Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1920
1920 is the year the twentieth century actually starts to feel like itself. The First World War has ended, the influenza pandemic is finally receding, and a generation that came of age during both catastrophes is beginning to write about what survived in them, and what didn’t. A twenty-three-year-old named F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes a debut novel so immediately popular it sells out its first printing within four days, effectively inventing the literary persona of the Jazz Age before the decade had even properly started being called that. Edith Wharton, already established and in her late fifties, looks back at the rigid, suffocating high society of 1870s New York and writes the novel that will win her the Pulitzer Prize the following year, the first ever awarded to a woman. An unknown writer named Agatha Christie publishes her first novel after accepting a bet that she could not write a mystery the reader couldn’t solve before the detective; she was wrong, and Hercule Poirot is born. And in Vienna, Sigmund Freud, already the most famous psychoanalyst alive, publishes the book that complicates everything he had previously argued about human motivation, introducing a death instinct to sit alongside the pleasure principle he had spent two decades describing.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Updated June 2026
This Side of Paradise
Amory Blaine is a handsome, self-absorbed young man who moves from a privileged Minnesota childhood through Princeton University and into a series of unsatisfying romances, gradually discovering that the social and intellectual world he was raised to inherit no longer makes sense in the aftermath of the First World War. Fitzgerald drew directly on his own Princeton years and his own romantic disappointments, and the novel mixes conventional prose with poetry, letters, and even sections written as a play script. Despite a famously sloppy first printing riddled with spelling errors, the novel sold out its initial run of three thousand copies within four days and became the first best-selling book of the new decade, instantly transforming Fitzgerald, at twenty-three, into a literary celebrity and clearing the way for him to marry Zelda Sayre the same month it was published.
This Side of Paradise is rougher and more uneven than the novels Fitzgerald would go on to write, but it remains essential as the book that effectively announced the Jazz Age before the term existed, capturing a specific generational disillusionment, faith in God, country, and inherited social codes all quietly collapsing at once, that older readers found genuinely scandalous. Amory’s romantic egotism is not entirely sympathetic, and Fitzgerald does not entirely intend it to be; the novel’s real subject is the gap between the greatness Amory believes he is destined for and his actual confusion about what that would require. Read it as the first draft of everything Fitzgerald would later perfect.
The Age of Innocence
Newland Archer is a young lawyer engaged to the conventional, dutiful May Welland in the rigidly codified high society of 1870s New York, until the arrival of May’s cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, fleeing a disastrous European marriage, draws him into a love that the entire structure of his world is organised to prevent him from acting on. Wharton wrote the novel in France in the years immediately following the First World War and the death of her close friend Theodore Roosevelt, looking back at a vanished social order she had grown up inside and had spent her career anatomising with a precision that was simultaneously affectionate and merciless. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921, making Wharton the first woman ever to receive the award.
The Age of Innocence is widely considered Wharton’s finest achievement, a novel that understands its rigid, gossip-policed social world from the inside well enough to make its quiet cruelties feel genuinely suffocating rather than merely quaint. Newland’s tragedy is not that he is forbidden from loving Ellen; it is that the world he was raised in has so thoroughly shaped his own sense of duty that he polices himself more effectively than any external force could. Wharton’s prose is exact and devastating, and the novel’s final pages, decades later, deliver one of the most quietly heartbreaking endings in American fiction.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Emily Inglethorp, a wealthy older woman, is poisoned at her country estate, Styles Court, and the case falls to a Belgian refugee detective living nearby named Hercule Poirot, whose meticulous attention to small, overlooked details cuts through a web of family secrets, a contested will, and a houseful of suspects each with their own motive. Christie wrote the novel, by her own later account, after accepting a bet from her sister that she could not write a detective story in which the reader could not identify the murderer before the detective did. She was, by general critical consensus, successful. The novel introduced not only Poirot but the entire sensibility, the fair-play puzzle, the country house setting, the eccentric but brilliant outsider detective, that would define what later became known as the Golden Age of detective fiction.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles is a genuinely remarkable debut, not because it is Christie’s most accomplished construction, which came later, but because so much of what would define an entire genre for the following decade is already present and functioning in her first attempt. Poirot’s precise, fastidious method, his contempt for sloppy thinking, and his confidence that the truth is always available to a sufficiently careful observer, is fully formed from the outset. Christie went on to become one of the best-selling and most translated novelists in history. It started here, on a bet she was right to make.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Freud, having spent two decades arguing that human behaviour is fundamentally organised around the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, uses this essay to introduce a complicating, darker counter-principle: a death instinct, a drive toward repetition, stasis, and ultimately self-destruction that operates alongside and sometimes against the pleasure principle he had previously treated as foundational. He develops the idea partly through observing a child’s repetitive game of throwing away and retrieving a toy, reading the compulsive repetition as an attempt to master a painful experience of separation by recreating it on the child’s own terms. The essay was written in the aftermath of the First World War and amid Freud’s own deepening engagement with trauma and repetition compulsion among returning soldiers.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle remains one of the most genuinely unsettling and most contested texts in the history of psychoanalysis, precisely because Freud is visibly working through a theoretical problem in real time rather than presenting settled conclusions. The idea that human beings are driven not only toward pleasure but toward repetition and even self-destruction complicated his entire earlier framework, and psychoanalysts have argued about the death instinct’s validity and implications ever since. Read it as Freud at his most genuinely speculative, willing to follow a difficult idea even when it undermined his own previous certainties.
Women in Love
Sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen pursue two very different relationships, Ursula with the school inspector Rupert Birkin, Gudrun with the wealthy industrialist Gerald Crich, against a backdrop of English coal-mining country and the broader question of what authentic human connection can look like once conventional marriage and class structures have been exposed as inadequate or actively destructive. Lawrence had written the novel as a sequel to The Rainbow, which had itself been suppressed as obscene in 1915, and Women in Love was published privately in a limited subscriber edition in the United States in 1920 before a public British edition followed the next year. The novel explores both heterosexual and homoerotic desire with a directness that remained controversial for decades.
Women in Love is one of Lawrence’s most ambitious and most formally accomplished novels, using two parallel relationships to dramatise sharply opposing answers to the question of what intimacy actually requires: Ursula and Birkin’s relationship moves toward a difficult, demanding mutual recognition, while Gerald and Gudrun’s curdles into a destructive struggle for dominance that the novel does not soften. The wrestling scene between Birkin and Gerald remains one of the most openly homoerotic passages in mainstream English fiction of its era. Read it as Lawrence’s fullest exploration of what he believed industrial modernity had done to human beings’ capacity for genuine connection.
Main Street
Carol Kennicott is an idealistic young woman who moves from the city to the small fictional town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, after marrying its local doctor, and finds herself increasingly suffocated by the town’s complacent conformity, its suspicion of new ideas, and its relentless social pressure to abandon any ambition larger than keeping a tidy house and attending the right social functions. Lewis drew on his own small-town Minnesota upbringing to construct a portrait of American provincial life sharp enough that the term “Main Street” became, almost overnight, shorthand for a specific kind of stifling Midwestern conformity. The novel sold nearly two million copies within a few years and was a serious contender for the Pulitzer Prize, narrowly losing to The Age of Innocence after a controversial jury override.
Main Street is the sharpest satirical portrait of small-town American conformity produced in the decade, and Carol Kennicott’s frustration, her genuine intelligence and ambition finding absolutely no acceptable outlet in Gopher Prairie’s social world, gave a voice to a specific kind of restlessness that resonated immediately with readers across the country. Lewis’s eye for the precise social mechanisms by which a town enforces conformity, gossip, exclusion, gentle but relentless pressure, remains uncomfortably accurate. The novel’s commercial success directly paved the way for Lewis becoming, a decade later, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Three Soldiers
Three American soldiers of very different backgrounds and temperaments, a sensitive musician, a working-class labourer, and an ambitious office worker, serve in the same unit during the First World War, and the novel follows each of their gradual disillusionment with military life, institutional authority, and the war’s actual meaning as the brutal, dehumanising machinery of the army grinds away whatever idealism each of them arrived with. Dos Passos drew on his own wartime service as an ambulance driver, and the novel was among the earliest American works of fiction to depict the war’s psychological toll without any trace of the patriotic justification that had characterised most prior American writing about it. Its publication provoked significant controversy for its unflinching, deeply critical portrait of military institutions.
Three Soldiers is one of the first major American novels to treat the First World War with genuine disillusionment rather than retrospective heroism, anticipating by nearly a decade the more famous anti-war literature that would follow later in the same generation. Dos Passos’s decision to follow three soldiers of different class backgrounds rather than a single protagonist allowed him to dramatise how military institutions damage different kinds of men in different, equally devastating ways. Read it as an early and genuinely angry precursor to the more fully developed anti-war fiction the decade would eventually produce.
Where to start
If you want the novel that announced an entire literary era
→ Read This Side of Paradise. Rougher than Fitzgerald’s later work, but it sold out in four days and made him famous at twenty-three, effectively inventing the Jazz Age persona before the decade had a name for itself.
If you want the most perfectly controlled novel of the year
→ Read The Age of Innocence. Wharton’s portrait of a love quietly destroyed by social convention won the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a woman, and its final pages remain one of the most devastating endings in American fiction.
If you want to watch an entire genre begin
→ Read The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Christie wrote it on a bet that she could outsmart her own reader. Hercule Poirot, and the Golden Age of detective fiction along with him, started here.
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“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
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