White Crucifixion
1938 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Christ wears a Jewish prayer shawl while a synagogue burns and refugees flee by boat. Chagall painted it in 1938, watching what was coming.
★ 7.2
Browse by time · year
1938
Showing 48 works across all media from 1938
Time Transfixed
1938 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
A small steam locomotive comes out of a fireplace under the mantel clock, and the room around it is otherwise entirely ordinary.
★ 7.2
Bringing Up Baby
Directed by Howard Hawks
1938
Nobody talks faster than this: Hawks overlapped every line until the dialogue becomes a physical event, and it did badly enough that exhibitors called Hepburn box office poison.
★ 7.1
The Black Jacobins
1938 · 448 pages
Enslaved people in the French colony that became Haiti rose in 1791 and defeated Napoleon's army. James wrote their revolution as world history, with Toussaint Louverture, born a slave, at its center.
★ 7.0
Selected Poems
1938 · 167 pages
Dense, classical, and packed with Petersburg stone and Black Sea light, from a poet the state killed for sixteen lines about Stalin. His widow saved them by memorizing every one.
★ 6.9
Nausea
1938 · 192 pages
Roquentin, a scholar alone in a French port town, watches ordinary objects turn strange and sickening in his hands. Under a chestnut tree the bare fact that anything exists at all overwhelms him.
★ 6.9
Brighton Rock
1938 · 270 pages
Pinkie Brown runs a Brighton razor gang at seventeen, kills without flinching, and believes in hell the way other people believe in weather. Greene makes damnation the engine of a seaside thriller.
★ 6.9
Homage to Catalonia
1938 · 250 pages
Orwell joined a militia on the Aragon front, took a sniper's bullet through the throat, then watched Communist allies brand his comrades fascists. The clearest book anyone wrote about being lied to.
★ 6.9
Begin the BeguineArtie Shaw
Begin the Beguine
1938
RCA called it "a complete waste of time", hid it on a B-side, and Shaw's clarinet sold six million anyway.
★ 6.6
American Photographs
Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Edition
1938 · 208 pages
Eighty-seven photographs of faces, storefronts, gravestones, and wooden churches, sequenced by Evans into a cold portrait of the United States. Robert Frank and the photographers after him worked from his example.
★ 6.6
The Thirty Years War
1938 · 520 pages
At twenty-eight Wedgwood narrated Europe's most ruinous pre-modern war whole, thirty years of armies eating Germany alive, and her verdict of meaningless conflict still has to be argued with.
★ 6.4
The Code of the Woosters
1938 · 254 pages
Bertie Wooster is ordered to steal a silver cow-shaped cream jug, and, armed by Jeeves with one humiliating fact, tells an aspiring English dictator he is a frightful ass in black shorts.
★ 6.3
The Emperor's Tomb
1938 · 208 pages
Franz Ferdinand Trotta drinks through the last spring of peace, then loses the war, his money and his wife. On the night Hitler annexes Austria he walks to the emperors' crypt.
★ 6.1
Scoop
1938 · 304 pages
Mistaken for a famous novelist with the same surname, a nature columnist who writes about questing voles is shipped off to cover an African war. Reporters still quote Waugh's newsroom to each other.
★ 6.0
The Black Jacobins · 1938
Maya with Doll
1938 · Private collection
His daughter Maya holding her doll, her face split front and profile at once, the Cubist trick turned warm for once.
★ 5.2
Rebecca
1938 · 448 pages
The second Mrs. de Winter is never given a name, which is the point. She marries a widower, arrives at his Cornish estate, Manderley, and finds the drowned first wife occupying every room.
★ 5.0
Magellan
Conqueror of the Seas
1938 · 352 pages
Five ships left Seville in 1519 and one came home three years later with eighteen men aboard. Zweig tells the circumnavigation as the story of an obstinate will set against an unmapped ocean.
★ 4.9
Facing Mount Kenya · 1938
You Can't Take it With You
Directed by Frank Capra
1938
A household where everyone does exactly as they like collides with a banking family: Frank Capra won his third directing Oscar in five years, and the argument is still the one America has.
★ 1.7