Quantcast
Channel: Poetry | The Guardian
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4232

Was 1925 really the best year for literature?

0
0

The BBC Culture website has chosen 1925 as “the greatest year for books ever”. Hemingway’s debut, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and The Great Gatsby certainly made for a glorious twelve months. But do you agree? And what other literary years could give 1925 a run for its money?

It was a very good year. Ernest Hemingway took his first literary steps with the collection of short stories In Our Time; Virginia Woolf published Mrs Dalloway; and F Scott Fitzgerald brought out The Great Gatsby. All that happened in 1925, as did the publication of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith.

BBC Culture, the BBC’s international arts website, has designated 1925 as the “greatest year” in the history of literature, in a piece by author and journalist Jane Ciabattari. But how to determine something like this? This was how she did it:

First, by searching for a cluster of landmark books: debut books or major masterpieces published that year. Next, by evaluating their lasting impact: do these books continue to enthral readers and explore our human dilemmas and joys in memorable ways? And then by asking: did the books published in this year alter the course of literature? Did they influence literary form or content, or introduce key stylistic innovations?

Continue reading...

Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 4232

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images