Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1937
1937 is the year before the years everyone remembers. The Spanish Civil War is in its bloodiest phase. The Depression has not fully released its grip on the industrial north of England or the migrant labour camps of California. And yet the literature of 1937 is, in several of its most enduring works, strangely far from the headlines — as if some of the century's most lasting books needed to be written about small worlds precisely because the large one was becoming unbearable to look at directly. John Steinbeck publishes a hundred-page novella about two ranch hands and a dream of owning a few acres of land. An Oxford philologist who has been telling his children bedtime stories for years finally publishes the book those stories became, about a hobbit who did not want an adventure and got one anyway. A novelist in Haiti, writing in seven weeks under what she called internal pressure, produces a novel about a Black woman's three marriages in Florida that the world is not yet ready to value. And George Orwell goes north, lives with coal miners, and writes the book that first articulated what English class actually felt like from the inside.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Updated June 2026
Of Mice and Men
George Milton and Lennie Small are itinerant ranch hands moving from job to job in Depression-era California, bound together by a friendship that is part responsibility and part genuine love: George manages Lennie, who is immensely strong and intellectually disabled, and protects him from a world that does not know how to handle what Lennie is. Together they share a dream — a small plot of land, rabbits, independence — that the novella's structure makes clear from the opening pages will not survive contact with the world they actually live in. Steinbeck took the title from Robert Burns's poem "To a Mouse": the best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley. He structured the novella like a three-act play and adapted it for the stage the same year. The Nobel committee, awarding Steinbeck the prize in 1962, singled it out as "a tiny masterpiece."
Of Mice and Men achieves in under a hundred pages what many longer novels fail to achieve in three hundred: a complete tragic structure in which the ending feels both inevitable and devastating, foreshadowed from the first chapter and earned by every choice that follows. Steinbeck's economy of style — the way he conveys Lennie's nature through behaviour rather than diagnosis, the way he lets the dream of the farm carry the entire emotional weight of the novella — is a masterclass in compression. The final act, in which George must choose between two unbearable outcomes, is one of the most morally complex endings in American fiction, precisely because it refuses to offer the reader an easy judgment.
The Hobbit
Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit — a small, comfort-loving creature with no interest whatsoever in adventures — who is recruited by the wizard Gandalf and thirteen dwarves to help reclaim a stolen treasure and a mountain kingdom from the dragon Smaug. Tolkien, an Oxford philologist specialising in Old and Middle English, had been inventing stories for his children for years; the manuscript began, by his own account, with a single sentence written on a blank exam paper he was grading: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." George Allen & Unwin published the book on the recommendation of the publisher's ten-year-old son, Rayner Unwin, who was paid a shilling to review the manuscript and reported that he thought "it good." It became the foundation of the entire fantasy genre as commercially understood today, and the direct prelude to The Lord of the Rings, published seventeen years later.
The Hobbit matters not only as a beloved children's book but as the text that essentially created the modern fantasy genre's vocabulary — the quest narrative, the wise but withholding wizard, the reluctant hero who discovers unexpected reserves of courage, the dragon as the ultimate guardian of treasure and destruction. Tolkien's philological training is everywhere in the texture: the names, the songs, the sense that this world has a deep history extending far beyond the events of the story. Bilbo's transformation — from a hobbit who values his pantry and his armchair above all things to one who can face a dragon and negotiate a kingdom's fate — is the most influential character arc in the genre's subsequent hundred years.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Janie Crawford is a Black woman in central Florida in the early twentieth century, and the novel traces her life across three marriages — from a loveless arrangement forced on her by her grandmother, through a controlling second husband, to her relationship with Tea Cake, the man who finally allows her to discover who she actually is. Hurston wrote the novel in Haiti in seven weeks, describing herself as working "under internal pressure," and the prose moves between a precise vernacular dialogue and passages of lyrical, almost biblical narration. The novel was initially received poorly within the Black literary establishment of its own moment, with Richard Wright among its harshest critics, who objected to its focus on a woman's interior life rather than direct racial confrontation. It was rediscovered after Alice Walker's 1975 essay "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" and a 1980 biography by Robert Hemenway, and is now considered a foundational text of African American literature.
Their Eyes Were Watching God is the novel on this list whose reputation has travelled the furthest distance — from near-obscurity to its current status as one of the essential American novels of the twentieth century. Hurston's achievement was to write a Black woman's interior life, her desire, her growth, her self-possession, as the novel's entire subject, at a moment when the dominant literary expectation for Black writers was social protest fiction addressed to a white audience. Janie's journey toward "her road" — the phrase Hurston uses for self-determination — is a feminist achievement decades ahead of when it could be fully recognised as one. The hurricane sequence near the novel's end is among the most powerfully written passages in American fiction.
The Road to Wigan Pier
Orwell spent months in 1936 living among the unemployed and the working poor in the industrial towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire — lodging in cheap rooming houses, descending into coal mines, observing the specific texture of poverty in the north of England during the Depression. The first half of the book is the resulting reportage: precise, unsentimental, and frequently shocking in its physical detail, including the often-quoted description of a coal miner's working conditions. The second half is a more personal and controversial essay on Orwell's own middle-class upbringing and his attempt to explain why many people who would benefit most from socialism are, in practice, among its strongest opponents. Victor Gollancz, the socialist publisher who commissioned it for the Left Book Club, wanted to publish only the first half; Orwell refused.
The Road to Wigan Pier is the book that established Orwell's specific method: the conviction that political argument is only honest when it is grounded in direct physical experience, and that abstraction without observation is a kind of intellectual cowardice. The first half's description of mining conditions remains one of the most vivid pieces of social reportage in the English language. The second half is more uncomfortable and more interesting — Orwell's honest acknowledgment that socialism's own advocates frequently make it unappealing to the very people it is meant to serve is a critique that retains its force. Read both halves, even though Gollancz wanted you to read only one.
To Have and Have Not
Harry Morgan is a fishing-boat captain working out of Key West, Florida, who turns to smuggling and other illegal work after his charter business fails during the Depression. The novel follows his gradual moral and economic desperation against the backdrop of the gap between the wealthy yacht owners of Key West and the men, like Morgan, who serve them and cannot survive on legitimate work. It was Hemingway's fourth novel and his second set in the United States, written sporadically between 1935 and 1937 while he was also travelling to and from the Spanish Civil War as a journalist. It is the most explicitly class-conscious of his major novels.
To Have and Have Not is the least admired of Hemingway's major novels by most critics, and is on this list partly for that reason — it is worth understanding why a writer at the height of his powers produced something this uneven, and what is nonetheless valuable in it. The novel's structural seams are visible; it was assembled partly from previously published stories. But Harry Morgan's class fury, his recognition that the economic system simply does not allow a man like him to survive within its rules, gives the book a political edge that distinguishes it from the more interior, individually-focused tragedies of Hemingway's other protagonists. It was the basis for the 1944 Howard Hawks film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, though the film bears little resemblance to the novel's plot.
Death on the Nile
Hercule Poirot is taking a holiday cruise down the Nile when a wealthy young heiress, Linnet Doyle, is found shot dead in her cabin. The suspects include her husband, the woman he jilted to marry her, and a cast of fellow passengers each carrying a secret motive of their own. Christie sets the puzzle within the confined, glamorous space of the steamer, using the Egyptian setting — drawn from her own travels with her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan — to provide both atmosphere and the closed circle of suspects that her plots required. It is widely regarded as one of her finest constructions, admired for the precision with which the solution is hidden in plain sight throughout.
Death on the Nile belongs on this list as the representative of Golden Age detective fiction at its most accomplished — not because it is more "serious" than the other books here, but because the precision of its construction is itself a kind of literary achievement worth taking on its own terms. Christie's gift was never simply plotting; it was the management of reader attention, the careful distribution of true and false signals so that the solution feels both surprising and, upon rereading, completely fair. The Egyptian setting gives the novel a visual and atmospheric richness that distinguishes it from her English country house mysteries, and it remains one of the most frequently adapted and admired of all her novels.
Out of Africa
Karen Blixen, writing under the pen name Isak Dinesen, lived on a coffee farm in British East Africa, in what is now Kenya, from 1914 to 1931. Out of Africa is her memoir of those years — the farm, the Kikuyu and Somali people she lived among and employed, the landscape, the animals, her relationship with the big-game hunter Denys Finch Hatton, and the eventual collapse of the farm and her return to Denmark. The book is structured not chronologically but episodically, moving through scenes and reflections in a prose that Ernest Hemingway said he wished he could write, and that critics have compared to Conrad in its precision and to the King James Bible in its cadence. It became the basis for the 1985 film starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Out of Africa is on this list as the most stylistically distinctive book of the year — a prose so controlled and so unusual in its rhythms that it does not read like anything else from the period. Dinesen's relationship to colonial East Africa is complicated and has been critically reassessed in recent decades; she writes with real affection for individual people and also within a colonial framework that the book does not fully interrogate. Read it for both reasons: for the prose, which is genuinely extraordinary, and as a document of a particular and consequential way of seeing that deserves to be read critically rather than simply admired.
Where to start
If you want the most perfectly constructed short novel of the year
→ Read Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck achieves a complete tragic structure in under a hundred pages. You can read it in an afternoon and think about the ending for years.
If you want the book that became the foundation of an entire genre
→ Read The Hobbit. Tolkien's children's book, recommended for publication by a ten-year-old, created the vocabulary that fantasy fiction still uses today and led directly to The Lord of the Rings.
If you want the novel whose reputation travelled furthest after 1937
→ Read Their Eyes Were Watching God. Dismissed by some of Hurston's own contemporaries, rediscovered in the 1970s, now considered one of the essential American novels. Janie Crawford's journey toward self-possession was decades ahead of its moment.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 1937
From the bookshelf
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
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