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What is the best novel of the 1920s?

By YPB Team

One decade produced the sentence styles everyone still copies. Some of these turn up in every classroom; others only ever found a cult.

  1. The Great Gatsby — ranked #11
    The Great Gatsby
    F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel about a self-made millionaire chasing a lost love across Jazz Age Long Island.
    1000pts
  2. Ulysses — ranked #22
    Ulysses
    James Joyce's 1922 stream-of-consciousness epic that maps one Dublin day onto Homer's Odyssey.
    621pts
  3. Lady Chatterley's Lover — ranked #33
    Lady Chatterley's Lover
    D. H. Lawrence's 1928 novel of an aristocrat's wife and a gamekeeper, banned for decades on both sides of the Atlantic.
    588pts
  4. The Sound and the Fury — ranked #44
    The Sound and the Fury
    William Faulkner's 1929 novel telling the collapse of a Mississippi family through four fractured voices.
    509pts
  5. To the Lighthouse — ranked #55
    To the Lighthouse
    Woolf's 1927 portrait of the Ramsay family and a long-postponed trip across a Hebridean bay.
    509pts
  6. A Farewell to Arms — ranked #66
    A Farewell to Arms
    Hemingway's 1929 war novel about an American ambulance driver and a British nurse on the Italian front.
    407pts
  7. Mrs Dalloway — ranked #77
    Mrs Dalloway
    Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel tracing a single June day in the life of a London society hostess.
    407pts
  8. The Magic Mountain — ranked #88
    The Magic Mountain
    Thomas Mann's 1924 novel set in a Swiss sanatorium where illness suspends time and argument fills it.
    407pts
  9. All Quiet on the Western Front — ranked #99
    All Quiet on the Western Front
    Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 account of German schoolboys ground down by trench warfare.
    271pts
  10. Babbitt — ranked #1010
    Babbitt
    Sinclair Lewis's 1922 satire of a booster-club realtor smothered by Midwestern conformity.
    271pts
  11. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd — ranked #1111
    The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
    Agatha Christie's 1926 Poirot mystery whose narrator pulls off the most argued-over twist in the genre.
    271pts
  12. Orlando — ranked #1212
    Orlando
    Woolf's 1928 mock-biography of a poet who lives four centuries and changes sex halfway through.
    185pts
  13. Cane — ranked #1313
    Cane
    Jean Toomer's 1923 mosaic of sketches, poems, and stories about Black life in Georgia and Washington.
    185pts
  14. A Passage to India — ranked #1414
    A Passage to India
    E. M. Forster's 1924 novel in which an accusation in the Marabar Caves splits colonial India.
    185pts
  15. The Sun Also Rises — ranked #1515
    The Sun Also Rises
    Ernest Hemingway's 1926 debut novel following expatriates from Paris cafes to the bullfights of Pamplona.
    185pts
  16. Steppenwolf — ranked #1616
    Steppenwolf
    Hermann Hesse's 1927 novel about a lonely intellectual who finds a magic theatre for his divided self.
    185pts
  17. The Trial — ranked #1717
    The Trial
    Franz Kafka's posthumous 1925 novel about a man prosecuted by a court that never states his crime.
    81pts
  18. The Age of Innocence — ranked #1818
    The Age of Innocence
    Edith Wharton's 1920 Pulitzer winner about old New York closing ranks on a scandalous countess.
    81pts

#books87#classics474#fiction16#1920s2

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