Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1935
1935 sits at an uneasy midpoint: the worst of the Depression has passed, but the recovery is fragile, and in Germany the Nuremberg Laws will be passed by the year’s end, stripping Jewish citizens of rights in a development the literary world has not yet fully reckoned with. American theatre, meanwhile, discovers a genuinely new political voice. A twenty-eight-year-old former actor named Clifford Odets writes four plays in a single year, igniting Broadway with a kind of working-class, Jewish-immigrant drama no one had staged with this urgency before. T.S. Eliot, already established as the most influential poet in English, turns to verse drama and the murder of an English archbishop eight centuries earlier. In Buenos Aires, a young librarian named Jorge Luis Borges publishes a slim, strange collection of biographical sketches of real and invented criminals that quietly anticipates everything he will become as a writer. And in North Carolina, Thomas Wolfe publishes the nine-hundred-page sequel to his celebrated debut, a sprawling, autobiographical hunger of a book that the country cannot stop reading even as critics argue about whether it actually works.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction & Drama · Updated June 2026
Of Time and the River
Eugene Gant, Wolfe’s fictionalised version of himself, leaves the American South for Harvard, then New York, where he teaches English at a university and eventually travels to Europe with his friend Francis Starwick. The novel is the sequel to Wolfe’s celebrated debut Look Homeward, Angel and continues its sprawling, lyrical, deeply autobiographical account of a young man’s hunger for experience, knowledge, and a world larger than the one he was born into. The manuscript was edited down from an enormous original draft by Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s, the same legendary editor who shaped Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Despite its nearly nine hundred pages, it was the third-best-selling work of fiction in America in 1935.
Of Time and the River is the novel that most fully demonstrates both Wolfe’s genius and his excess in the same breath. The prose, at its best, achieves a kind of incantatory lyricism that few American novelists have matched, building long rhythmic sentences out of accumulated sensory memory. At its most undisciplined, it can feel formless, overstuffed, in need of exactly the editorial hand that Perkins eventually had to apply. Read it as a record of a young writer’s appetite for the entire world, before that appetite was tempered into anything resembling restraint. Wolfe died only three years later, at thirty-seven.
Gaudy Night
Harriet Vane returns to her Oxford women’s college for a reunion and discovers a campaign of poison-pen letters and vandalism unfolding among the dons. She enlists the help of Lord Peter Wimsey, the aristocratic amateur detective who has been proposing marriage to her across several previous novels, and the mystery becomes the occasion for an extended, genuinely serious examination of women’s intellectual independence, the cost of an academic vocation, and whether a woman like Harriet can have both a mind of her own and a marriage that does not require her to sacrifice it. Sayers, herself one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford, drew directly on her own experience of the university.
Gaudy Night is widely considered Sayers’s finest novel and one of the few detective novels that uses its genre scaffolding to make a substantive argument rather than merely solve a puzzle. The mystery plot is genuinely well-constructed, but the novel’s real achievement is its unflinching treatment of the question of whether intellectual women can be loved as equals rather than as exceptions, written by a woman who had lived the question herself. The Wimsey-Vane relationship, which culminates here after years of development across earlier novels, is one of the more intellectually honest romantic pairings in detective fiction.
National Velvet
Velvet Brown is a fourteen-year-old butcher’s daughter in a small Sussex town who prays nightly for horses, and who wins a piebald gelding in a village raffle that turns out to be exactly the kind of jumper that could win England’s most famous steeplechase, the Grand National. With the help of her eccentric, loving family and a former jockey, Velvet trains the horse and, disguised as a male rider, enters the race herself. The novel is richly atmospheric of rural English life between the wars and was an immediate success, later adapted into the celebrated 1944 film starring a young Elizabeth Taylor.
National Velvet earns its place not as a minor children’s classic but as a genuinely well-constructed novel about determination and the specific, unglamorous work that turns a wish into an achievement. Bagnold’s prose has real wit and precision, and the Brown family, with its mixture of eccentricity and unconditional support, is one of the warmest depictions of family life in interwar British fiction. The novel’s quiet feminist undercurrent — Velvet’s gender becoming an obstacle she must work around rather than a fact the novel apologises for — still resonates.
Awake and Sing!
Three generations of the working-class Jewish Berger family are crowded into a Bronx apartment, dominated by the forceful matriarch Bessie, who prioritises respectability and survival above her family members’ individual desires. Her son Ralph wants something more than the cramped, compromised life available to him; her father Jacob, an idealistic old Marxist, dreams of a revolution he will not live to see. Odets wrote the play for the Group Theatre, and it premiered just weeks after his agitprop one-act Waiting for Lefty had made him an overnight Broadway sensation. By the end of 1935, with four major productions running, Odets was, in the words of his contemporaries, the toast of Broadway.
Awake and Sing! is the play that proved American theatre could address the Depression’s economic desperation with the same seriousness that Odets’s contemporaries were bringing to fiction. The Berger family’s claustrophobic apartment becomes a pressure chamber for every tension of Depression-era immigrant life: idealism against survival, generational obligation against personal ambition, dignity against poverty. Odets’s ear for the specific cadences of Jewish-American Bronx speech gave the play an authenticity that critics immediately recognised as new. Read it alongside Waiting for Lefty to see the full range of what Odets accomplished in a single, extraordinary year.
Murder in the Cathedral
The play dramatises the final days of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, before his murder by four knights acting on the implicit wishes of King Henry II in 1170. Eliot, already established as the most influential poet writing in English, structures the play partly on the model of Greek tragedy, with a chorus of the women of Canterbury voicing the dread that accumulates as Becket’s death approaches. The play was commissioned for the Canterbury Festival and was performed in the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral itself, close to the actual site of the historical murder.
Murder in the Cathedral is Eliot’s most successful attempt to bring the rigour and music of his poetry into a dramatic form intended for performance rather than private reading. The central temptation scene, in which four tempters appear to Becket offering him different forms of escape from his fate — including, most unsettlingly, the temptation of martyrdom itself as a form of spiritual pride — is one of the most theologically sophisticated passages in twentieth-century English drama. The play asks what it means to choose one’s death rightly rather than for the wrong reasons, a question Eliot, a recent and serious convert to Anglo-Catholicism, took with complete seriousness.
A Universal History of Infamy
A collection of short biographical sketches, most based loosely on real historical criminals — pirates, gangsters, impostors, slavers — rewritten by Borges in a compressed, stylised prose that treats their lives less as history than as a kind of myth. The pieces include accounts of a Mississippi riverboat pirate, a New York gang leader, and a Chinese pirate queen, alongside the famous closing story “Man on Pink Corner,” a knife-fight tale set in the Buenos Aires underworld that Borges considered his first genuinely original piece of fiction. The book appeared a full nine years before Ficciones and was largely overlooked outside Argentina until its much later English translation.
A Universal History of Infamy is the work in which Borges first discovered the method that would define his entire career: treating biography, history, and crime not as documentary record but as material for compression, embellishment, and myth-making. None of the magical realism or metaphysical labyrinths of his later work is fully present yet, but the essential Borges technique — the precise, almost encyclopaedic sentence that turns out to be concealing an invention — is already visible in embryonic form. Read it as the missing first chapter of Borges’s development, the moment before the writer of Ficciones and Labyrinths arrived at his mature voice.
Vein of Iron
Ada Fincastle is a Virginia woman whose life spans from a rural Scots-Irish Presbyterian community through the upheavals of the First World War and into the Depression, and the novel traces three generations of her family as they confront poverty, social change, and the gradual erosion of the rigid moral certainties they were raised with. Glasgow, already in her sixties and one of the most respected Southern novelists of her generation, builds the novel around the idea of an inherited “vein of iron” — a stubborn, unsentimental endurance passed down through the women of the family that allows them to survive what would break less resilient people. The novel was the second-best-selling work of fiction in the United States in 1935.
Vein of Iron is on this list as a quieter, more clear-eyed counterpoint to the more flamboyant Southern fiction the decade is remembered for. Glasgow was writing realist fiction about the South decades before it became fashionable to dismantle its myths, and her interest is specifically in the inner resources, often unacknowledged, that allow ordinary women to endure economic and social catastrophe without melodrama. Ada Fincastle’s particular stoicism — not cheerful, not bitter, simply enduring — is one of the more psychologically convincing portraits of resilience in the fiction of the period.
Where to start
If you want the detective novel with the most to say
→ Read Gaudy Night. Sayers uses the conventions of crime fiction to ask a genuinely serious question about whether an intellectual woman can be loved as an equal, written by one of the first women ever to graduate from Oxford.
If you want to see a major writer before he became himself
→ Read A Universal History of Infamy. Borges is not yet the metaphysical labyrinth-builder of Ficciones, but the essential technique — turning history into myth through a single precise, deceptive sentence — is already visible here, nine years early.
If you want the play that announced a major new American voice
→ Read Awake and Sing!. Clifford Odets wrote four plays in 1935 alone, and this is the one that proved Depression-era working-class life could carry the full weight of serious American drama.
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“The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.” — T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
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