Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1934
1934 is a year of extremes, both literary and otherwise. James Joyce’s Ulysses, after a landmark American obscenity ruling, is finally published legally in the country that had banned it for over a decade. Henry Miller publishes Tropic of Cancer in Paris, a book so explicit by the standards of its time that it will remain banned in the United States for the next twenty-seven years. F. Scott Fitzgerald, after nine years of work and personal catastrophe, finally completes his long-delayed fourth novel, a story of psychological collapse that mirrors his own marriage almost too closely to read comfortably. A young writer named Henry Roth publishes a stunning debut about a Jewish immigrant child on Manhattan’s Lower East Side; it sells almost nothing, falls out of print, and will not be properly recognised for another thirty years. Meanwhile, on a train trapped in a Yugoslav snowdrift, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot solves what would become her most famous case, and in London, Robert Graves gives voice to a Roman emperor who survived by being underestimated.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction · Updated June 2026
Tender Is the Night
Dick Diver is a brilliant young American psychiatrist whose marriage to Nicole, a wealthy patient he treats and then marries, gradually unravels across the French Riviera of the late 1920s as her growing strength and independence expose the ways his own identity had depended on being needed by her. The young actress Rosemary Hoyt becomes infatuated with the glamorous couple early in the novel, providing an outsider’s view of a marriage that is already, invisibly, in the process of dissolving. Fitzgerald worked on the novel for nine years, through his wife Zelda’s psychiatric hospitalisations and his own deepening alcoholism, and the parallels between the Divers’ collapse and his own marriage are difficult to read as coincidental. It was serialised in Scribner’s Magazine from January 1934 before book publication that April.
Tender Is the Night is the most directly autobiographical and the most painful of Fitzgerald’s novels, written by a man whose own life was disintegrating in almost exactly the way Dick Diver’s does on the page. Fitzgerald structures the novel to delay the revelation of how Dick and Nicole’s marriage actually began, and the eventual reveal recontextualises everything that came before it. Critics at the time found the novel’s structure confusing, and Fitzgerald himself revised it later in life into a more straightforwardly chronological version; most readers today still prefer the original, fractured order. Read it as the most honest account in American fiction of what it costs to build an identity entirely around being someone else’s caretaker.
Tropic of Cancer
A loosely autobiographical account of Miller’s years as a penniless American expatriate writer in Paris in the early 1930s, narrated in a first person voice that moves between vivid sensory description, philosophical digression, and frank, often explicit sexual content. The book has almost no conventional plot; it is a sustained voice rather than a story, built from fragments of poverty, hunger, friendship, and sexual encounter, written with a deliberate, joyful disregard for the literary proprieties of its time. Published in Paris in 1934 by the Obelisk Press, which specialised in works too explicit for British and American publishers, it was immediately banned as obscene in the United States and remained illegal to import or sell there for twenty-seven years, until a 1964 Supreme Court ruling finally permitted its publication.
Tropic of Cancer matters less for its content, by today’s standards relatively mild, than for the specific freedom of voice it fought to establish: a narrator entirely unembarrassed by his own poverty, appetite, and desire, refusing the moralising frame that earlier confessional writing about sex and degradation had typically required. Norman Mailer later called it one of the ten or twenty great novels of the century. The book’s twenty-seven-year ban in the United States, and the landmark obscenity case that finally ended it, makes Tropic of Cancer one of the central texts in the history of American literary censorship and its slow, contested dismantling.
I, Claudius
Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, who lived from 10 BC to 54 AD and eventually became Roman emperor, narrates his own life in the form of a secret autobiography, written, he claims, for readers far in the future who will be able to read it honestly. Dismissed by his family as a weak, stammering, limping idiot, Claudius survives the murderous intrigues, poisonings, and political purges of the Julio-Claudian imperial court precisely because no one considers him a threat worth eliminating. Graves drew on Tacitus, Suetonius, and other classical historians to construct a richly detailed and psychologically convincing account of imperial Rome’s worst excesses, narrated by the one man inside the palace clear-eyed enough to see them for what they were.
I, Claudius is the historical novel that most successfully solves the genre’s central problem: how to make distant historical material feel immediate and psychologically alive rather than merely informative. Graves’s decision to narrate from inside Claudius’s perspective — underestimated, watchful, surviving by appearing harmless — gives the novel both genuine suspense and a sustained, quietly devastating irony, since the reader always knows more about Claudius’s actual intelligence than the characters around him do. It remains one of the finest accounts ever written of survival through calculated self-effacement in a court built on violence.
The Postman Always Rings Twice
Frank Chambers is a young drifter who stops at a roadside California diner for a meal and ends up working there, drawn by Cora, the diner owner’s much younger wife, into an affair that quickly curdles into a plan to murder her husband Nick. The novel, narrated entirely in Frank’s terse first person, follows the murder, its aftermath, and the legal manoeuvring of two opposing lawyers who treat the entire case as a kind of game. Cain was forty-two and a relatively obscure journalist when the novel, originally titled Bar-B-Que, became one of the publishing sensations of the decade. It was banned in Boston for its mixture of sex and violence and is widely credited as the foundational text of American noir fiction.
The Postman Always Rings Twice compresses an entire tragedy into roughly a hundred pages of spare, propulsive first-person prose, and its influence on twentieth-century crime fiction is difficult to overstate. Albert Camus identified the novel explicitly as the model for The Stranger, and the comparison is apt: both novels use a flat, affectless narrating voice to describe acts of violence the narrator seems barely able to account for himself. Cain’s true subject is not the murder but the specific psychological trap that closes around Frank and Cora once they have committed it, a trap that tightens regardless of whether the law ever catches up with them.
Murder on the Orient Express
A wealthy American businessman is found stabbed to death in his locked compartment aboard the Orient Express, which has been stopped in its tracks by a heavy snowdrift in the mountains of what is now Croatia. Hercule Poirot, travelling on the same train, is drawn into the investigation, and the solution he eventually uncovers implicates a far larger and more carefully organised group of suspects than the conventional single-culprit format of detective fiction had typically allowed. Christie drew the plot partly from the real, unresolved kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son, and partly from her own experiences travelling on the actual Orient Express, including a journey delayed for days by a real Turkish snowstorm in 1929.
Murder on the Orient Express is widely regarded as one of Christie’s most ingenious constructions, precisely because its solution breaks the genre’s usual rule that the murderer must be a single individual hiding among the innocent. The closed setting of the snowbound train is used with complete formal control: every detail of the compartments, corridors, and timing that Christie carefully researched becomes load-bearing evidence by the novel’s end. The moral question the solution ultimately raises — whether a collective act of justice outside the law can ever be a legitimate substitute for it — gives the novel a genuine ethical weight beneath its puzzle-box mechanics.
Mary Poppins
Mary Poppins arrives, blown in on the East Wind, to take up a position as nanny to the Banks children of Cherry Tree Lane, and proceeds to introduce them to a series of magical, only partly explained adventures while remaining herself brisk, vain, strict, and almost entirely unsentimental about her own powers. The literary Mary Poppins is considerably sharper and stranger than the warm, singing figure most readers know from the later film adaptation: she is genuinely vain, prone to admiring herself in mirrors, and the novel’s tone is closer to dry social satire of middle-class English parenting than to uncomplicated whimsy. Travers, who was reportedly displeased that the book was marketed primarily as a children’s title, was equally unhappy decades later with how the Disney film reshaped her creation.
Mary Poppins rewards adult readers who only know the character through the film, because the original is a considerably more interesting and more unsettling creation: a magical figure who refuses to explain herself, who is frequently impatient and even unkind to the children in her care, and whose magic is presented with a flat, matter-of-fact tone that makes it stranger rather than more reassuring. Travers was writing a sharp comedy of manners about an English middle-class household as much as a fantasy for children, and that satirical undertone is largely what later adaptations stripped away.
Call It Sleep
David Schearl is a young boy growing up in the Jewish immigrant slum of New York’s Lower East Side in the early years of the twentieth century, navigating a violent, emotionally unavailable father, a loving but constrained mother, and a world of streets, tenements, and languages that he is only beginning to understand. Roth, working in a modernist tradition descended from Joyce, renders David’s perception of his world with an unusual intensity and precision, mixing Yiddish-inflected dialogue with passages of intense lyrical interiority. Published in December 1934 to mostly favourable reviews, the novel sold poorly during the Depression, fell out of print, and was largely forgotten until 1964, when an ecstatic front-page review by Irving Howe in The New York Times Book Review catapulted it back onto the bestseller list, where it has remained continuously available ever since, selling more than a million copies.
Call It Sleep is one of the great rediscovery stories in American literature, and the thirty-year gap between its original publication and its eventual recognition says as much about the literary establishment of 1934 as it does about the novel itself. Roth’s achievement was to write the interior life of a small child with the same modernist seriousness that Joyce had brought to adult consciousness, never condescending to David’s perspective or simplifying his fear and confusion for the reader’s comfort. The novel is now considered one of the essential texts of American immigrant literature, and Roth himself, after this stunning debut, did not publish another novel for sixty years.
Where to start
If you want the most painful and most personal Fitzgerald
→ Read Tender Is the Night. Nine years of work and his own marriage’s collapse went into this novel about a psychiatrist whose identity unravels alongside his wife’s recovery. The most autobiographical of his major works.
If you want the rediscovery story that says the most about literary neglect
→ Read Call It Sleep. Henry Roth’s stunning debut sold almost nothing in 1934 and was forgotten for thirty years before a single review brought it back. It is now considered essential. Read it and ask why it took so long.
If you want the puzzle box that breaks its own genre’s rules
→ Read Murder on the Orient Express. Christie’s most famous Poirot mystery solves the locked-room problem by breaking the assumption that only one person can be guilty. The ethical question underneath the puzzle is genuinely serious.
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“Let me tell you something, young fellow.” — Robert Graves, I, Claudius
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