Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1925
1925 has a reasonable claim to being the single greatest year in the history of the novel. On April 10th, Charles Scribner's Sons publishes a short, glittering tragedy about a self-invented millionaire and the woman he cannot have, written by a twenty-eight-year-old who is convinced he has failed. A month later, Virginia Woolf publishes the novel that compresses an entire life into a single London day. Within the same twelve months, Theodore Dreiser publishes the era's most exhaustive indictment of the American dream, John Dos Passos fractures the conventional novel into the overlapping voices of an entire city, Sinclair Lewis builds the first major American novel about scientific integrity, and a young war veteran named Ernest Hemingway publishes the spare, understated short stories that will redefine what American prose is allowed to sound like. The BBC's Jane Ciabattari called 1925 "the greatest year for books ever." It is hard, looking at what actually appeared on shelves that year, to argue with her.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction · Updated June 2026
The Great Gatsby
Nick Carraway moves to Long Island in the summer of 1922 and becomes drawn into the world of his mysterious neighbour, Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire who throws extravagant parties for guests he barely knows, all in the hope of winning back Daisy Buchanan, the woman he loved and lost five years earlier and who is now married to the brutal, wealthy Tom Buchanan. Fitzgerald wrote the novel while living in France, revising obsessively, and was convinced upon publication that it had failed: sales were modest, reviews were mixed, and he died in 1940 believing himself a forgotten writer. The U.S. Army distributed free copies to soldiers during the Second World War, and the novel's reputation rose dramatically in the postwar decades until it became, as one Fitzgerald scholar has put it, something close to a holy text of American identity.
The Great Gatsby earns its reputation as the most perfectly constructed short novel in American literature: every image, every piece of dialogue, every scene placement is doing more than one kind of work simultaneously. The green light at the end of Daisy's dock, the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg on the faded billboard, the ash heaps between Long Island and Manhattan — Fitzgerald builds a symbolic architecture so precise that the novel rewards rereading more than almost any other American book of its length. Its central subject, the gap between the American dream's promise and its actual cost, has not aged out of relevance in a single decade since 1925.
Mrs Dalloway
Clarissa Dalloway spends a single June day in 1923 preparing for a party she will host that evening, moving through London on errands while her thoughts drift continually backward into memory and sideways into the consciousness of those around her, including the shell-shocked war veteran Septimus Warren Smith, whose parallel storyline never directly intersects with hers but whose fate will reach into her party regardless. Woolf, who had spent her career experimenting with form, published the novel through her own Hogarth Press in an edition of two thousand copies. The single-day structure, borrowed and transformed from Joyce's Ulysses, allowed Woolf to compress an entire life's accumulated grief, desire, and disappointment into roughly twelve hours of London time.
Mrs Dalloway is widely considered Woolf's most accomplished novel because of how completely it integrates form and subject: the stream-of-consciousness technique is not a stylistic flourish but the only honest way to represent how thoroughly the past intrudes on the present, how thoroughly other people's inner lives run alongside our own without ever quite touching them. Clarissa's wartime grief and Septimus's wartime trauma are never directly connected in the plot, yet the novel insists, through its structure alone, that they are part of the same damaged postwar world. Few novels manage to be this technically radical and this emotionally devastating at the same time.
An American Tragedy
Clyde Griffiths is a poor young man whose ambition for wealth and status leads him into a relationship with a wealthy young woman, even as his factory-worker girlfriend Roberta becomes pregnant and threatens to expose him. The eight-hundred-page novel follows Clyde's plan to drown Roberta on a lake, the murder itself, and the lengthy criminal trial that follows, in prose so exhaustively, deliberately unadorned that critics have argued for a century about whether its plainness is a flaw or its entire point. Dreiser based the novel closely on a real 1906 murder case, and his approach treats Clyde's crime less as an individual moral failure than as the predictable product of an economic system that manufactures desperate ambition in people it has no intention of rewarding.
An American Tragedy is the most exhaustive indictment of the American dream produced by any major novelist of the 1920s, and its length and deliberate flatness are essential to its argument: Dreiser wants the reader to feel the grinding, accumulating weight of Clyde's circumstances rather than experience his crime as a single dramatic event. Where Fitzgerald compresses the failure of the American dream into a hundred and eighty elegant pages, Dreiser spreads the same failure across eight hundred relentless ones, and the contrast between the two approaches, both published the same year, says as much about American fiction's range as either book does alone.
Manhattan Transfer
Dozens of overlapping characters move through New York City from the Gilded Age into the Jazz Age — wealthy power brokers, struggling immigrants, actors, lawyers, journalists — their individual stories interrupted and interwoven through a fragmented, rapid-cutting narrative technique that Dos Passos borrowed partly from cinema. No single character carries the novel; the city itself, in its constant motion and impersonal churn, becomes the true protagonist. Jay McInerney later called the technique "an intriguing narrative experiment, and a fascinating portrait of the great American city in the early years of the century."
Manhattan Transfer is the most formally adventurous American novel of 1925, and its discontinuous, multi-character structure directly anticipates the kind of urban panorama fiction that John Dos Passos would later expand into his U.S.A. trilogy. The novel's refusal to settle on a single protagonist is the point: it argues that the city itself, with its rapid transit and brief promiscuous contact between strangers, has become a kind of character with its own impersonal momentum, indifferent to any individual life caught inside it. Read it as the most direct fictional ancestor of the urban ensemble novel that writers from Dos Passos's own generation through today have continued to attempt.
Arrowsmith
Martin Arrowsmith is a young doctor and researcher whose career moves through small-town general practice, a public health crisis involving a deadly outbreak, and eventually elite scientific research, as he repeatedly confronts colleagues and institutions more interested in money, fame, and professional politics than in the actual pursuit of truth. Lewis, drawing on consultation with the scientist Paul de Kruif, builds what has been called the first major American novel to take the practice of science seriously as a subject, satirising the ways institutional and financial pressure corrupt scientific integrity while holding up Arrowsmith's stubborn devotion to honest inquiry as the genuine alternative. The novel contributed to Lewis becoming the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1930.
Arrowsmith remains startlingly relevant nearly a century later because Lewis's central concern — the corruption of scientific truth-seeking by money, ego, and institutional convenience — has only become more urgent rather than less. Martin Arrowsmith is not a flawless hero; he is stubborn, often difficult, and prone to his own ethical failures, which makes his eventual commitment to honest research feel earned rather than sentimental. The novel's satire of professional medicine and research culture in the 1920s reads, with only minor substitutions, like a description of pressures scientists still navigate today.
In Our Time
A collection of short stories, several featuring the recurring character Nick Adams, moving between his Michigan childhood, his wartime experience, and his attempts afterward to find some kind of equilibrium in ordinary postwar life. Hemingway published an earlier, much shorter version in Paris in 1924 before this expanded American edition appeared from Boni & Liveright in 1925, his first major American publication. The prose is famously spare: short declarative sentences, minimal adjectives, almost no explicit emotional commentary, with violence and trauma typically reported rather than dramatised, leaving the reader to register the full weight of what is being withheld.
In Our Time is the book in which Hemingway's mature style first arrived essentially complete, and its influence on the subsequent century of American short fiction is difficult to overstate. The famous "iceberg theory" Hemingway later articulated — that the writer should show only the visible tip of an emotional or narrative situation while the actual weight remains submerged and implied — is already fully operational here. "Big Two-Hearted River," the collection's closing story, in which a war veteran goes fishing and says almost nothing about the war, is one of the most influential exercises in implication in twentieth-century American fiction.
The Painted Veil
Kitty Fane is a shallow, socially ambitious young Englishwoman who marries a dull bacteriologist, Walter, largely to avoid the embarrassment of being unmarried, and who then begins an affair with a married colonial official in Hong Kong. When Walter discovers the affair, he forces Kitty to accompany him into the interior of China, where he has volunteered to fight a deadly cholera epidemic, in what may be intended as a kind of punishment, or possibly an indirect form of suicide. Confronted with genuine suffering and death on a scale she has never witnessed, Kitty is gradually transformed from a vain, self-absorbed young woman into someone capable of compassion and self-knowledge.
The Painted Veil works as both a tightly constructed marital drama and a genuinely serious meditation on what it takes to shock a shallow person into moral seriousness. Maugham's prose is economical and precise in the way his admirers always praise, but the novel's real achievement is its refusal to sentimentalise Kitty's transformation: her growth is earned through direct exposure to suffering rather than through any sudden epiphany, and Maugham is careful not to let her redemption erase the genuine damage her earlier vanity and selfishness caused. It remains one of the most psychologically convincing accounts of a character's moral awakening in interwar British fiction.
Where to start
If you want the single best novel of the year, and possibly the century
→ Read The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald considered it a failure when it was published. It is now considered close to a holy text of American identity. Every sentence in it is doing more than one job. You can find my full thoughts on it on the bookshelf page for The Great Gatsby.
If you want the novel that compresses an entire life into a single day
→ Read Mrs Dalloway. Woolf's stream-of-consciousness technique is not a stylistic trick here; it is the only honest way to show how thoroughly memory and other people's hidden grief run alongside an ordinary day.
If you want to see the same American dream collapse twice, differently
→ Read An American Tragedy alongside The Great Gatsby. Dreiser spreads the same failure of ambition that Fitzgerald compresses into a hundred and eighty pages across eight hundred relentless ones. Read both and notice what each approach makes visible that the other cannot.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1925
More from the shelf
From the bookshelf
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
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.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations