Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1921
1921 is the year the twentieth century starts inventing the genres it will spend the rest of itself perfecting. A Russian engineer and former Bolshevik named Yevgeny Zamyatin, already disillusioned with the revolution he had once supported, writes a novel about a totalitarian future so precise in its predictions that it will directly shape both Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four more than a decade before either is written, though Soviet censors will keep it from being published in his own country for another six decades. In Rome, an audience splits violently over a play that breaks its own fourth wall before the term existed to describe it, characters who insist they are more real than the actors playing them, demanding the right to finish a story their own author abandoned. A twenty-seven-year-old Aldous Huxley publishes a witty, plotless debut novel set at a country house party, already sketching, in throwaway dialogue from a minor character, the outline of the dystopia he will write in full eleven years later. This is a year of beginnings whose full implications nobody at the time could have seen coming.
By Lisanne Swart · 5 books · Fiction & Drama · Updated June 2026
We
D-503 is a mathematician and engineer living centuries in the future under the OneState, a totalitarian regime in which every aspect of life, work, recreation, even sexual relationships, is scheduled with mechanical precision and individuality has been engineered out of the population entirely. D-503 keeps a journal, intended for eventual transport aboard a spaceship he is helping to build, until a woman named I-330 introduces him to forbidden desire, irrationality, and the dawning, terrifying recognition that he possesses something the state has tried to eliminate: an individual soul. Zamyatin, a former Bolshevik who had grown disillusioned with the revolution’s direction, wrote the novel within a few years of the events it was already warning against. The original Russian text was not published in the Soviet Union until 1988, sixty-seven years after it was written.
We is the foundational text of twentieth-century dystopian fiction, predating and directly influencing both Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and its vision of a regimented future built on collective conformity and the systematic suppression of individual desire reads as a direct prophecy of Stalinism written before Stalin had consolidated power. Zamyatin’s prose style, fragmented, mathematical, mirroring D-503’s own engineered rationality as it slowly breaks down, is genuinely innovative on its own terms, not merely a vehicle for political warning. Read it as the book that made the entire subsequent dystopian genre possible.
Six Characters in Search of an Author
A theatre company is rehearsing a play when six strange figures interrupt, claiming to be characters abandoned mid-story by an author who never finished writing them, and they demand that the company’s director help them complete their own tragic narrative, insisting throughout that their reality as characters is more authentic and more permanent than the flesh-and-blood actors attempting to portray them. The play repeatedly breaks its own theatrical illusion, characters arguing with actors about how a scene should be performed, blurring the line between the fiction being staged and the supposedly real production staging it. The Rome premiere caused a genuine riot, with the audience violently divided between those who considered it a brilliant innovation and those who considered it an outrage against conventional theatre, though subsequent productions across Europe established it as a landmark of modern drama.
Six Characters in Search of an Author is one of the most influential and formally radical plays of the twentieth century, anticipating by decades the kind of metafictional self-awareness that would later become common across literature, film, and theatre. Pirandello’s central, genuinely unsettling argument, that a fictional character, once fully imagined, possesses a reality that outlasts and exceeds any single performance or telling, raises questions about authorship, identity, and representation that drama had rarely confronted this directly before. The play’s initial riot is itself a measure of how thoroughly it violated audience expectations of what theatre was supposed to do.
Crome Yellow
Denis Stone is a shy young poet invited to a country house party at Crome, hopelessly in love with his hosts’ niece Anne, who has little interest in him and considerably more in a temperamental painter among the other guests, while the assembled eccentrics, mystics, philosophers, and self-styled men of reason hold forth at length on competing visions of art, spirituality, and the future of human society. Huxley wrote the novel in the summer of 1921 at a Tuscan seaside resort, modelling its house-party structure on the country-house satires of Thomas Love Peacock and basing several of its characters on real figures from the Bloomsbury circle around Garsington Manor, including a thinly disguised version of Bertrand Russell. One minor character’s speech about a future society of mass-produced humans gestated in bottles directly anticipates, in miniature, the world Huxley would build in full in Brave New World eleven years later.
Crome Yellow is a genuinely funny, almost plotless social satire that established Huxley’s reputation while quietly seeding the ideas that would eventually become his most famous work. The novel’s real interest is not Denis’s hapless romantic pursuit but the parade of competing intellectual positions the other guests advance, each a small, exaggerated portrait of a particular interwar enthusiasm, spiritualism, rationalism, free love, utopian social engineering. Read it as a document of exactly the kind of intellectual ferment that, within a decade, several of its participants would take in considerably darker directions.
The Brimming Cup
Marise Crittenden is a married woman in a small Vermont town whose comfortable domestic life is unsettled by the return of a man she once loved, and the novel examines, with considerable psychological subtlety, what genuine contentment within marriage and small-town life actually requires when measured against the seductive pull of an alternative she did not choose. Fisher, who also introduced Montessori education methods to the United States and helped found American adult education programmes, was already a serious public intellectual when the novel became the best-selling work of fiction in the country in 1921. The novel suggests far more than it directly states, leaving much of its central emotional drama to be inferred from what its characters carefully avoid saying to each other.
The Brimming Cup is not considered great literature by most contemporary critics, but it remains genuinely interesting reading, particularly for its restraint: Fisher trusts her readers to understand the stakes of Marise’s situation without spelling them out, a technique closer to the implication-driven fiction Hemingway would popularise later in the decade than to the more explicit domestic fiction common at the time. Fisher’s own remarkable range, fifteen novels, six story collections, work in education reform, and decades on the Book of the Month Club selection committee, makes her a figure worth knowing beyond this one novel.
Rilla of Ingleside
Rilla Blythe, the youngest daughter of Anne of Green Gables, is fifteen years old and primarily concerned with parties and romance when the First World War breaks out, and the novel follows her gradual transformation across four years of war as her brothers and friends enlist, as some of them do not return, and as her own youthful self-absorption matures into genuine wartime resilience and purpose on the home front. Montgomery wrote the novel directly out of her own experience of the war, drawing on letters and a diary she had kept throughout the conflict, and it remains one of the few popular novels of the period to depict the war’s impact specifically through the eyes of the young women left waiting at home rather than the soldiers fighting abroad. It is the eighth novel in Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series and is generally considered the most emotionally serious of them.
Rilla of Ingleside earns a place beside more obviously literary war fiction of the period because it depicts a perspective those other novels largely ignore, the specific, sustained anxiety of women managing daily life and emotional survival while the men they love are at the front, with no guarantee any particular letter won’t be the last. Montgomery’s decision to age her beloved Anne Shirley into a background figure and centre an entirely new, less polished protagonist allowed her to write about the war’s psychological toll on an entire generation of young women with unusual directness for a popular series novel of its era.
Where to start
If you want the book that made every dystopia after it possible
→ Read We. Zamyatin predicted Stalinism before Stalin consolidated power, and both Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four owe it a debt neither later book fully repaid in recognition.
If you want the play that caused an actual riot
→ Read Six Characters in Search of an Author. Pirandello’s characters insist they are more real than the actors playing them, and the metafictional questions the play raises are still being worked out a century later.
If you want to see Brave New World being invented in miniature
→ Read Crome Yellow. A minor character’s throwaway speech about bottled, mass-produced humans is the seed of the novel Huxley would write eleven years later. Funny, light, and quietly more prophetic than it lets on.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1921
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“An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature's hideous system.” — Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow
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