Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 1939
1939 is the year the world ends its long delay. Germany invades Poland on September 1st. Britain and France declare war two days later. The Depression has not fully lifted. The Spanish Civil War has just concluded, badly. What is remarkable about the literature of 1939 is how much of it knows what is coming — and how much of it is trying to say something permanent before the permanent becomes impossible to say. John Steinbeck publishes the novel that America most needed to hear about itself: a story about dispossession, about what a country owes its most vulnerable citizens, about the specific violence of indifference. James Joyce publishes, at last, the novel that seventeen years of work have produced — a book so radical in its form that it is still not fully read, still not fully understood, still not fully absorbed. Raymond Chandler publishes his first novel at fifty, introducing a private detective named Philip Marlowe who will permanently change what crime fiction is understood to be able to do. And James Hilton's Goodbye, Mr Chips sells in enormous numbers to an audience that seems to understand, without quite saying so, that the world it is being nostalgic for is already gone.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Fiction & Nonfiction · Updated June 2026
The Grapes of Wrath
The Joad family — Oklahoma tenant farmers forced off their land by drought, dust, and the mechanisation of agriculture — load everything they own onto a truck and drive west to California, where they have been told there is work. There is not enough work. The camps are brutal. The landowners are hostile. The police are instruments of the landowners. The novel follows the Joads across Route 66 and into the Central Valley, and it does not look away from what it finds there. Steinbeck had spent 1936 and 1937 visiting the migrant camps with a Farm Security Administration photographer, living with the families whose story he was telling. The novel was published on April 14, 1939, was publicly burned in Kern County, California, debated on national radio, and defended on the floor of Congress. According to the New York Times, it was the best-selling book of 1939, with 430,000 copies in print by February 1940. It won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. John Ford directed the 1940 film with Henry Fonda. Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.
The Grapes of Wrath is the great American social novel of the twentieth century — not because it is the most formally accomplished, but because it is the one that most completely demonstrated what the novel could do as a political instrument. Steinbeck was not writing journalism or propaganda; he was writing a family whose specific, individual humanity made their dispossession impossible to ignore or dismiss. The burning of the book confirmed its power. The chapters that alternate between the Joad narrative and broader documentary passages about the Dust Bowl and the economics of California agriculture are among the finest examples of structural ambition in American fiction. Read it knowing it was written in five months and changed the national conversation about poverty and labour rights.
The Big Sleep
Philip Marlowe — private detective, former DA's investigator, man who cannot be bribed — is hired by a very old, very wealthy man named General Sternwood to deal with a blackmailer. What he finds beneath the blackmail is a Los Angeles of oil money, pornography, gambling, murder, and the specific corruption of great wealth: the way money insulates people from consequence until the insulation itself becomes the problem. Chandler was fifty years old when The Big Sleep was published. He had spent his forties writing short stories for pulp magazines, teaching himself a craft he had invented — the hard-boiled detective story with genuine literary prose — before assembling his first novel from three of those stories. Alfred A. Knopf published it on February 6, 1939. The 1946 film starred Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall; the screenplay was co-written by William Faulkner.
The Big Sleep is the novel that permanently changed what crime fiction was understood to be capable of. Chandler's achievement was not the plot — he famously could not remember who had committed one of the murders, and neither could anyone else, including Bogart — but the prose: a voice so precisely calibrated to its world that every sentence does double work, describing Los Angeles and commenting on it simultaneously. Marlowe is one of the great characters in American fiction not despite the genre but through it: a man with a code in a world that has abandoned the idea of codes. Read this if you have never encountered Chandler; then read The Long Goodbye, which is the one he thought was his best.
Goodbye to Berlin
Six interconnected stories set in Berlin between 1930 and 1933, narrated by a young English writer named Christopher Isherwood who teaches English, observes, and does not quite participate. The stories move through the world of the rooming houses and cabaret clubs and working-class flats of Weimar Berlin, through its Jewish families, its communists, its street violence, its landlady Frläulein Schroeder and her world of small calculations, and most famously through Sally Bowles — an English singer of ordinary talent and extraordinary self-invention. The opening line is the one everyone knows: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking." Isherwood had lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933. He published the stories in two volumes, with Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). Together they became the basis for the stage musical I Am a Camera (1951), then Cabaret (1966), and finally Bob Fosse's film in 1972 with Liza Minnelli.
Goodbye to Berlin is the essential literary record of what Weimar Berlin was — not the historical record (for that, read Sebastian Haffner's memoir) but the felt record: the specific texture of a city that was brilliant and desperate and self-destructive and could not quite believe it was going to become what it became. Isherwood's camera method — the refusal to interpret, the precision of the observed surface — is the right instrument for this subject. The narrator's passivity is the point; the horror of what follows is all the more complete for not being anticipated. Sally Bowles is one of the great characters of the century, exactly because she is not exceptional — she is ordinary, glamorous, doomed, and alive.
Finnegans Wake
A man named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker — HCE — dreams. He may be an innkeeper in Chapelizod, on the Liffey west of Dublin. His wife is Anna Livia Plurabelle. His sons are Shem and Shaun. His daughter is Issy. The Wake is the account of his dream, and it is written in a language that is not quite English: a portmanteau language that collapses dozens of languages and thousands of years of history into single words, that uses puns and allusions and sound patterns to say several things simultaneously, that moves from myth to history to gossip to prayer to joke without warning and without transition. Joyce worked on it from 1922 to 1939, publishing sections under the title Work in Progress. T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Samuel Beckett watched it develop. Pound wrote to Joyce saying he could not make head or tail of it. Beckett wrote an essay in its defence. Its final sentence is the beginning of its first.
Finnegans Wake is on this list not as a recommendation in the ordinary sense — it is genuinely difficult and cannot be read without effort — but as a record of what 1939 contained. Joyce understood that the great epic of the twentieth century would have to be written in a language adequate to the fragmentation of consciousness that the century represented, and that such a language would necessarily be unreadable by conventional means. The last pages, the Anna Livia Plurabelle monologue, are among the most beautiful prose in the English language and can be read in isolation. Start there. The rest will wait, and will reward the attempt when you are ready for it.
Rebecca
A young, nameless woman marries the wealthy widower Maxim de Winter and comes to live at his great Cornish estate, Manderley — a house that is still entirely organised around the presence of his first wife, Rebecca, who drowned the previous year. The housekeeper Mrs Danvers worshipped Rebecca and refuses to allow her memory to die. The novel is narrated from an unspecified future in which the narrator already knows how everything ended, which gives it a quality of elegy from the first page. Du Maurier published it in August 1938; it crossed the Atlantic to become one of the most widely-read novels of 1939. Alfred Hitchcock directed the 1940 film with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Rebecca has never been out of print.
Rebecca is a novel that operates simultaneously as a gripping gothic thriller and as a precise psychological study of insecurity, obsession, and the specific damage that a predecessor can do to a marriage and a self. The narrator's lack of a name is not an oversight — it is the novel's central argument: she has come into a house where someone else's identity is so overwhelming that her own cannot take hold. Mrs Danvers is one of the great villains in English fiction, not because she commits violence but because her devotion to a dead woman is itself a form of destruction. The opening sentence — "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" — is one of the most famous in twentieth-century English fiction.
Wind, Sand and Stars
Saint-Exupéry was an airmail pilot who flew routes across the Sahara and South America in the earliest years of commercial aviation, when flying was still an enterprise of genuine physical danger and the pilots who did it were required to navigate by stars and landmarks in aircraft without instruments in deserts where a forced landing could mean death by dehydration. Wind, Sand and Stars is the memoir of those years: the crashes, the rescues, the landscapes, the other pilots, and the meditations on courage, solitude, and the meaning of human life that the conditions of the work produced. It won the Prix Femina in France and the National Book Award in the United States. It is the book from which The Little Prince grew, and it contains the same quality of serious attention to the human being that the later work made famous.
Wind, Sand and Stars is the nonfiction book on this list most likely to change how you think about what you are reading while you are reading it. Saint-Exupéry writes about flight and the desert and the specific loneliness of being somewhere utterly inhospitable and having to think clearly enough to survive, and the meditations that arise from that situation are not abstract philosophy — they are the thoughts of a man who has spent real time in real danger and has arrived at real conclusions. The prose is extraordinary in Lewis Galantière's translation. Read it as the work that made The Little Prince possible, and read it as itself.
And Then There Were None
Ten people — strangers to each other, connected only by their invitation — arrive on Soldier Island off the Devon coast, where they are the guests of a host who does not appear. That night, a gramophone record accuses each of them of a murder they were never prosecuted for. The next morning, one of them is dead. The deaths continue, following the nursery rhyme posted in each guest's room: ten little Soldier boys, and then there were none. Christie later said she considered it the most difficult of all her novels to write — making the puzzle both fair and unsolvable, hiding the killer in plain sight without cheating the reader. Published in November 1939, it has sold approximately 100 million copies — making it the best-selling crime novel ever written, and one of the best-selling books of any kind in history.
And Then There Were None earns its place on a literary list for two reasons. The first is formal: Christie's solution to the locked-room-and-no-suspect problem is genuinely ingenious, and the construction of the novel is as precise as any high modernist work published the same year — it simply uses different rules, different conventions, and a different relationship with the reader. The second reason is the sales record: a hundred million copies is a cultural fact. That many people have read this particular story, in this particular form, with this particular solution, and that most of them have been surprised by it — that is worth understanding as well as the novel itself.
Where to start
If you want the novel that most completely changed a national conversation
→ Read The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize winner was publicly burned, debated on national radio, and defended in Congress. No other novel of the decade had more direct political consequence. Written in five months. Read it in one week.
If you want the novel that permanently changed a genre
→ Read The Big Sleep. Chandler introduced Philip Marlowe at fifty, after a decade of short stories, and transformed crime fiction into literary fiction. The plot is famously unsolvable. The sentences are the point.
If you want to understand what Weimar Berlin felt like from the inside
→ Read Goodbye to Berlin. Isherwood lived there from 1929 to 1933 and recorded what he saw with the patience and precision of a camera. Sally Bowles. Frläulein Schroeder. The specific texture of a world that did not know it was about to end. It became Cabaret. The stories are better.
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“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” — Daphne du Maurier, RebKcca
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