Ulysses
1922 · 694 pages
Leopold Bloom walks Dublin for one day in June 1904, and Joyce pours the whole English language into it. Bloom, advertising canvasser and cuckold, is the kindest man in fiction.
★ 9.7
Browse by time · decade
1920s
1920 – 1929
Showing 457 works across all media from the 1920s
In Search of Lost Time (set of 6)
1922 · 4211 pages
The most complete account of memory ever written. A man tastes a madeleine, and three thousand pages of remembered love, jealousy, and vanished aristocrats change permanently how you look at your own past.
★ 9.7
Water Lilies (Nympheas Cycle)
1926 · Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris
Monet painted these eight murals of his pond for two oval rooms in Paris while his eyesight failed. They opened months after he died.
★ 9.5
The Great Gatsby
1925 · 208 pages
Gatsby throws enormous parties hoping the woman he loved will wander into one. Fitzgerald made the Jazz Age America's myth of itself, and the last page is the most beautiful in American writing.
★ 9.4
The Waste Land
1922 · 234 pages
April is the cruellest month, and from that line Eliot assembles a ruined Europe out of voices, tarot cards, and pub talk. The fragments lodge in the memory for good.
★ 9.4
To the Lighthouse
1927 · 209 pages
At a summer house by the sea a trip to the lighthouse keeps being postponed, and Woolf gets so close to how a mind works that years pass and grief arrives in passing.
★ 9.2
The Sound and the Fury
1929 · 321 pages
Four sections circle one Mississippi family's ruin, and the first belongs to a brother who cannot speak or keep time in order. Faulkner makes confusion itself carry the weight of grief.
★ 9.2
West End Blues
1928
Armstrong's twelve-second opening cadenza announced that jazz had a soloist, and everything since has been the answer.
★ 9.1
The Magic Mountain
1924 · 706 pages
Hans Castorp goes to a Swiss sanatorium to visit his tubercular cousin for three weeks and stays seven years. Time comes loose there while the patients debate everything and Europe drifts into war.
★ 9.1
Mrs. Dalloway
1925 · 197 pages
Clarissa Dalloway buys the flowers herself and gives a party, one June day in London, while a veteran wrecked by the war comes apart nearby. Woolf moves between strangers' minds without warning.
★ 9.0
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
The Second Coming · 1920
Metropolis
Directed by Fritz Lang
1927
Science fiction has been raiding its designs for a century: Lang built a vertical city and a metal woman in 1927, and both are still turning up in new films.
★ 8.8
The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka
1924 · 486 pages
An officer demonstrates his execution machine with love, and a hunger artist starves himself before crowds that have stopped watching. Kafka's imagination runs at full strength in the short forms.
★ 8.7
Rhapsody in Blue
1924 · From Rhapsody in Blue
Ross Gorman slurred the opening clarinet as a joke in rehearsal, and Gershwin kept the wail for Aeolian Hall.
★ 8.7
The Passion of Joan of Arc
Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer
1928
No screen performance has been called greater, and its actress never made another film: Dreyer shot Renee Falconetti's face in close-up, and his original cut went missing for fifty years.
★ 8.7
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
Directed by F. W. Murnau
1927
It won the only Academy Award ever given for Unique and Artistic Picture: Murnau's camera never stops moving, and the film is astonishing to look at a century on.
★ 8.6
The General
Directed by Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman
1926
Keaton did every stunt himself and dropped a real locomotive through a burning bridge: it flopped, cost him his independence within two years, and is now considered the great silent comedy.
★ 8.6
Bird in Space
1928 · Museum of Modern Art, New York
American customs taxed it as industrial metal until Brancusi v. United States in 1928 forced the law to recognize abstract sculpture as art.
★ 8.6
Being and Time
1927 · 592 pages
Philosophy forgot to ask what it means for anything to exist. Heidegger rebuilds the question around the ordinary human being, thrown into a world he did not choose and running out of time.
★ 8.5
A Passage to India
1924 · 322 pages
Something happens in the dark of the Marabar Caves, and an Englishwoman accuses the Indian doctor who brought her there. Forster watches a colonial society close ranks and goodwill count for nothing.
★ 8.5
The Castle
1926 · 352 pages
K. arrives in a village claiming the castle above it hired him as land surveyor, and never reaches anyone who can confirm it. Waiting becomes the whole of his life there.
★ 8.4
Nosferatu
Directed by F. W. Murnau
1922
A court ordered every print destroyed and the film survived anyway: Murnau's unauthorized Dracula gave horror its first permanent image, a shadow climbing a staircase toward a door.
★ 8.4
Stardust (1927)
1927
Carmichael whistled the tune to his band at Gennett and cut it fast; Parish added the lyric two years later.
★ 8.3
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
1922 · 125 pages
Seven numbered propositions draw the limits of what can be said. Language pictures facts, Wittgenstein argues, so ethics and God fall outside it, and the final proposition tells you to stop talking.
★ 8.2
A Room of One's Own
1929 · 112 pages
Give a woman five hundred a year and a room with a lock and she will write, Woolf argues, then invents a gifted sister for Shakespeare and follows her to a terrible end.
★ 8.0
All Quiet on the Western Front
1928 · 304 pages
German schoolboys enlist after a teacher's patriotic speech and find mud, lice, and men dying badly. Remarque was in those trenches, and no book has done more damage to the idea of glory.
★ 8.0
The Sun Also Rises
1926 · 256 pages
From the cafes of Paris to the bullring at Pamplona, expatriates drink and travel and love the wrong people. Hemingway leaves the wound unnamed, and what nobody says sits under every line.
★ 8.0
A Farewell to Arms
1929 · 332 pages
Driving ambulances for the Italian army, an American falls in love with an English nurse while the front collapses around them. Hemingway's plain sentences leave you completely undefended by the last page.
★ 8.0
The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe)
1929 · LACMA, Los Angeles
The words under the pipe are correct, since a painting of a pipe is not a pipe, which is the whole and entire joke.
★ 7.9
Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground
1927
Wordless humming answered by a pocketknife slide, an 1792 hymn tune NASA put on the Voyager Golden Record.
★ 7.8
Three Musicians
1921 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
A harlequin, a Pierrot and a monk in flat interlocking shapes that look cut from paper. Synthetic Cubism at its grandest and most deadpan.
★ 7.8
The Gold Rush
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
1925
Chaplin said this was the film he wanted to be remembered for: the boiled boot eaten like a banquet, the dancing dinner rolls, and a cabin on a cliff edge.
★ 7.7
T for Texas (Blue Yodel No. 1)
1928
Cut in a converted Camden church in 1927, two takes, and the yodel that made hillbilly records big business.
★ 7.7
St. Louis BluesBessie Smith
St. Louis Blues
1925 · From The Complete Recordings
Armstrong's cornet answering every line Smith sings, with only a wheezing harmonium underneath, cut in New York in 1925.
★ 7.5
Ain't Misbehavin'
1929
Waller sold every song in Hot Chocolates for five hundred dollars, then cut this one alone for Victor.
★ 7.5
Singin' the Blues
1927
No vocal, the melody withheld until the final chorus, and Beiderbecke's cornet solo transcribed note-for-note by Fletcher Henderson's orchestra.
★ 7.4
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
The Great Gatsby · 1925
The Age of Innocence
1920 · 336 pages
Newland Archer, engaged to the right New York girl, falls for her cousin the Countess Olenska, back from a ruinous European marriage. Old New York moves against them without ever raising its voice.
★ 7.2
Siddhartha
1922 · 132 pages
Siddhartha leaves home to seek enlightenment, meets the Buddha and declines to follow him, then spends years chasing money and a courtesan. What finally teaches him is a river and its ferryman.
★ 7.2
The Elephant Celebes
1921 · Tate Modern, London
Part boiler, part elephant, with a tusked hose coming out of its head. Ernst took the shape from a photograph of an African grain bin.
★ 7.2
The Three Dancers
1925 · Tate Modern, London
Picasso's classical calm breaks here into something jagged and violent, the limbs flung out almost crucified, set off by the death of an old friend.
★ 7.2
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
1922 · 550 pages
Lawrence rode with the Arab tribes revolting against the Ottoman Empire, dynamited their trains, and took Aqaba from the desert side. He tells it as epic and never stops accusing himself.
★ 7.2
The Story of My Experiments with Truth
1929 · 448 pages
The method that would break an empire took shape over twenty years in South Africa, and Gandhi sets it down beside his vows, his diets, and his failures, with disarming candor.
★ 7.2
Composition VIII
1923 · Guggenheim, New York City
Circles, triangles and floating lines arranged with the precision of a score. Kandinsky painted it while teaching at the Bauhaus, his storms over.
★ 7.2
The Worst Journey in the World
1922 · 573 pages
Three men hauled sledges through five weeks of Antarctic winter darkness to fetch penguin eggs, in cold that cracked Cherry-Garrard's teeth. That was before Scott's polar party failed to come back.
★ 7.1
Babbitt
1922 · 368 pages
George Babbitt sells real estate in a booming midwestern city, loves his car, and believes whatever his club believes. When he finally tries to break out, Lewis is merciless and then unexpectedly kind.
★ 7.1
Three Women
1922 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Three nudes turned on a lathe, smooth and tubular, laid out among furniture built to match. The odalisque redone for the age of the factory.
★ 7.1
Carnival of Harlequin
1925 · Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
A cat plays a guitar and an eye drifts past on a stalk. Miró said the hallucinations of hunger in his Paris studio fed the picture.
★ 7.1
The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China
1922 · 448 pages
Modern Chinese literature begins here. Ah Q, a village laborer, turns every beating into a spiritual victory, and a madman reads the Confucian classics until the words eat people surface between the lines.
★ 7.0
Wildwood Flower
1928
Maybelle Carter played melody and rhythm at once, and every country guitarist since has learned this 1860 parlor tune.
★ 7.0
The Garden Party and Other Stories
1923 · 256 pages
The morning of a wealthy family's garden party, a carter dies in the cottages below and a young daughter carries the leftovers down to his house. Mansfield catches life where it cracks.
★ 7.0
Parade's End
1928 · 906 pages
Christopher Tietjens, a government statistician called the last Tory, endures a wife bent on ruining him and a war in France that takes apart the England he was raised to defend.
★ 7.0
I, Too · 1926
In Search of Lost Time · 1922
Billy Budd, Sailor
1924 · 385 pages
Struck dumb by a false charge of mutiny, a beautiful young sailor answers with his fist and kills his accuser. Melville leaves his captain to choose between the law and the plain truth.
★ 7.0
Red Cavalry
1926 · 320 pages
Riding with Bolshevik Cossacks through Poland in 1920, a Jewish intellectual watches them sack towns and kill prisoners. Babel writes the atrocity in sentences so beautiful that the effect is obscene.
★ 7.0
Orlando
A Biography
1928 · 333 pages
Orlando starts as a boy at Queen Elizabeth's court and ends as a woman in 1928 London, changing sex without fuss. Woolf wrote it for her lover Vita Sackville-West, and the joy shows.
★ 7.0
Death Comes for the Archbishop
1927 · 297 pages
Two French priests give their lives to a diocese in territorial New Mexico. Cather dissolves plot into landscape and legend, and their friendship carries decades of desert riding without a raised voice.
★ 7.0
The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.
The Professor's House · 1925
Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.
Compania General de Tabacos de Filipinas v. Collector of Internal Revenue · 1927
Steppenwolf
1927 · 224 pages
Harry Haller believes he is half man, half wolf: too fine for bourgeois life, too weak to leave it. A dance hall woman leads him into jazz, drugs, and the Magic Theater.
★ 6.9
The False Mirror
1928 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
One enormous eye with a cloudy sky for an iris. Whether it is looking out or reflecting back is the question.
★ 6.9
Civilization and Its Discontents
1929 · 186 pages
Freud's answer to why we are unhappy: civilization survives only by making us surrender aggression and desire, and the aggression we cannot spend outward turns inward as a permanent, unpayable sense of guilt.
★ 6.9
Downhearted BluesBessie Smith
Downhearted Blues
1923 · From The Complete Recordings
Alberta Hunter and Lovie Austin wrote it; Smith's debut record sold 780,000 copies in six months, just voice and piano.
★ 6.9
Black and Tan Fantasy
1927
Miley's growl trumpet, Nanton's plunger-muted trombone, and a Chopin funeral march closing out the 1927 Victor side.
★ 6.9
Crazy Blues
1920
Seventy-five thousand copies in two months, Perry Bradford's tune, and Smith's voice opening the record industry to Black audiences.
★ 6.8
Automat
1927 · Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines
One cup of coffee, one glove still on, and a window behind her that reflects nothing but two rows of ceiling lights.
★ 6.8
Rhapsody in Blue
1924
The famous clarinet wail at the start was a joke the player improvised in rehearsal, and Gershwin told him to keep it in.
★ 6.8
The Tilled Field
1924 · Guggenheim, New York City
An eye and an ear sprout from a tree and a lizard wears a cap. Miró's Catalan farm has come apart into Surrealism.
★ 6.8
Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti
1925 · Location unknown
She painted herself at the wheel in leather helmet and gloves for a German fashion magazine, and invented the look of the Jazz Age.
★ 6.7
Pony Blues
1929
H.C. Speir set up the June 1929 session, and Patton's first Paramount release still sounds like the Delta's starting point.
★ 6.7
The Complete Tales of Winnie-The-Pooh
1927 · 344 pages
Pooh is a bear of very little brain, moving through the Hundred Acre Wood by way of honey, a heffalump trap, and Eeyore's lost tail. The goodbye at the end undoes adults.
★ 6.6
The Good Soldier Svejk
1923 · 784 pages
Josef Svejk, a Prague dealer in stolen dogs officially certified an idiot, is swept into the Austro-Hungarian army and obeys every order so eagerly that the whole war machine looks ridiculous.
★ 6.6
Zeno's Conscience
1923 · 464 pages
Zeno quits smoking constantly and never quits. Told by his analyst to write his life, he sets down a marriage begun by proposing to three sisters in one evening, and lies gorgeously throughout.
★ 6.6
We
1924 · 225 pages
Numbered citizens live in glass apartments under a Table of Hours, and the engineer D-503 records his own unraveling. Banned in Russia until 1988, it gave Orwell his model for Nineteen Eighty-Four.
★ 6.6
Goodbye to All That
1929 · 347 pages
Reported dead to his family at the Somme, Graves came home from the trenches unable to sleep. This is his farewell to England and to the whole world that sent him there.
★ 6.6
The Counterfeiters
1925 · 467 pages
Every life in Gide's novel is a forgery: boys passing false coins, adults faking passions they do not feel, and a novelist inside the book writing a novel called The Counterfeiters.
★ 6.6
An American Tragedy
1925 · 972 pages
Clyde Griffiths, raised by street preachers and starving for money, gets a factory girl pregnant as a rich one turns toward him. Dreiser drew the lake that follows from a 1906 murder case.
★ 6.5
Lady Chatterley's Lover
1928 · 342 pages
Paralyzed in the war, Clifford Chatterley loses his wife to the gamekeeper. Lawrence insists tenderness is physical or nothing, and the 1960 jury that cleared the book remade what British publishers could print.
★ 6.5
The Maltese Falcon
1929 · 217 pages
Chandler said Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley. His detective Sam Spade loses a partner, trusts nobody, and chases a black statuette worth killing for.
★ 6.5
Woman Combing Her Hair
1920 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Goyo oversaw every stage of his prints himself and finished only a handful before dying young. This is the one everyone knows.
★ 6.5
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
1924 · 60 pages
Neruda was nineteen when these poems appeared, mapping a woman's body onto hills, water, and dusk with a directness that startled readers. Millions of copies later, they are the best-selling poetry in Spanish.
★ 6.5
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
1927 · 128 pages
In 1714 a rope bridge in Peru snaps and five travelers fall to their deaths. A Franciscan who witnessed it spends six years reconstructing their lives to prove God chose them.
★ 6.5
Coming of Age in Samoa
1928 · 223 pages
Sixty-eight girls on the Samoan island of Ta'u convinced Mead that the turmoil of adolescence is made by culture, not biology. She turned anthropology into an argument ordinary Americans took sides in.
★ 6.4
That's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.
The Great Gatsby · 1925
New York Street with Moon
1925 · Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Her male colleagues doubted a woman could paint the city, so O'Keeffe painted the city, with a moon caught between two dark buildings.
★ 6.3
Eclipse of the Sun
1926 · Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington NY
A headless official takes advice from an industrialist, a blinkered donkey listens above, and a dollar sign has blotted out the sun.
★ 6.3
Nadja
1928 · 160 pages
Walking Paris in 1926, Breton meets a woman who calls herself Nadja and lives entirely by chance. Photographs of the real streets interrupt the account, and surrealism never came closer to a novel.
★ 6.3
Castle and Sun
1928 · Private collection
Small colored blocks stack up into a town like stained glass, with a red sun above. Klee taught at the Bauhaus and kept the whimsy.
★ 6.3
The Menaced Assassin
1927 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
A murdered woman on a divan, a calm man listening to a gramophone, and two men with a club and a net waiting outside the door.
★ 6.3
Naomi
1924 · 237 pages
Joji, a Tokyo engineer, takes home a fifteen-year-old cafe waitress to raise into a Western-style wife, and she ruins him instead. Naomi became the emblem of Japan's modern girl and scandalized older readers.
★ 6.3
The White Guard
1926 · 304 pages
Kyiv, winter 1918: three Turbin siblings hold their apartment while the government falls and Ukrainian nationalists seize the city. Bulgakov's doomed White officers so charmed Stalin he saw the stage version fifteen times.
★ 6.3
The Kid
Directed by Charlie Chaplin
1921
Comedy and heartbreak arrive in the same shot, which almost nobody has managed since: Chaplin's first feature has a tramp raising an abandoned boy, and Jackie Coogan was five years old.
★ 6.2
In Search of Lost Time · 1922
Dempsey and Firpo
1924 · Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
Firpo has just punched Dempsey clean out of the ring and into the laps of the reporters. Bellows painted the exact instant.
★ 6.1
Main Street
1920 · 898 pages
Carol Milford marries a doctor and moves to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, determined to civilize it. The town wins, and Lewis made Main Street a byword for everything narrow and self-satisfied in American life.
★ 6.1
La Belle Rafaela
1927 · Location unknown
The odalisque rebuilt in the machine age, all gleaming curves against deep red, sensual and cold at exactly the same time.
★ 6.1
Therese Desqueyroux
1927 · 128 pages
Cleared of poisoning her husband because her family closes ranks, Therese rides home through the pine forests of the Landes trying to explain herself. Mauriac makes provincial Catholic marriage feel like slow suffocation.
★ 6.0
Dulce et Decorum Est · 1920
1926
United States v. Schwimmer · 1929