# What is the best novel of the 1920s?

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

*By YPB Team · Published September 8, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-novel-of-the-1920s*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

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

Tags: books, classics, fiction, 1920s