Citizen Kane
Directed by Orson Welles
1941
Welles was twenty-five and had never directed a feature before: he built a portrait of a man whose whole life nobody around him can add up, and changed everything.
★ 9.9
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1941
Showing 60 works across all media from 1941
Take the "A" Train
1941
Strayhorn turned Ellington's subway directions into a theme song; Ray Nance's trumpet solo got copied note for note ever after.
★ 8.2
God Bless the ChildBillie Holiday
God Bless the Child
1941
A quarrel with her mother over money, by Holiday's own account, gave the song its title line and its steel.
★ 7.8
The Maltese Falcon
Directed by John Huston
1941
Huston's first film as a director, and the one that finally made Bogart a star: everyone chasing the black bird lies about it for a hundred straight minutes.
★ 7.7
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
1941 · 432 pages
Sent to Alabama in 1936 to report on cotton tenancy, Agee returned with an act of devotion: three sharecropping families recorded down to the nails in their shoes, alongside Walker Evans's photographs.
★ 7.0
★ 6.9
Selected Poems of Rabindranath Tagore
1941 · 208 pages
Tagore wrote the songs that became the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. His Bengali lyrics address God as a lover who is late, plainly and without a trace of religious machinery.
★ 6.9
Chess Story
1941 · 104 pages
Aboard a liner to Buenos Aires, the world chess champion meets a stranger who learned the game in Gestapo isolation from one stolen book. Zweig makes chess an instrument of torture.
★ 6.5
Boogie Woogie Bugle BoyThe Andrews Sisters
Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy
1941
Raye and Prince wrote it for an Abbott and Costello comedy, and the sisters harmonize like a brass section.
★ 6.5
Stardust (1941)Artie Shaw
Stardust (1941)
1941
Lennie Hayton's arrangement gives Butterfield's trumpet and Jenney's trombone their solos, then floats Shaw's clarinet over strings.
★ 6.3
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
A Journey Through Yugoslavia
1941 · 1181 pages
Rebecca West traveled through Yugoslavia in 1937 and wrote eleven hundred pages. A lamb bled on a Macedonian rock and a Serbian poem of chosen defeat become her account of Europe's death wish.
★ 6.1
Chattanooga Choo Choo
1941
Cut in Hollywood in May 1941; nine months later RCA handed Miller the first gold record ever presented.
★ 6.0
The Managerial Revolution
1941 · 304 pages
Capitalism is not dying into socialism, Burnham argues, but into rule by the managers who actually run production, in Berlin, Moscow and Washington alike. Orwell took Nineteen Eighty-Four's three superstates straight from him.
★ 5.8
Speech at Harrow School, October 29, 1941 · 1941