The best books about the 1920s

This is the ultimate book about 1920s Paris. It was written as a memoir about Hemingway’s years in Paris, when he was learning to be a writer after the war. It is the most nostalgic of his books, the most rose-tinted. I have read it over and over – the tone alone is enough. I read it for all the literary gossip – F Scott Fitzgerald is there, and Gertrude Stein, and more as you never knew them. I read it again for the way he writes about how to write, the crack of the fire in the dawn as he works a paragraph. I read it yet again for the love story, the deep connection he has with his first wife Hadley, and his regrets over her that drench the book. A series of interconnected stories, it’s a guide to being young in that time and place. Ultimately it is a book about love – what else could it be, when he writes about doing what he loves, with the woman he loves, in Paris? 

Is this the perfect novel? I suspect it is one of them. How can I feel so uplifted, so enraptured, by a tragic story of deluded liars? The language: Fitzgerald’s writing is transcendent. So richly lyrical that it always threatens to tip over into melodrama, but somehow never does, this brief but vibrant story always grounds itself in the fundamental need to be loved.

It's set in 1922, on an island off New York City, narrated by the passive Nick Carraway. Nick watches his friend, Daisy, endure a loveless marriage to a bully and briefly revive an affair with the dazzling, deceitful, Jay Gatsby, before it all ends badly. But this brief plot summary is not what the book is about. It is about the madness and delusion of love. It’s about the American Dream and the violence inherent within it. It is about the rupture of war in every facet of life in every level of society. It is about being young in the 1920s, with all its post-war glamour.

I have read this book at least ten times. I have written essays about it, flirted with handsome men over it, leant it out, given it away. Every time I read it, I get something new from it.

It is not too much to say that this book changed my life. I found this book when I was looking for a guide, a template, for how to be a writer. This book has a hundred anecdotes of the creative life, of how to succeed and how to fail gloriously. This book ignited my obsession with the 1920s.

Nicholson writes about the life of Britain’s bohemians in the first half of the twentieth century, not from their work, but from their way of life. There are chapters on money and clothes, on cleaning and babies, on houses and travel. She includes famous names, like the Bloomsbury Illuminati, and many whom I’d never heard of. She includes lots of material from the people she writes about – photos, sketches, letters, telegrams, talks, and interviews. The writing is perfectly economical and the portraits leap off the page. Nicholson is Virginia Woolf’s grandniece, Vanessa Bell’s granddaughter, and her anecdotes of this time are witty, tender, lyrical, and deeply personal.

This beautiful tome, with endless photos, takes a tour of Paris through the années folles, from the end of the Great War in 1919 to the start of World War Two in 1939. Many histories of Paris in this period focus solely on the culture – understandable, as this outpouring of modernism was world-shaking. This book includes history, politics, law, Parisian café life, sex workers, immigration, and more. My copy is full of so many notes that I had to buy a second copy. Here I found the underground gay scene and the effect of the war on the working class. Schiaparelli’s surreal hats sat along an overview of soup kitchens during the Depression. The book shows Paris as it was lived in those years, and mostly through visual material, giving the impression that you could book a ticket and visit.

This book should not be out of print. It is beautifully written – economical, witty yet discreet, and joyful. Bowen was a young woman from Adelaide, in South Australia, who set off to London to be an artist and landed there during the Great War. She had a long affair and daughter with writer Ford Madox Ford, painted and partied in Paris, moved her daughter back to England in time to watch German bombers fly overhead during the Blitz. This book became another guide for how to live the creative life, the bohemian life, a life full of honesty and art. Like Hemingway’s memoir, it’s full of anecdotes of other writers and artists that were her friends for a time. It reflects on what it means to be an artist, a woman artist, an artist and mother, ideas that still hold true as they are about the inner life of art-making and what it requires.