A Century of Reading: The 10 Books That Defined the 1930s / Emily Temple In: Lit Hub Daily October 18, 2018

Some books are flashes in the pan, read for entertainment and then left on a bus seat for the next lucky person to pick up and enjoy, forgotten by most after their season has passed. Others stick around, are read and re-read, are taught and discussed. sometimes due to great artistry, sometimes due to luck, and sometimes because they manage to recognize and capture some element of the culture of the time.
In the moment, you often can’t tell which books are which. The Great Gatsby wasn’t a bestseller upon its release, but we now see it as emblematic of a certain American sensibility in the 1920s. Of course, hindsight can also distort the senses; the canon looms and obscures. Still, over the next weeks, we’ll be publishing a list a day, each one attempting to define a discrete decade, starting with the 1900s (as you’ve no doubt guessed by now) and counting down until we get to the (nearly complete) 2010s.
Though the books on these lists need not be American in origin, I am looking for books that evoke some aspect of American life, actual or intellectual, in each decade—a global lens would require a much longer list. And of course, varied and complex as it is, there’s no list that could truly define American life over ten or any number of years, so I do not make any claim on exhaustiveness. I’ve simply selected books that, if read together, would give a fair picture of the landscape of literary culture for that decade—both as it was and as it is remembered. Finally, two process notes: I’ve limited myself to one book for author over the entire 12-part list, so you may see certain works skipped over in favor of others, even if both are important (for instance, I ignored Dubliners in the 1910s so I could include Ulysses in the 1920s), and in the case of translated work, I’ll be using the date of the English translation, for obvious reasons.
For our fourth installment, below you’ll find 10 books that defined the 1930s.

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1930)

According to my esteemed colleagues at CrimeReads, Dashiell Hammett more or less invented the American hardboiled crime novel, and also inspired the entire film noir genre (although, Molly Odintz would like me to specify here, film noir also owes a lot to German expressionism). This novel is not only important for all of those that would come after it (see below, for instance), but also —not to mention the very popular and highly mythologized film adaptation(s). “Spade has no original,” Hammett wrote in the introduction to a 1934 edition of the novel.

He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not—or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague—want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client.

The Maltese Falcon was an instant bestseller when it was published in hardcover, and saw seven printings in 1930. Unlike some of the other novels on this decade’s list, in this case the critics loved it as well as the readers. In the New Republic, Donald Douglas wrote that the novel showed “the absolute distinction of real art” and in The Judge, Ted Shane wrote that “the writing is better than Hemingway; since it conceals not softness but hardness.” In the New York Evening Graphic, Gilbert Seldes wrote that The Maltese Falcon was “the real thing and everything else has been phony.” No surprise then that we’re still reading it today.

Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth (1931)

You couldn’t say that the contents of this novel reflect American life in the 1930s, exactly—beginning as it does in a pre-revolutionary Chinese village—but it was certainly a sensation of its time, so it must have struck a certain chord. It was the bestselling novel of 1931 and 1932, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, and certainly contributed to Buck’s Nobel Prize in 1938, which made her the first American woman to win the Nobel for literature. Some have even suggested that the book—and the subsequent film—stirred up enough pro-Chinese sentiment in Americans to contribute to the 1943 repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act. (“It humanized Chinese people,” Maxine Hong Kingston said. “It is written with so much empathy that for the first time, Americans had to see Chinese as equals.”) And Buck wasn’t only an American phenomenon: during her lifetime she was the most translated American author of the 20th century.
But the novel—and Buck’s work in general—is not without controversy. Highbrow critics found her prose lacking. “Pearl’s Asian subjects, her prose style, her gender, and her tremendous popularity offended virtually every one of the constituencies that divided up the literary 1930s,” wrote her biographer Peter Conn. “Marxists, Agrarians, Chicago journalists, New York intellectuals, literary nationalists, and New Humanists had little enough in common, but they could all agree that Pearl Buck had no place in any of their creeds and canons.” Buck, though born in West Virginia, had grown up in China, but Chinese intellectuals and even officials were offended by her depiction of China, to the point of denying her entry to the country.
Since the 1930s, Puck has become decidedly unfashionable. “In the years after World War II, Buck’s literary reputation shrunk to the vanishing point,” Conn writes in the preface to his Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography.

She stood on the wrong side of virtually every line drawn by those who constructed the lists of required reading in the 1950s and 1960s. To begin with, her principal subjects were women and China, both of which were regarded as peripheral and even frivolous in the early postwar years. Furthermore, she preferred episodic plots to complex structures and had little interest in psychological analysis. In addition to all that, she was not a felicitous stylist, and she even displayed a taste for formulaic phrases. Needless to say, none of this endeared her to that vast cultural heartland stretching from the East River to the Hudson. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/a-century-of-reading-the-10-books-that-defined-the-1930s/

Irma S. Rombauer, The Joy of Cooking (1931)

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (1937 (first single-volume English translation))

Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (1936)

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1936)

Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)