Reading list
The best books of the 1920s, free to read
Every January another year of books enters the public domain in the United States, and the 1920s are now all in: the decade when the novel stopped explaining itself and started showing what it is like to be inside a head, at a party, at a war or in a city at night.
22 books, all free to read
These are the books of that decade still read for pleasure, not homework. A note on rights: they are public domain in the US; outside it some authors' works are still in copyright, so check where you live.
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1. The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A self-made man throws parties for a woman across the bay. Short and perfect, and sadder every time you read it.
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2. Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
One June day in London, from inside the heads of a society hostess and a shell-shocked veteran. Woolf's most approachable book.
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3. The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
Expatriates drink their way from Paris to the bullfights in Pamplona. Hemingway's first and best novel.
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4. All Quiet on the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque
A German schoolboy volunteers and finds out what the trenches are. The war novel that every war novel since answers to.
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5. Ulysses
by James Joyce
One day in Dublin, told every way a story can be told. Hard in places and very funny in others; a feed helps.
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6. Siddhartha
by Hermann Hesse
A Brahmin's son leaves home to find enlightenment and finds a river. Short and calm, and it has never gone out of print.
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7. To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
A family's summers in Scotland, ten years apart, and a trip to a lighthouse that keeps being put off. Woolf at her best.
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8. The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
The decline of a Southern family, told first by a man who cannot understand time. Difficult, and then astonishing.
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9. The Maltese Falcon
by Dashiell Hammett
Sam Spade, a dead partner and a jewelled bird. The decade ends hardboiled.
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10. A Passage to India
by E. M. Forster
An accusation in the Marabar Caves splits a town in British India. Forster's last novel and his best.
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11. Steppenwolf
by Hermann Hesse
A lonely intellectual who feels half wolf is taught to dance by a young woman. Hesse's strangest book.
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12. The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
New York society in the 1870s, a man engaged to the right woman and in love with the wrong one. It won Wharton the Pulitzer.
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13. A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
An American ambulance driver and an English nurse on the Italian front. Hemingway's love story, and his most famous ending.
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14. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
by Agatha Christie
The 1926 Christie that broke the rules of the detective story. Read it before someone spoils it.
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15. Babbitt
by Sinclair Lewis
A real-estate man in a booming Midwestern city, and the satire that put his name in the dictionary.
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16. We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin
The Soviet dystopia that came before Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and taught them both.
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17. Cane
by Jean Toomer
Stories, poems and a play about Black life in Georgia and Washington. The book that opened the Harlem Renaissance.
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18. Quicksand
by Nella Larsen
A young woman of mixed race looks for a place to belong, from Chicago to Harlem to Copenhagen. Nella Larsen's first novel.
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19. The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann
A visitor to a Swiss sanatorium stays seven years. Mann's huge, funny novel about time and ideas before the war.
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20. The Prophet
by Kahlil Gibran
A prophet's farewell sermons on love, work and children. Short, and one of the bestselling books of the century.
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21. Death Comes for the Archbishop
by Willa Cather
Two French priests in the New Mexico desert over forty years. Cather's quietest, most beautiful book.
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22. The Bridge of San Luis Rey
by Thornton Wilder
A bridge in Peru collapses and a friar tries to find out why those five people died. Short and it won the Pulitzer.
Read it as a path: The 1920s modern classics
The decade that made the novel modern, in eight books.
More lists
Read them free
Every book on this list is free in Doomreader: open one and it reads as short posts you scroll, with your place kept and its best pages a tap away. You can listen to any of them free too, read aloud by your device.