced from the 1890s to 1935 through a fractured, non-chronological structure that moves between decades according to association rather than sequence. The novel follows Beavis’s drift from detached cynicism toward pacifism and a kind of spiritual seriousness, against a backdrop that includes his complicated relationships, the death of a friend, and the broader currents of interwar British intellectual life. The title comes from Milton’s Samson Agonistes, referencing Samson’s captivity and blindness among the Philistines. Unlike the modernist stream of consciousness of Woolf or Joyce, Huxley grounds his fragmented narration in factual memory rather than unreliable interior monologue.
Eyeless in Gaza is frequently called Huxley’s best and most purely literary novel, distinct from the satirical, idea-driven fiction (including Brave New World, published four years earlier) for which he is more widely known. The novel’s structure — jumping between widely separated years without chronological signposting — forces the reader to assemble Anthony’s life the way memory actually works, by association and recurrence rather than by sequence. It is a more demanding and more genuinely personal book than Huxley’s satires, and it deserves more attention from readers who know him only as the author of Brave New World.
Nightwood
Robin Vote moves between several lovers in 1920s Paris and Berlin — her husband Felix, an American expatriate named Nora Flood, and the Baroness Jenny Petherbridge — in a novel that traces obsessive love, dislocation, and queer desire through a prose so dense and aphoristic that it is closer to poetry than to conventional narrative fiction. Much of the novel’s most extraordinary writing belongs to Dr Matthew O’Connor, a transvestite physician whose extended monologues constitute some of the most quoted passages in twentieth-century fiction. Barnes drew heavily on her own relationship with the artist Thelma Wood. T.S. Eliot, who edited the manuscript and championed its publication at Faber and Faber, wrote the introduction.
Nightwood is the most formally daring book on this list, and the one whose reputation has grown most steadily among readers interested in queer modernism and experimental prose. Barnes’s sentences operate at a level of compression and musicality that rewards rereading more than almost any other novel from the period; nearly every paragraph contains an aphorism that could stand alone. Its open depiction of lesbian desire was genuinely radical for 1936, and its refusal to resolve into a conventional moral or narrative shape is part of its point. This is not an easy read, but it is one of the most rewarding difficult books of the decade.
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Keynes’s central work argues against the prevailing classical economic assumption that markets naturally self-correct toward full employment, proposing instead that demand can remain persistently insufficient and that government spending — even deficit spending — can be necessary to restore employment and economic activity during a downturn. Written in direct response to the Great Depression, the book provided the theoretical foundation for the kind of government intervention that the New Deal and postwar Western economic policy would subsequently rely on. It is dense, technical, and was written for professional economists rather than a general audience, but its influence over twentieth-century government policy is difficult to overstate.
The General Theory is on this list as the nonfiction work whose influence over the actual conditions of people’s lives in the following decades exceeded that of any novel published in 1936. Keynes’s argument that governments are not merely passive observers of economic cycles but can and should actively intervene to manage demand and employment became the operating assumption of most Western governments for the following forty years, and remains a central reference point in every economic policy debate since. It is not an easy read for a non-economist, but its consequences touched virtually everyone who lived through the twentieth century’s second half.
Cards on the Table
Mr Shaitana, a flamboyant and faintly sinister party host, gathers eight guests for dinner — four detectives, including Hercule Poirot, and four people Shaitana privately believes have each committed an undetected murder. He is found stabbed to death in his own armchair during a game of bridge, while the four detectives were playing cards in the next room and the four suspects were also playing cards, watched by no one but each other. The solution depends entirely on what the bridge scorecards reveal about each player’s behaviour and character during the hours leading up to the murder. Christie considered it one of her favourites among her own books, citing the originality of its premise.
Cards on the Table belongs on this list as a demonstration of detective fiction’s capacity for genuine formal ingenuity rather than mere plot mechanics. The novel’s premise — that a card game can reveal character as precisely as any direct interrogation, and that murder method itself is a signature as distinctive as handwriting — is one of Christie’s most purely intellectual conceits. It rewards readers who enjoy puzzle construction for its own sake, and it is frequently cited by mystery writers themselves as one of the most cleverly engineered books in the genre’s history.
Where to start
If you want the novel that should be read against Gone with the Wind
→ Read Absalom, Absalom!. Faulkner takes on exactly the same historical material the same year and refuses every comfort. Read both, in either order, and notice what each one is willing and unwilling to say.
If you want the most formally daring book of the year
→ Read Nightwood. Djuna Barnes’s prose operates at a level of compression that rewards rereading more than almost anything else from the decade. Dr O’Connor’s monologues alone are worth the entire book.
If you want the book whose consequences reached furthest beyond literature
→ Read at least the introduction to The General Theory. Keynes’s argument for active government intervention in economic downturns shaped the policy assumptions of most Western governments for the rest of the century.
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“The past is never dead. It's not even past.” — William Faulkner
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