Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1931
1931 is the second full year of the Depression, and the literature of the year reflects two opposite responses to a world that has stopped making sense: retreat into the abstract and lyrical, or a hard, unsentimental look at exactly how corrupt and violent everyday institutions actually are. Virginia Woolf publishes what she privately called a “playpoem”, her most radical formal experiment, structured entirely as soliloquies from six voices who may not even be separate characters at all. William Faulkner, broke and frustrated by years of critical praise that had not translated into sales, deliberately writes what he called a potboiler about rape, corruption, and bootlegging in his fictional Mississippi county, and the book that disturbed him most to write becomes the one that finally makes him commercially successful. Pearl S. Buck, the daughter of missionaries who spent most of her childhood in China, publishes a novel about Chinese peasant life that becomes the best-selling American novel of the year and the next, and Dashiell Hammett delivers the bleakest and most morally airless of his hard-boiled crime novels, set in a city so thoroughly corrupted that nobody in it, on either side of the law, is innocent.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Updated June 2026
The Good Earth
Wang Lung is a poor Chinese farmer in the years before the revolution who marries a former slave, O-Lan, and the novel follows the family’s fortunes across decades of drought, famine, war, and eventual prosperity, as Wang Lung’s relationship to the land that sustains him gradually curdles into the same forms of vanity and excess he once despised in wealthier men. Buck, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, spent most of her life before 1934 in China and drew directly on the rural communities she had lived among. The novel spent two years at the top of American bestseller lists, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, and contributed directly to Buck becoming, in 1938, the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Good Earth gave most Western readers their first sympathetic, sustained portrait of Chinese peasant life, rendered without the exoticism or condescension that characterised most prior American writing about China. Buck’s achievement was to make Wang Lung and O-Lan’s specific struggles, against drought, against poverty, against their own slowly accumulating moral compromises, feel as universal and as urgent as any American farming family’s. The novel’s enormous popular success in the years before the Second World War has been credited with helping shift American public sentiment toward seeing China as a nation of equals rather than a foreign curiosity.
The Waves
Six characters, Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and Louis, speak in soliloquy from childhood to old age, their interior voices punctuated by nine brief interludes describing a coastal scene at different times of day, from sunrise to sunset. A seventh figure, Percival, is described and mourned by the others but never speaks himself, and dies partway through the novel on an imperialist mission in India. Woolf described the book in her diary not as a novel with characters but as a “playpoem”, and said she was puzzled when an early reviewer praised her characters, since she had not intended to create separate people at all but rather different facets of a single consciousness. Despite its abstraction, the novel sold ten thousand copies in its first six months and her husband Leonard called it her masterpiece.
The Waves is widely considered the furthest Woolf ever pushed the formal experimentation she had been developing across her career, abandoning plot and conventional character almost entirely in favour of pure interior voice, structured around the natural rhythm of waves and the changing light of a single day standing in for an entire human life. The novel’s six speakers blur into and out of each other in ways that resist easy interpretation, which is precisely the point: Woolf was trying to capture something about consciousness and connection that conventional narrative could not reach. This is the most demanding book on this list and, for many of her most serious readers, her greatest achievement.
Sanctuary
Temple Drake is a college student from a wealthy Mississippi family who, after a night of drinking and a car crash strand her at an isolated bootlegging operation, is raped and abducted by the impotent gangster Popeye and held in a Memphis brothel, where her own moral disintegration becomes as central to the novel as the violence inflicted on her. Faulkner later claimed he wrote the book purely as a commercial potboiler after his earlier, more critically admired novels had sold poorly, though scholars and his own friends have disputed how cynical the claim actually was. His publisher initially refused to print the original manuscript, reportedly telling Faulkner they would both go to prison if it were published; Faulkner substantially rewrote it before the 1931 edition finally appeared.
Sanctuary is Faulkner’s most controversial and, despite his own dismissive comments about it, one of his most psychologically unflinching novels, examining what genuine evil actually looks like through the lens of Southern decline, hard-boiled crime fiction, and a moral universe in which the supposed hero, an ineffectual lawyer, is overwhelmed by the corruption surrounding him. The novel was Faulkner’s first commercial breakthrough, ironically validating the very cynicism with which he claimed to have written it. Read it as proof that even Faulkner’s most deliberately commercial work carries more psychological weight than most other writers’ most serious efforts.
The Glass Key
Ned Beaumont is a gambler and fixer for Paul Madvig, a corrupt political boss running an election campaign, and when the son of the senator Madvig is backing turns up murdered, Ned finds himself trying to protect his friend from a frame-up engineered by enemies on every side, in a city where police, lawyers, and judges on both factions are equally compromised. Hammett narrates entirely from the outside, refusing the reader any access to Ned’s actual thoughts or feelings, conveying his interior state only through descriptions of his breathing, his expression, and his physical stillness. Raymond Chandler later praised Hammett for writing scenes that seemed never to have been written before, and The Glass Key is frequently cited as the novel where that technique reaches its most extreme, almost clinical form.
The Glass Key is the bleakest and most morally airless of Hammett’s major novels, a story in which there genuinely is no good guy, only varying degrees of complicity in a thoroughly corrupted political and criminal system. Hammett’s refusal to grant the reader any direct access to Ned’s interior life is the novel’s most radical formal choice, pushing the hard-boiled style to a point where psychology is rendered entirely through surface and physiology. The political corruption it depicts, yellow press, rigged elections, sanctioned violence, reads as freshly relevant today as when it was written.
Only Yesterday
Allen, the editor of Harper’s Magazine, set out to write an informal history of the 1920s only two years after the decade had actually ended, covering Prohibition, the Jazz Age, the rise of consumer culture, and the stock market crash that brought it all to a halt, while it was still recent enough that most readers had lived through every event he described. He identified himself explicitly as a “retrospective journalist” rather than a historian, and his focus throughout is less on policy or economics than on what he called “the changing state of the public mind”, the fads, the styles, the unrecorded emotional textures of a decade that had already begun to feel impossibly distant. The book was a Book of the Month Club selection, sold over a million copies, and became one of the first works to treat a single decade as a coherent unit of popular history.
Only Yesterday matters as one of the earliest and most influential examples of popular history written close enough to its subject to capture genuine lived texture, the specific feel of a decade, rather than the more distanced analysis later historians would eventually bring to the same material. Allen’s informal, anecdotal style became the template for an entire subsequent genre of accessible popular history. Later historians have criticised the book’s narrow focus on the experiences of Harper’s relatively affluent readership, largely ignoring immigrants, Black Americans, and rural communities, a limitation worth keeping in mind even as the book remains genuinely valuable for what it does capture.
The Story of Babar
A young elephant named Babar flees into the human world after his mother is shot by a hunter, and is taken in by a wealthy old lady in a French city who teaches him to dress, speak, and live as a refined gentleman, before Babar eventually returns to the great forest, where his sophistication and his loss combine to see him crowned king of the elephants. De Brunhoff, a French painter, wrote and illustrated the story for his own children, originally as a private bedtime tale, before its publication brought it to a far wider audience and established what would become a long-running series. The book’s elegant, simply rendered illustrations and its melancholy undertone, an orphaned child navigating an unfamiliar world, distinguished it immediately from more conventionally cheerful children’s fare of the period.
The Story of Babar is one of the most influential children’s books of the twentieth century, notable for the way it allows real grief, the death of Babar’s mother, to sit alongside its gentler, more whimsical material without softening or rushing past it. De Brunhoff’s illustrations established a visual language for picture books that subsequent generations of illustrators continued to draw on, and the story’s underlying theme, an outsider finding belonging by absorbing and ultimately reshaping an unfamiliar culture, has been read by later critics through a number of different, sometimes uncomfortable colonial lenses. Read it as a foundational text of modern children’s literature, complications and all.
Where to start
If you want the most formally radical book of the year
→ Read The Waves. Woolf called it a playpoem rather than a novel, and her abandonment of plot and character in favour of pure interior voice remains one of modernism’s most audacious experiments.
If you want Faulkner at his most disturbing
→ Read Sanctuary. He called it a potboiler written purely for money. It became his commercial breakthrough anyway, and it remains one of the most psychologically unflinching novels he ever wrote.
If you want the novel that changed how Americans saw China
→ Read The Good Earth. Pearl Buck’s sympathetic, unsentimental portrait of a Chinese farming family spent two years as the best-selling novel in America and helped lay the groundwork for her Nobel Prize seven years later.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1931
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“I am not one and simple, but complex and many.” — Virginia Woolf, The Waves
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