Category: Literature
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The Age of Heroines
According to a 1922 New York Times Magazine article, the average age of female protagonists in love stories had increased by about a decade since around 1900 or so. In the appreciation of the public of today, mature beauty eclipses mere girlish loveliness. It was not always so. Fifteen or twenty years ago the heroines of…
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Authors and Alcohol
Novels often take 2-3 years to write their works. So during the third year of Prohibition in 1922, the New York Times Magazine asked: do writers need alcohol for greatness, and was Prohibition starting to affect the quality of American literature? [Sir Arthur] Quiller-Couch asserted boldly that a total abstainer was imperfectly equipped for high…
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From Molière to America
In 1922, the Western writer and novelist Owen Wister postulated an interesting thesis: that America’s most famous “writers” were not primarily writers at all, not in the way that (for example) Shakespeare was. Wister notes that America’s most famous words globally had come from the pens of those like Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Abraham…
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The Year in Books
This late-1921 article recapping the year in books predicted: “The average of fiction was but fair, and it is to be doubted if anything of lasting import appeared.” Well, now we know: nothing of lasting import appeared. Looking at the Publishers Weekly list of the 10 bestselling novels of 1921, as of this writing, only four…
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The Child, the Book and the Movie
In 1921, as the nascent medium of film had recently soared in popularity, New York Times Magazine commissioned a debate: would movies decrease or increase children’s love of reading books? Alexander Black predicted it would increase, though his argument was in no small based on how movies of the time required considerable reading with title cards…
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A New Literary Broom
This 1921 article predicted potentially great things for the new literary magazine Broom. Its final issue was published less than two and a half years later, in January 1924. There can be no doubt of the potentialities of Broom, the international magazine of the arts whose first issue, dated November, has just reached this side of the…
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One Soldier on “Three Soldiers”
Even the most popular cultural phenomena can fade away. A 1921 New York Times Magazine article begins: “Every one now seems to have taken part in the discussion of John Dos Passos’s brilliantly written novel” Three Soldiers. Today, the novel’s Wikipedia article barely contains any information, while its Goodreads page has 1,131 user ratings. For comparison, the most famous…
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Book Reviews — Signed or Unsigned?
A relatively recent trend was emerging around 1921: reviewers appending their names to their reviews. It is only in this twentieth century that the newspapers of New York have chosen to declare the authorship of their reviews of books, of plays, of pictures and of music…. [But] even now, a certain proportion of the book…
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Psychiatric First Aid for Fiction Writers
Walter B. Pitkin, a professor of feature and short-story writing at Columbia University School of Journalism in 1921, had an unusual piece of advice for how to write better love and romance stories: don’t fall in love yourself. One young man, for instance, began by writing love stories as class exercises, and did them with…
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The Future of the Novel
A 1921 article predicted novels would move towards action and adventure. That happened… eventually. While the biggest novels of recent decades have been action-heavy, perhaps the least action-heavy classic ever — Ulysses by James Joyce — was published only the next year. This is the age of the airplane, the wireless telegraph, of radium, of…
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