Best Books of 1933

Man’s Fate

André Malraux · 1933 (La Condition Humaine)

La Condition Humaine — published in English as Man’s Fate — won the Prix Goncourt in December 1933 and is widely considered the greatest French novel of the century’s first half. It is set during the failed Communist uprising in Shanghai in April 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek turned against his Communist allies and ordered the massacre of thousands of workers in the streets. Malraux follows three men through the days before and after the uprising: Kyo, a half-French, half-Japanese Communist organiser; Ch’en, a young revolutionary who has already committed his first political murder when the novel opens; and Katow, a Russian veteran who has been through this kind of failure before and knows exactly what it costs. All three are facing execution by the end of the novel. The title comes from Pascal: all men are condemned to death, and the human condition is precisely this condemnation.

Man’s Fate asks the question that all serious political fiction asks: when a cause fails, what was it for? Malraux’s answer is not cynical — the men in this novel are not disillusioned by their defeat, they are deepened by it — but it is honest about the relationship between belief, action, and consequence. Ch’en’s arc in particular is one of literature’s most precise examinations of political violence as a psychological state: the escalating need to be present at the moment of killing, the way ideology becomes inseparable from a particular mode of feeling alive. For anyone interested in motivation, ideology, and what people do when their world ends, this novel is essential.

Testament of Youth

Vera Brittain · 1933

Testament of Youth was published in August 1933 and became an immediate bestseller. It is Vera Brittain’s account of the First World War: the years before it, in which she won a scholarship to Oxford; the war itself, during which she gave up her place to serve as a nurse in London, Malta, and France; and the aftermath, in which she tried to make a life and a politics from what remained. During the war she lost her brother Edward, her fiancé Roland Leighton, and her two closest male friends. The memoir is both a personal document and a historical argument: a precise account of what it meant to be a young woman of her generation — educated, ambitious, committed to the world — who watched everything she loved destroyed, and then had to decide what to do next. It became the defining female account of the First World War.

What makes Testament of Youth essential rather than simply important is Brittain’s refusal to make her suffering into either a political argument alone or a private tragedy alone, and leave it there. She does both: she is honestly devastated and honestly political, and she does not pretend the two are separable. Her pacifism after the war is not naive — it emerges from a precise understanding of what war actually does to specific bodies and specific minds — and her account of that understanding is one of the most rigorous memoirs of the twentieth century. For anyone interested in grief, resilience, and how women have made meaning from catastrophe, this belongs on the shelf.

→ More essential memoirs on my best memoirs and biographies list

Down and Out in Paris and London

George Orwell · 1933

Down and Out in Paris and London was George Orwell’s first published book, appearing in January 1933. It is a documentary account of his time living in poverty: first in Paris, where he worked as a plongeur — a dishwasher and general kitchen hand — in the great hotel restaurants, and then in London, tramping between hostels and spike houses with the men who had no permanent address. Orwell was not driven to poverty by circumstance. He chose to go there, deliberately, from a conviction that he had spent his life inside systems whose underside he did not properly understand, and that this ignorance was a moral problem. The book is therefore as much an argument about class, dignity, and the social organisation of poverty as it is a personal narrative. It established his method: spare, honest, first-person, morally serious, free of sentimentality.

Orwell’s first book already contains everything that made him essential: the insistence on seeing clearly, the refusal to aestheticise suffering, the precision about how systems work and who they actually work for. The Paris section — in which he traces the invisible hierarchy of a great hotel, following food from the kitchen to the table and charting who does what, who is blamed for what, and what the customer never sees — is one of the most efficient analyses of class ever produced in prose narrative. For anyone interested in how social structures shape individual behaviour, and what it costs to understand them from the inside, this is the place to start with Orwell.

→ More nonfiction written from the inside: my best memoirs list

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Gertrude Stein · 1933

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was published in September 1933 and made Gertrude Stein famous in the United States for the first time, despite the fact that she had been central to the Paris avant-garde for thirty years. The book is not written by Alice B. Toklas. It is Stein’s memoir of her life in Paris from the early 1900s onward, written as if by her partner of nearly four decades — a conceit that gave Stein the freedom to write about herself from the outside, with a clarity she could not have achieved writing as herself. The portrait it contains of the Paris avant-garde is the definitive insider account: Picasso (whom Stein championed before anyone else), Matisse, Braque, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Apollinaire, Sherwood Anderson — Stein knew all of them, had strong opinions about all of them, and shares those opinions here without apology.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is one of the great literary acts of self-invention: a woman who had spent decades at the centre of modernism but was unknown to the wider public, writing herself into view by pretending to be someone else writing about her. The formal trick is also a way of seeing clearly — Stein’s portrait of herself is neither modest nor dishonest, and the warmth of the friendship between the two women comes through on every page. For anyone interested in creativity, bohemian life, and what it means to build an entire existence around making and supporting art, this is the most enjoyable entry into that world.

Lost Horizon

James Hilton · 1933

Lost Horizon was published in September 1933 and introduced the word Shangri-La into the English language — a word that has remained in active use, in multiple languages, for over ninety years. Four Westerners are kidnapped and flown by an unknown pilot to a hidden lamasery in the Tibetan Himalayas — Shangri-La — where the inhabitants age at a fraction of normal speed under the leadership of a two-hundred-year-old High Lama who has been waiting for someone to pass the community’s leadership to. The novel was written in 1933: the year Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the year of the Reichstag fire, the year of the first concentration camps and the May book burnings. Hilton’s fantasy of an isolated community preserved from the surrounding catastrophe was not accidental. The High Lama tells Hugh Conway, the novel’s British protagonist, that the world outside will destroy itself — and that Shangri-La’s purpose is to preserve what is worth preserving until the destruction is over.

Lost Horizon is a fantasy of retreat written at the exact moment when retreat became something to fantasise about. Reading it now — knowing what 1933 became — gives the novel’s central proposition a weight that its first readers could not have fully felt: the High Lama predicts catastrophe and is right, and the question of what should be preserved through it, and by whom, and at what cost, is not a merely literary question. It does not argue that withdrawal is desirable. It imagines it with enough precision that the reader can feel the pull, and then carry that feeling back into a world where the option is not available. Still readable. More relevant in some years than others.

Miss Lonelyhearts

Nathanael West · 1933

Miss Lonelyhearts was published in April 1933 and is sixty thousand words — the length of a long novella — that produce a force disproportionate to their volume. The unnamed protagonist writes an advice column for a New York newspaper under the pen name Miss Lonelyhearts. The letters he receives — from people in genuine, intractable pain, people for whom no advice is actually possible — gradually break him. His editor, Shrike, mocks his growing religious feeling with sustained, brilliant cruelty. His attempts to help his correspondents end in violence. West spent two years on the sixty thousand words, and Fitzgerald, who read it in manuscript, said West was one of the best writers he had encountered in years. The novel was poorly distributed on publication due to the bankruptcy of its first publisher and sold badly; it has been in print continuously since its reissue.

Miss Lonelyhearts belongs on this list because it takes seriously the question of what happens to a person who is professionally required to respond to suffering and actually absorbs it. West modelled the letters Miss Lonelyhearts receives on real letters — he wanted readers to feel their weight — and the novel argues that there is no adequate response to another person’s genuine pain: not irony, not religion, not action. The attempt to find one damages the person making it. One of the most compressed novels in the American canon. One sitting. The kind of book that leaves a mark out of proportion to its length.

The Shape of Things to Come

H.G. Wells · 1933

The Shape of Things to Come was published in 1933 as a speculative history of the world from 1933 to 2106, written as if from the perspective of a historian in that distant future looking back at what happened. Wells predicted that a second world war would begin in 1940, triggered by a dispute over Danzig. He was off by one year and slightly wrong about the trigger, but the fact that he predicted it at all — in 1933, when the diplomatic consensus was still that negotiation remained possible — says something about how clearly certain observers could read what was in front of them. The novel is not Wells at his most literary; it is didactic and often wrong in its longer-range predictions. But as a document of 1933’s political consciousness — of what one of the century’s most important minds saw from where he was standing — it is irreplaceable.

The Shape of Things to Come belongs on this list not primarily as literature but as evidence: evidence of what it felt like, in 1933, to look at Europe and see the next decade clearly. Wells predicted the coming destruction with considerable accuracy. He also predicted, with much less accuracy, that after the destruction a rational World Government of technocrats would rebuild civilisation on sound scientific principles — the second prediction failed entirely. But the first prediction, made when many were still persuading themselves the catastrophe was avoidable, is worth sitting with. Reading it now, knowing what came, is a different experience from anything else on this list.