Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1930
1930 opens the decade that the Wall Street collapse of the previous October has already started to define, though the literature of the year has not yet caught up to the scale of what is coming. William Faulkner, working the night shift at a university power plant, writes a novel by hand in the quiet hours in the middle of it, narrated by fifteen voices including, in one section, a woman speaking after her own death. Evelyn Waugh, his marriage newly collapsed and still eight months from the conversion to Catholicism that would shape everything he wrote afterwards, publishes a satire of the Bright Young Things that curdles by its final pages into something closer to despair. Dashiell Hammett gives detective fiction a voice as flat and unsentimental as Hemingway’s. And Bertrand Russell, already one of the most famous philosophers alive, publishes a practical, almost cheerful guide to being less miserable, just as the world is about to give everyone considerably more reason to be.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction & Non-fiction · All first published in 1930
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As I Lay Dying
Addie Bundren is dying in rural Mississippi, watching her eldest son Cash build her coffin from her own bedroom window, and the novel follows her poor, often quietly absurd family’s journey to honour her dying wish to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson, encountering flood, fire, and their own competing motives, noble and selfish in roughly equal measure, along the way. Faulkner narrates the novel in fifty-nine short sections across fifteen different voices, including, in one of the most startling formal choices in American fiction, a section narrated by Addie herself after she has already died. The story he told about writing it is famous and only half true. He worked the night shift at the University of Mississippi power plant, six in the evening to six in the morning, and in his own account of it he wrote “between 12 and 4” using a wheelbarrow as a desk, finishing the book in six weeks without changing a word. It actually took about seven weeks, from late October to 11 December 1929, and the manuscript is full of revisions — minor ones, but there.
As I Lay Dying is one of the most technically audacious novels in American literature, moving between fifteen radically different interior voices, including a young child’s confused literalism and a brother’s escalating psychological breakdown, without ever losing the reader’s grip on what is actually happening to the Bundren family on their journey. Faulkner’s decision to let Addie narrate from beyond her own death is not a gimmick; it is the novel’s clearest statement that the dead continue to act on the living long after their bodies have stopped. Funnier, stranger, and more formally controlled than its grim premise suggests.
The Maltese Falcon
Sam Spade is a San Francisco private detective whose partner is shot dead the same evening a woman calling herself Miss Wonderly hires their agency to follow a man, drawing Spade into a tangled, double-crossing search for a small, jewel-encrusted statuette that several increasingly dangerous parties are willing to kill for. Hammett, who had worked as an actual Pinkerton detective before turning to fiction, wrote in a flat, unsentimental prose that refused the puzzle-box conventions of British Golden Age detective fiction in favour of something closer to the genuine moral murk of organised crime and institutional corruption. It had already run in five instalments in Black Mask, from September 1929 to January 1930, before Knopf published it as a book. Spade is loyal to almost nothing except a private, idiosyncratic code of his own, including, famously, the obligation to avenge a partner he did not particularly like.
The Maltese Falcon is one of the foundational texts of American hard-boiled crime fiction, and Hammett’s achievement was to write a detective who solves his case not through brilliant deduction in the English tradition but through stubborn persistence and a refusal to be played by anyone, including the women who try hardest to manipulate him. The novel’s famous ending, in which Spade hands over a woman he may genuinely love because his own code requires it, gives the book a moral seriousness that pulp detective fiction rarely achieved before it. Read it as the template for nearly every hard-boiled American crime novel that followed.
Vile Bodies
Adam Fenwick-Symes is a young writer whose engagement to Nina Blount survives a series of farcical reversals, fortune won and lost on a drunken bet, a manuscript confiscated as obscene, an endless circuit of increasingly absurd costume parties among London’s so-called Bright Young Things, until the novel’s final pages abandon comedy almost entirely and strand Adam on a battlefield as another war begins. Waugh wrote much of the novel while his first marriage was collapsing, and later said the tonal shift partway through, from light farce to genuine bleakness, directly reflected his own state of mind during composition. The novel made Waugh’s reputation and his fortune. Reviewing it in the Fortnightly Review the following month, Rebecca West wrote that he was destined to be the dazzling figure of his age.
Vile Bodies is the funniest and the bleakest book on this list in roughly equal measure, and that combination is precisely the point: Waugh shows the same emptiness and amorality in his characters’ endless parties that, two decades later, would feel considerably less funny in his own retrospective accounts of the era. The novel’s closing image, a comic hero of frivolous engagement comedies abandoned on an actual battlefield, gives the entire preceding farce a different, much colder meaning in hindsight. Read it as the book where Waugh’s comedy first revealed how much genuine despair was sitting underneath it.
Cakes and Ale
A young writer named Willie Ashenden is asked by a pompous, socially ambitious novelist to help write a flattering biography of a recently deceased literary great, which forces Ashenden to confront his own much more vivid and far less respectable memories of the great writer’s first wife, Rosie, a former barmaid whose warmth, generosity, and casual sexuality made her, in Ashenden’s clear personal estimation, a far more honest and admirable figure than any of the literary establishment now scrambling to construct a sanitised version of her late husband’s career. Readers at the time matched the pompous novelist to Hugh Walpole and the dead great man to Thomas Hardy. Maugham denied the Hardy resemblance flatly and went on denying it; the Walpole one he denied to Walpole’s face in a letter and then conceded twenty years later, in a 1950 introduction, that he had done all he could to cover his tracks and that few people in literary London had been fooled. He used the novel to satirise the literary world’s tendency to flatten genuinely complicated, often disreputable real lives into respectable myth after death.
Cakes and Ale is Maugham at his most pointedly satirical about the literary establishment’s hypocrisy, and Rosie remains one of his most fully realised and most sympathetically drawn characters precisely because the novel refuses to judge her by the standards the era’s respectable society would apply. Maugham’s own contemporaries speculated extensively about which real novelists had inspired the unflattering portraits in the book, adding a layer of literary scandal to its original reception. The novel’s argument, that a woman’s generosity and warmth matter more than her respectability, was genuinely ahead of its moment.
Narcissus and Goldmund
Narcissus is an ascetic young monk firmly committed to a life of intellectual and spiritual discipline within his monastery; Goldmund is his closest friend, a romantic, sensuous young man hungry for worldly experience who eventually leaves the monastery to wander the world pursuing art, women, and adventure, while Narcissus remains behind, rising within the monastic hierarchy. Hesse structures the novel as a sustained meditation on the apparent conflict between the contemplative, ascetic life and the sensual, experiential one, following both men’s diverging paths across decades before bringing them back together near the novel’s end, each having learned something the other already understood from the beginning. Narcissus becomes abbot; Goldmund comes back to the monastery at the end of his life and dies there, under his friend’s care. The first English translation, by Geoffrey Dunlop in 1932, was called Death and the Lover.
Narcissus and Goldmund is the most serene and the most philosophically patient of Hesse’s major novels, refusing to declare either the ascetic or the sensual path correct and instead suggesting that both are genuinely necessary, incomplete expressions of a fuller human life. The novel’s eventual reunion of its two central characters, each transformed by a path the other never took, gives the book an emotional resolution that the more anguished Steppenwolf, published three years earlier, deliberately withholds. Read it as Hesse’s most balanced statement on a conflict he spent his entire career examining from different angles.
The Conquest of Happiness
Russell, already one of the most famous living philosophers, sets out a practical, deliberately unsentimental account of what actually makes people unhappy, competitiveness, boredom, envy, excessive self-absorption, and what genuinely seems to counter it, work, interest in the world outside oneself, and a tolerance for ordinary, unspectacular contentment rather than constant intensity. The book predates the modern self-help genre by decades but anticipates many of its central concerns, while remaining noticeably more rigorous and less prescriptive than most of what followed it. Russell wrote the book in a deliberately accessible, almost conversational register, distinct from the technical philosophical work for which he was already famous.
The Conquest of Happiness is one of the earliest and still one of the most genuinely useful examples of a serious philosopher addressing ordinary human contentment in plain, practical language rather than abstract theory. Russell’s insistence that happiness is largely a matter of redirecting attention outward, toward genuine interests and other people, rather than inward toward constant self-examination, remains a more durable piece of advice than much of what the later self-help industry produced. Read it as popular philosophy from a writer who never stopped being a serious one.
Strong Poison
Harriet Vane, a mystery novelist, is on trial for poisoning her former lover Philip Boyes with arsenic — the same poison she had been buying under false names while researching a novel of her own — and Lord Peter Wimsey, the aristocratic amateur detective, becomes convinced of her innocence and determined to prove it, falling in love with her over the course of the investigation despite, or perhaps partly because of, the considerable obstacles her trial presents to anything resembling a conventional courtship. Sayers did not invent Harriet Vane to give Wimsey an equal. She invented her to get rid of him: she wrote later that she had written the book with the intention of doing away with Peter by marrying him off. It did not work. She could find no form of words in which Harriet could accept him without losing her self-respect, and that problem took three more novels to solve, ending with Gaudy Night in 1935.
Strong Poison is the novel that transformed Sayers’s detective fiction from clever puzzle-construction into something with genuine emotional and intellectual stakes, by introducing a heroine capable of matching Wimsey’s wit while having every reason to resent being indebted to him for her own life. Harriet Vane’s prickly, justified reluctance to fall for the man who saved her from the gallows gives their courtship a complexity rare in detective fiction of the period. Read it as the beginning of one of the more intellectually honest romantic pairings in the genre’s history.
Where to start
If you want Faulkner’s most formally daring novel
→ Read As I Lay Dying. Fifteen narrators, including one speaking from beyond her own death, and it is shorter and funnier than its reputation suggests.
If you want the book that defined hard-boiled American crime fiction
→ Read The Maltese Falcon. Hammett’s flat, unsentimental prose and Sam Spade’s stubborn private code became the template nearly every detective novel since has worked from or against.
If you want comedy that turns genuinely bleak without warning
→ Read Vile Bodies. Waugh’s satire of London’s Bright Young Things ends on a battlefield, and the shift from farce to despair was, by his own account, exactly how he felt while writing it.
If you want something to think with rather than a story
→ The Conquest of Happiness. It is ninety-six years old and still the most practical thing on this page.
If you want the one with the best argument behind it
→ Strong Poison, and then keep going: Sayers spent the next five years solving a problem she created here by accident.
Books first published in 1930
Sixteen more books whose first publication genuinely falls in 1930, for when you want breadth rather than a recommendation.
The Murder at the Vicarage
First Miss Marple novel
Agatha Christie · Collins Crime Club, 20 October
The first Miss Marple novel, though not her first appearance: she had turned up in short stories from December 1927, later collected as The Thirteen Problems.
Cimarron
Best seller
Edna Ferber · Doubleday, Doran, spring
The best-selling novel in America that year.
The Bridge
Hart Crane · Black Sun Press, February
The long poem, published first in Paris in February and then by Liveright in New York in April, with photographs by Walker Evans.
Ash-Wednesday
T. S. Eliot · Fountain Press and Faber
Eliot’s first long poem after his conversion. Note the hyphen: that is his own spelling of the title, and almost every list drops it.
Last and First Men
First novel
Olaf Stapledon · Methuen, 23 October
Two billion years of human history in one book. His first novel, though not his first book — A Modern Theory of Ethics came in 1929.
Civilization and Its Discontents
Sigmund Freud · Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag
Published in Vienna as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, and in English the same year by the Woolfs at the Hogarth Press, translated by Joan Riviere.
Swallows and Amazons
Arthur Ransome · Jonathan Cape, 21 July
Four children, a dinghy and a lake. Not his first book — he had been publishing since the nineteen hundreds.
The Apes of God
Wyndham Lewis · The Arthur Press, 3 June
Six hundred and twenty-five pages of attack on the Bloomsbury set, published by a press Lewis set up because nobody else would touch it.
Angel Pavement
J. B. Priestley · Heinemann, August
A London office and the people in it, written straight after The Good Companions had made him famous.
Years of Grace
Pulitzer 1931
Margaret Ayer Barnes · Houghton
The 1930 novel that won the Pulitzer — awarded the following year, which is why it almost never appears on lists of 1930.
Miss Mole
James Tait Black
E. H. Young
The James Tait Black fiction prize for 1930, announced the year after.
Malaisie
Prix Goncourt
Henri Fauconnier · Stock
The Goncourt of 1930, on eight votes.
The Secret of the Old Clock
Carolyn Keene · Grosset & Dunlap, 28 April
The first Nancy Drew, written to order under a house name for the Stratemeyer Syndicate.
Labels
Evelyn Waugh · Duckworth
Waugh’s other 1930 book, a Mediterranean travel journal. It came out in America as A Bachelor Abroad.
The Documents in the Case
Dorothy L. Sayers with Robert Eustace · Benn
Sayers’s other 1930 book, and the only novel she wrote without Lord Peter Wimsey.
The Name of Action
Graham Greene · Heinemann
His second novel, and one he later refused to let anyone reprint. The Man Within, the debut, is 1929 — a year lists regularly get wrong.
First books published in 1930
Four writers who arrived in 1930 — and the difference between a first book and a first novel, which is where most lists go wrong.
Whoroscope
Samuel Beckett
His first separately published work, a poem written overnight to win a ten-pound prize set by Nancy Cunard, and printed by her Hours Press in Paris.
Poems
W. H. Auden
His first commercially published book, a thousand copies from Faber, accepted by T. S. Eliot. An earlier Poems of 1928 was hand-printed by Stephen Spender in about forty-five copies and was private.
Flowering Judas
Katherine Anne Porter
Her first book, a collection of stories. The expanded version most people read, Flowering Judas and Other Stories, came in 1935.
Last and First Men
Olaf Stapledon
His first novel but not his first book, which is the distinction most lists of debuts get wrong.
1930 in books, in short
- Nobel Prize
- Sinclair Lewis, announced on 5 November 1930, “for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters” — the first American to win it. He had refused the Pulitzer four years earlier. See every Nobel winner
- Pulitzer, the Novel
- Laughing Boy, Oliver La Farge — awarded in 1930 for a book published in 1929. The 1930 novel that won it was Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes, awarded in 1931. The category was called the Novel until 1948, which is why the older lists say Novel and the newer ones say Fiction
- James Tait Black
- Miss Mole by E. H. Young for fiction and The Lives of a Bengal Lancer by Francis Yeats-Brown for biography — both books of 1930, announced the following year
- Prix Goncourt
- Malaisie, Henri Fauconnier, published by Stock that same year
- Hawthornden Prize
- The End of the World, Geoffrey Dennis
- Newbery Medal
- Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, Rachel Field
- Best seller
- Cimarron by Edna Ferber was the best-selling novel in America
- Two clubs founded
- Collins launched the Crime Club on 6 May 1930, a subscription imprint that went on for sixty-four years and two thousand first editions. And British crime writers founded the Detection Club the same year, with G. K. Chesterton as its first president and both Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers among the founding members
- And one for now
- Every book first published in 1930 entered the public domain in the United States on 1 January 2026. That includes all seven on this page, which is why good editions of them are suddenly cheap and plentiful
The prize year is not the publication year, and 1930 is a clean example of the trap. The Pulitzer handed out in 1930 went to a book from 1929; the Pulitzer for the best 1930 novel was handed out in 1931. The James Tait Black is labelled by the year of the book but announced the year after, and the Newbery Medal of 1930 went to a book from 1929. Not one of the seven books at the top of this page won a major prize, then or later — which tells you something about what prizes were for in 1930 and what they were not.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1930
What are the best books published in 1930?
The books of 1930 that people still read are As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh, Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham, Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse, The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell and Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers. Also from that year: The Murder at the Vicarage, the first Miss Marple novel; Cimarron, the year’s best seller; Hart Crane’s The Bridge; and Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.
How did Faulkner write As I Lay Dying so quickly?
Not quite as quickly as he said. Faulkner worked the night shift at the University of Mississippi power plant, six in the evening to six in the morning, and wrote the book in the quiet hours in the middle of it, using a wheelbarrow as a desk. His own account, in the introduction he wrote for Sanctuary in 1932, is that he wrote it “between 12 and 4… in six weeks, without changing a word”. The composition actually ran from late October to 11 December 1929, about seven weeks, and the surviving manuscript has revisions in it. They are minor, which is the remarkable part, but they are there.
What is The Maltese Falcon about?
A San Francisco private detective called Sam Spade takes a job following a man for a woman calling herself Miss Wonderly. His partner is shot dead the same evening, and Spade is drawn into a search for a jewelled statuette that several people are willing to kill for. Hammett had been a Pinkerton operative himself, and he wrote in a flat, unsentimental style that refused the puzzle conventions of British detective fiction. It ran as a serial in Black Mask from September 1929 before Knopf published it as a book in February 1930.
Why does Vile Bodies end so differently from how it begins?
It opens as a comedy about London’s Bright Young Things and ends on a battlefield in a new war. Waugh said later that the change of tone reflected the collapse of his first marriage, which happened while he was halfway through writing it: his wife left him in the summer of 1929 and he filed for divorce that September. The closing pages retrospectively darken everything that came before them.
What is the best book to read from 1930 if you only read one?
As I Lay Dying, if you want the most formally rewarding novel: Faulkner’s fifteen narrators are one of the most original structures in American fiction, and the book is funnier and shorter than people expect. The Maltese Falcon, if you want the most purely entertaining read with the longest shadow. Vile Bodies, if you want the book that catches a mood curdling into something darker.
Who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930?
Sinclair Lewis, announced on 5 November 1930, “for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters”. He was the first American to win it, and he had turned down the Pulitzer for Arrowsmith four years earlier on the grounds that prizes of that kind ask novels to be wholesome.
Did any of the books on this page win a prize?
No, and that is worth saying out loud. Not one of these seven books won a major prize, in 1930 or afterwards. The Pulitzer of that year went to a 1929 book; the Pulitzer for the best 1930 novel went to Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes, awarded in 1931 and rarely read now. Three of the seven writers did win the Nobel Prize in Literature later on — Hesse in 1946, Russell in 1950 and Faulkner for 1949 — but for the work as a whole, not for these books. If you pick your reading by the medals on the jacket, 1930 is the year that shows you what that method costs.
Which writers published their first book in 1930?
Samuel Beckett published Whoroscope, a poem written overnight to win a ten-pound prize from Nancy Cunard. W. H. Auden published Poems with Faber, his first commercially published book, accepted by T. S. Eliot. Katherine Anne Porter published Flowering Judas. And Olaf Stapledon published Last and First Men, his first novel but not his first book. None of the seven writers at the top of this page debuted in 1930: the earliest of them, Maugham, had published his first book in 1897.
Are the books from 1930 in the public domain?
In the United States, yes, since 1 January 2026, when the whole 1930 cohort came out of copyright ninety-five years after publication. That covers all seven books on this page. It is why you can suddenly find good-looking editions of them cheaply, and it is a fact about American copyright rather than about every country — the rules elsewhere run from the author’s death, not from publication.
What else happened in books in 1930?
Two institutions that shaped crime fiction started that year. Collins launched its Crime Club on 6 May, a subscription imprint that ran for sixty-four years and published more than two thousand first editions; The Murder at the Vicarage came out under it that October. And British crime writers founded the Detection Club, with G. K. Chesterton as its first president and both Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers among its founding members. In April, Grosset and Dunlap published the first Nancy Drew.
Footnotes
As I Lay Dying 5 facts
Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith published it on 6 October 1930. The novel runs to fifty-nine sections narrated by fifteen characters, seven of them Bundrens; Darl has nineteen of them.
As I Lay Dying — Digital Yoknapatawpha, University of Virginia
Addie Bundren is from Jefferson and the family lives at Frenchman’s Bend, which is why the journey exists at all. One section is hers, and it comes after she has died.
Addie Bundren — Digital Yoknapatawpha, University of Virginia
The writing story is Faulkner’s own, from the introduction he wrote for the Modern Library edition of Sanctuary in 1932: “I got a job in the power plant, on the night shift, from 6 P.M. to 6 A.M., as a coal passer… On these nights, between 12 and 4, I wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks, without changing a word.” This page previously gave that as fact and described a twelve-hour shift of which he worked eight and wrote four. The shift was twelve hours; the writing happened in a lull in the middle of it.correction
And the claim itself does not hold. The composition ran from late October to 11 December 1929, nearer seven weeks than six, and the manuscript and typescript carry numerous revisions, minor but real. Whether he shovelled the coal himself or supervised is also disputed: he said he shovelled it, the biographical record has him as the overnight supervisor. This page now says it is his account rather than what happened.correction
The line quoted at the foot of this page, “My mother is a fish.”, is section nineteen in its entirety. Vardaman says it and the section ends.
The Maltese Falcon 3 facts
Alfred A. Knopf published it on 14 February 1930, after it had run in five instalments in Black Mask between September 1929 and January 1930.
Miles Archer is shot dead the same evening he takes the job, not the night after. This page had it a day late.correction
Hammett worked for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency from 1915, including in San Francisco, before he wrote fiction.
Vile Bodies 5 facts
Chapman and Hall published it in January 1930. The day is genuinely disputed: the biographies give 19 January and the antiquarian trade gives 14 January, so this page gives the month only.correction
Rebecca West wrote that Waugh was destined to be the dazzling figure of his age — in a review of Vile Bodies in the Fortnightly Review in February 1930, about a month after publication, not on publication. The wording is “destined to be”, not “destined to become”.correction
Evelyn Gardner left him in the summer of 1929 — her letter is dated 9 July and she had moved out by early August — and Waugh filed his divorce petition on 3 September 1929, halfway through the writing.
The introduction to this page called Waugh “recently divorced and freshly converted to Catholicism” at the time of publication. Neither was true in January 1930. He was received into the Catholic Church on 29 September 1930, eight months after the book came out, and the divorce was completed later in 1930. In January he was separated, undivorced and Anglican.correction
This page also said Decline and Fall had skewered the same Bright Young Things two years earlier. It had not: that book satirises English institutions — Oxford, the schools, the prison system. The Bright Young Things are what Vile Bodies is about.correction
Cakes and Ale 2 facts
William Heinemann published it in September 1930.
On the models: Maugham denied the Hardy resemblance flatly, in the 1934 collected edition and again in 1950. On Walpole he told Walpole himself, in a letter, that Alroy Kear “is made up of a dozen people and the greater part of him is myself” — and then in his 1950 introduction wrote that he had done all he could to cover his tracks and that few people in literary London had failed to see who the model was. This page said only that there were rumoured models; the record is more specific and more interesting than that.correction
Narcissus and Goldmund 2 facts
S. Fischer Verlag published Narziß und Goldmund in 1930. Narcissus becomes abbot; Goldmund returns at the end of his life and dies at the monastery. The first English translation, by Geoffrey Dunlop in 1932, was titled Death and the Lover.
Der Steppenwolf was published by Fischer in 1927, three years earlier.
The Conquest of Happiness 1 fact
George Allen and Unwin published it in October 1930 at seven shillings and sixpence, Horace Liveright in New York the same year. Russell names his causes of unhappiness in his chapter titles — competition, boredom, fatigue, envy, the sense of sin, persecution mania, fear of public opinion — and his remedies in the second half: zest, affection, family, work, impersonal interests.
Strong Poison 3 facts
Victor Gollancz published it in 1930, Brewer and Warren in New York the same year. Harriet Vane is tried for poisoning Philip Boyes with arsenic, which she had been buying under assumed names while researching a novel.
This page said Sayers created Harriet Vane to give Wimsey an equal. She created her to get rid of him. In her own words: “Let me confess that when I wrote Strong Poison, it was with the infanticidal intention of doing away with Peter” — by marrying him off. It failed, because she could find no form of words in which Harriet could accept him without loss of self-respect, and undoing that took three more novels. The equal is what Harriet became, not what she was for.correction
Gaudy Night was published by Gollancz in 1935, five years later.
1930 in books 22 facts
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1930 went to Sinclair Lewis, with the citation quoted on this page, reproduced exactly as the Nobel Foundation sets it — lower case at the start, British spelling of humour, no full stop.
The announcement was on 5 November 1930 and Lewis was the first American to win the prize.
He had refused the 1926 Pulitzer for Arrowsmith, objecting among other things to the prize’s requirement that a novel present the wholesome atmosphere of American life.
Sinclair Lewis, the Main Street burglary and a rejection notice — The Pulitzer Prizes
The Pulitzer for the Novel awarded in 1930 went to Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge, a book published in 1929.
The Pulitzer for the Novel awarded in 1931 went to Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes, and that is a 1930 book. The category was called the Novel until 1948.
The James Tait Black prizes for 1930 went to Miss Mole by E. H. Young and The Lives of a Bengal Lancer by Francis Yeats-Brown. Edinburgh lists these prizes by the year of the book, with the announcement the year after, which is why this page says “for 1930” rather than “awarded in 1930”.correction
Fiction winners — The James Tait Black Prizes, University of Edinburgh
Every book first published in 1930 entered the public domain in the United States on 1 January 2026, ninety-five years after publication — all seven on this page among them. Outside the United States the term usually runs from the author’s death instead, so this is not a worldwide fact.
Collins launched the Crime Club on 6 May 1930. It ran until April 1994 and published 2,012 first editions of crime novels.
The Detection Club was founded in 1930 with G. K. Chesterton as its first president; Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers were among the founding members. Accounts differ on how many there were, so this page gives no number.
The Murder at the Vicarage was published by the Collins Crime Club on 20 October 1930 and is the first Miss Marple novel — but not her first appearance, which was in short stories from December 1927.correction
Cimarron was the best-selling novel in America in 1930. On the month the sources split: most reference works say April, but Time reviewed the book on 24 March 1930, which rules April out. This page says spring rather than pick a side it cannot settle.correction
The Bridge appeared first from the Black Sun Press in Paris in February 1930 and then from Liveright in New York in April, with photographs by Walker Evans.
Das Unbehagen in der Kultur was published in Vienna in 1930, and the English translation by Joan Riviere appeared the same year from the Hogarth Press.
Last and First Men was published by Methuen on 23 October 1930, and it is Olaf Stapledon’s first novel though not his first book.
Swallows and Amazons was published by Jonathan Cape on 21 July 1930.
The Apes of God was published by the Arthur Press on 3 June 1930 and runs to six hundred and twenty-five pages.
The Prix Goncourt of 1930 went to Malaisie by Henri Fauconnier, published by Stock, on eight votes.
The Hawthornden Prize of 1930 went to The End of the World by Geoffrey Dennis.
The Newbery Medal of 1930 went to Hitty, Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field — another prize that runs a year behind, because that book was published in 1929.correction
Newbery Medal winners and honor books, 1922 to the present — ALA
The Secret of the Old Clock, the first Nancy Drew, was published by Grosset and Dunlap on 28 April 1930 under the Stratemeyer Syndicate house name Carolyn Keene.
Two years that lists regularly get wrong: The Man Within is Graham Greene’s 1929 debut, not a 1930 book — his 1930 novel is The Name of Action. And The Waves is 1931, not 1930.correction
Samuel Beckett’s Whoroscope, W. H. Auden’s Poems from Faber and Katherine Anne Porter’s Flowering Judas were all first books of 1930. Auden had privately printed an earlier Poems in 1928 in about forty-five copies.
Last verified 24 September 2026. Everything marked “correction” above is a place where this page said something different before. The substantial ones: Waugh was neither divorced nor a Catholic when Vile Bodies came out, and Decline and Fall had satirised institutions rather than the Bright Young Things; Sayers invented Harriet Vane to get rid of Lord Peter, not to give him an equal; Sam Spade’s partner is shot the same evening rather than the night after; and Faulkner’s account of writing As I Lay Dying in six weeks without changing a word is his account, not what the manuscript shows. Where a source contradicts the version that circulates, the source wins. Anything I could not source to a named publisher, prize body, archive, library record, newspaper or reference work is not on this page. Where a Wikipedia article is the source, that is what the footnote says.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all theirs.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.
Where to go next
Pages on this site that pick up where 1930 leaves off.
From the bookshelf
“My mother is a fish.” — William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
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