The year 1925 has been called the annus mirabilis of American literature, and for good reason. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s uber-classic The Great Gatsby was published, as well as Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Gertrude Stein’s magnum and magisterial and weird opus The Making of Americans, Ernest Hemingway’s first and best book In Our Time, Ezra Pound’s first book of Cantos, T.S. Eliot’s first Collected Poems, and William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain, and that’s just for starters. Also: Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro, announcing the national arrival of the Harlem Renaissance writers, artists, and critics was published;Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, which if you’re middle-aged or older you’ll think is one of her few best; Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, which seems extraordinarily prescient, given its focus on epidemics, scientific method, the medical-industrial complex, and the ethics of testing vaccines; Anita Loos’s astonishing comedy of sex and intellectual history, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes;John Dos Passos’ breakthrough modernist novel Manhattan Transfer; and novels like Edith Wharton’s overlooked commercial potboiler The Mother’s Recompense, Sherwood Anderson’s benighted Dark Laughter, O.E. Rolvaag’s immigrant saga Giants in the Earth, and Ellen Glasgow’s masterpiece Barren Ground. William Faulkner published his first 20 short pieces and finished the manuscript of his first novel….
[An abridged version of the Introduction was published in Los Angeles Review of Books on January 25, 2025]