Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1927
1927 is the year high modernism reaches one of its fullest expressions and the year American literature turns its attention toward the con artists running its institutions. Virginia Woolf publishes the novel she will be most remembered for among readers who want her at her most technically extraordinary, a meditation on time, memory, and family in which almost nothing happens and everything happens. Sinclair Lewis publishes his most controversial novel, an attack on religious hypocrisy so direct that it gets him hate mail and at least one threat of physical violence. In Germany, Hermann Hesse publishes a strange, despairing novel about a man who believes himself to be half human and half wolf, a book that will be rediscovered by an entirely new generation of readers four decades later. And Willa Cather, in her sixth decade, publishes a quiet, unhurried novel about two French missionary priests in the New Mexico territory that many of her admirers consider her finest achievement.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction & Poetry · Updated June 2026
To the Lighthouse
The Ramsay family and their houseguests spend a summer at a holiday home on the Isle of Skye, where Mr. Ramsay’s repeated postponement of a promised boat trip to a nearby lighthouse becomes the small, almost trivial axis around which an entire family’s tensions, allegiances, and quiet disappointments turn. The novel is structured in three sections spanning roughly a decade, and Woolf includes almost no direct action or conventional dialogue; the book is built almost entirely from thought, perception, and the shifting interior viewpoints of its characters, a technique now cited as a key example of multiple focalisation in modernist fiction. Hogarth Press, run by Woolf and her husband Leonard, printed three thousand copies for the first British edition. The book’s success allowed Woolf to buy her first car and led directly to her winning the Prix Femina the following year.
To the Lighthouse is widely considered Woolf’s most technically accomplished novel, the one in which her interest in interior consciousness over plot reaches its most fully resolved form. The middle section, Time Passes, compresses a decade and a death into a handful of pages narrated almost entirely from the perspective of the empty house itself, a formal risk that few novelists before or since have attempted with this much control. The novel asks what actually endures, a marriage, a memory, a single unfulfilled promise, against the much larger backdrop of time’s indifferent passage. This is Woolf at the absolute height of her powers.
Steppenwolf
Harry Haller is a middle-aged intellectual who believes himself to be split between a civilised human self and a savage, predatory wolf self, alienated from bourgeois society and from his own capacity for ordinary human connection, until a chance encounter with a young woman named Hermine draws him into a world of dance halls, drugs, and a mysterious Magic Theatre that forces him to confront the full, fragmented multiplicity of his own identity. Hesse drew on his own severe personal crisis, including a failed marriage and a period of genuine suicidal despair, to construct the novel, and it remains one of the most direct literary renderings of a psyche at war with itself. The book was largely overlooked outside German-speaking readers until it was rediscovered by the American counterculture in the 1960s, becoming a touchstone text for an entirely new generation.
Steppenwolf earns its place here as one of the most psychologically unflinching novels of the interwar period, a portrait of alienation and self-division that refuses to offer Harry, or the reader, any easy resolution. Hesse’s central insight, that a human self is not a single fixed thing but a multiplicity of warring impulses, anticipated psychological and philosophical ideas that would not become mainstream for decades. The novel’s strange, theatrical final sections, in which Harry confronts literalised visions of his own fragmented psyche, remain genuinely unsettling. Read it as the rawest and most personally exposed of Hesse’s major novels.
Elmer Gantry
Elmer Gantry is a charismatic, fundamentally hollow man who drifts into the ministry not out of faith but out of ambition and opportunism, rising through a series of Protestant denominations and revivalist movements while engaging in the hypocrisy, corruption, and personal exploitation that the novel suggests is endemic to American organised religion of the period. Lewis researched the novel extensively, attending actual revival meetings and consulting with practising clergy, and the specificity of his portrait of religious institutions provoked immediate fury from religious leaders and conservative commentators when it was published. Lewis received hate mail and at least one documented threat against his life. The novel was banned in several American cities and one Canadian city went so far as to ban Lewis from ever visiting.
Elmer Gantry is the most direct and most controversial of Sinclair Lewis’s satirical attacks on American institutions, and its argument, that charisma and conviction are not the same thing, and that institutions built on emotional persuasion are uniquely vulnerable to being captured by people who have mastered the persuasion without holding the conviction, has not become less relevant in the century since. Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930, the first American to receive it, and Elmer Gantry remains one of the works most frequently cited in that recognition. Read it as the angriest and most fearless book on this list.
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Father Jean Marie Latour and his close friend Father Joseph Vaillant travel from France to the newly acquired New Mexico Territory in the mid-nineteenth century to establish a Catholic diocese among a population of Indigenous peoples, Hispanic settlers, and a scattering of American newcomers whose existing religious practices and loyalties do not always align with the institutional Church they represent. The novel moves episodically across nearly four decades, following Latour’s slow, patient work of building both physical churches and genuine spiritual relationships across cultures he must learn to understand rather than simply convert. Cather drew on extensive research into the actual French missionary bishops who served the territory, and the novel’s unhurried, episodic structure was a deliberate departure from conventional dramatic plotting.
Death Comes for the Archbishop is, by Cather’s own account and by the judgment of many of her most serious readers, her finest achievement, a novel that finds genuine drama not in conflict but in patience, cultural humility, and the slow accumulation of a life’s quiet work. Latour’s relationship to the desert landscape of New Mexico is rendered with the same precision and respect Cather brought to the prairie landscapes of her earlier novels, and the book’s refusal of conventional narrative urgency is entirely deliberate: this is a novel about what it means to build something that will outlast you. One of the most serene and most quietly profound American novels of the decade.
Men Without Women
Fourteen short stories, including “Hills Like White Elephants,” in which a couple’s entire unspoken crisis over an unwanted pregnancy is conducted through a conversation about drinks at a train station, and “The Killers,” in which two hired gunmen arrive in a small town to wait for a man who already knows he cannot escape his fate and has simply stopped trying to. The collection moves between bullfighting, boxing, infidelity, divorce, and death, almost always approaching its actual subject obliquely, through dialogue and action rather than direct statement. Hemingway’s second short story collection consolidated the spare, understated style he had developed in The Sun Also Rises and In Our Time into some of the most technically precise short fiction published in English that decade.
Men Without Women contains some of the most influential short stories in the American canon, and “Hills Like White Elephants” in particular is still taught as the definitive example of how dialogue alone can carry an entire unspoken emotional crisis without ever naming it directly. Hemingway’s method here, withholding almost all explicit information and trusting the reader to feel the weight of what characters are deliberately not saying, became one of the most widely imitated techniques in twentieth-century short fiction. Read “Hills Like White Elephants” and “The Killers” first; they remain the two most perfectly executed examples of his method at short length.
The Tower
A collection that marks a decisive shift in Yeats’s poetry away from the romanticism and Celtic mysticism of his earlier career and toward a sparer, more austere, more directly confrontational engagement with aging, mortality, and political upheaval in postwar Ireland. The collection’s centerpiece poems, including “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Leda and the Swan,” grapple directly with the indignities of an aging body and an aging civilisation while reaching for some form of transcendence beyond both. Yeats wrote much of the collection while living in the actual Norman tower at Thoor Ballylee in County Galway that gives the book its title, a structure he had purchased and restored as both home and recurring symbol across his later poetry.
The Tower is widely regarded as the collection in which Yeats’s late style, the spare, unflinching, formally exacting voice that secured his reputation as one of the essential poets of the twentieth century, arrives fully formed. The collection’s preoccupation with what an aging mind and an aging body can still reach for, when youth and physical vigour are no longer available, gives it an emotional urgency that distinguishes it sharply from his earlier, more decorative work. Yeats received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923, but it is The Tower, completed in the years immediately following, that many critics consider his true masterwork.
God’s Trombones
Seven poems, including “The Creation” and “Go Down, Death,” written in the formal cadences and structure of the traditional Black American folk sermon, drawing directly on the rhythms and rhetorical techniques Johnson had heard from preachers throughout his life while elevating them into deliberately literary verse. Johnson, already an accomplished novelist, lawyer, and diplomat, sought to preserve and dignify a specifically Black homiletic tradition that he believed was at risk of being lost or dismissed as merely folkloric rather than recognised as a genuine and sophisticated rhetorical art form in its own right. The collection was illustrated by Aaron Douglas, one of the central visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance.
God’s Trombones is one of the most successful attempts in American letters to translate an oral tradition into literary form without flattening or simplifying it, and Johnson’s deep, lived familiarity with the actual cadences of Black preaching gives the poems an authority that more distanced literary borrowings of similar material typically lack. “The Creation” remains one of the most frequently anthologised and performed poems to come out of the Harlem Renaissance, and the collection as a whole stands as a direct, deliberate act of cultural preservation by a writer who understood exactly what was at stake in treating vernacular religious oratory as serious art.
Where to start
If you want Woolf at the absolute height of her technical powers
→ Read To the Lighthouse. The middle section alone, compressing a decade and a death into a handful of pages, is one of the boldest formal risks in modernist fiction.
If you want the angriest and most fearless book of the year
→ Read Elmer Gantry. Sinclair Lewis’s attack on religious hypocrisy got him hate mail and a death threat, and its central argument about charisma versus conviction has not aged a day.
If you want Hemingway’s method at its most perfectly compressed
→ Read “Hills Like White Elephants” from Men Without Women. An entire unspoken crisis carried through a single conversation about drinks. Nothing is stated directly and everything is understood.
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“What is the meaning of life, after all?” — Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
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