I have tried, in this encyclopedia, to give a sense of one of the
richest moments in our literary and cultural history, and as much as
practicable in writers’ own words. I didn’t manage to cover all the
novelists and poets, much less all the books on American and
world history, or all the books on travel, philosophy, or world
literature. Each of those would also reveal additional, important
aspects of the culture of 1925. I barely scanned the many
educational titles, scientific and engineering books, Biblical
exegeses, political tracts, and biographies and autobiographies of
worthies in various fields. And my sampling of literature from
outside the American context is spotty, and outside Anglo-
American and European contexts, the coverage is even spottier. A
literary culture of the depth and complexity of that in 1925, even
the literary culture of just the US, necessarily exceeds the grasp of
any single reader, no matter how intense their study, no matter
how obsessive or compulsive. I have, I think, represented the zeigeist.
But I’m afraid that, after 40 years, I have still, if you will
excuse the pun, only scratched the surface.