Birth Year Project: 1939
[from Grapes of Wrath (1940)]
Birth Year Project:
You supply your birth year, I respond with a short list of books published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I'd recommend. If your year's already been done, I'll do an update. So far, we’ve done 17 years altogether, between 1944 and 1989. [See BYP Index in navigation bar.]
Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you're unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I'll aggregate and post.
Well-known/Bestselling Fiction:
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Kitty Foyle, Christopher Morley1
A Sample of 1939’s Literary Fiction:
Mister Johnson, Joyce Cary2
Good Morning, Midnight, Jean Rhys3
The Wall [five short stories], Jean-Paul Sartre
Special mention:
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Virginia Lee Burton4
Finnegans Wake, James Joyce5
Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo6
Four Important Writers We Know from Other Books
Magna, Zona Gale7
Drums at Dusk, Arna Wendell Bontemps8
Moses, Man of the Mountain, Zora Neale Hurston9
Purposes of Love, Mary Renault10
My List:
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler, 193911
Ask the Dust, John Fante, 193912
The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee Jerusalem], William Faulkner, 193913
Goodbye To Berlin, Christopher Isherwood, 193914
The Tropic of Capricorn, Henry Miller, 193915
At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O’Brien, 193916
The Hopkins Manuscript, R. C. Sherriff, 193917
The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West, 193918
Kitty Foyle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty_Foyle_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty_Foyle_(film)Cary: A young Nigerian running afoul of British colonial authority. I’ve never read this one, but I revere The Horse’s Mouth (1944), the third book of a trilogy—the others: Herself Surprised (1941) and To Be a Pilgrim (1942). The Horse’s Mouth has appeared in several earlier posts—features artist/rascal Gulley Jimson, a great character (played by Alec Guinness in the 1958 film).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Johnson_(novel)
Rhys:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Rhys
Mike Mulligan: This is one of few books I remember from childhood . . . and even at the time it seemed the product of an earlier era. It’s a sweet story, really.
[But, wow, here it finds itself in an exceedingly odd literary ménage à trois.]
https://www.illustrationhistory.org/artists/virginia-lee-burtonFinnegans: In an earlier post, I wrote: . . . and books like Finnegans Wake . . . Then I thought, Well, no—there aren’t any books like Finnegans Wake. The pinnacle of Modernist experimentation? One of the world’s hardest books? A 688-page fever dream?
Have a look at the Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegans_WakeAnd have a look at this earlier post: Big Hard Novels.
Now it occurs to me I have nothing else to say about it (whole college course have been devoted to tunneling through it). But I do recall a sample sentence that was quoted to me years ago. Joyce was riffing on birds and wrote: No birdy aviar soar anywing to eagle it!
Trumbo: Possibly the most searing anti-war novel ever written—how can we bear to read about a quadruple amputee/faceless survivor of an artillery blast who wants only to be euthanized? I couldn’t, anyway. But consider: a) it was a pacifist novel published in the ramp-up to WWII, and b) Trumbo belonged to the American Communist Party and the novel was serialized in The Daily Worker, and c) the novel received a National Book Award, Most Original Novel of the Year.
Trumbo was principally a screenwriter (Exodus, Spartacus, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, etc.). He was among the so-called “Hollywood Ten” who refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He and scores of others were blacklisted (kept from working in the film industry), though he did so under the cover of pseudonyms, and was later re-instated.
Gale: A Sconnie [i.e. born in Wisconsin], novelist, story writer, playwright. Known for the novel Miss Lulu Bett (1920)—her adaptation of it for the stage won the 1921 Pulitzer in Drama—the first awarded to a woman. Gale was a suffragist, progressive activist, supporter of the La Follettes, member of the National Women’s Party, a pacificist, director of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and a number of similar causes/organizations, and later a regent of the University of Wisconsin. And amid all that (and a family life), wrote!
Magna was her final novel, published the year following her death from pneumonia in 1938.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zona_Gale [Was anyone wondering who the first woman to win the Pulitzer in Fiction was? That would be Edith Wharton, for The Age of Innocence, same year.]
Bontemps:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arna_Bontemps Harlem renaissance
Hurston: She, along with Arna Bontemps (see above), was a member of the Harlem Renaissance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_Renaissance
We know her for the 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, which (I was surprised to learn) was lambasted by certain others in that coterie. Ralph Ellison wrote that the novel had the "blight of calculated burlesque.” Richard Wright’s review in The New Masses said:
Miss Hurston seems to have no desire whatsoever to move in the direction of serious fiction… [She] can write; but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phyllis Wheatley... Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears.
But, as happens to a few lucky novels (like Moby Dick), the book was rediscovered by later literary communities, and became both popular and studied in great depth. In 2005, Time listed it among the 100 best novels since 1923.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Their_Eyes_Were_Watching_God
[A post on the Harlem Renaissance is coming soon.]
Renault: I’ve never read her work, but she and Marguerite Yourcenar [Memoirs of Hadrian (1958)] are among the premier literary novelists re-creating the ancient world [her most celebrated work is The King Must Die (1958)].
But looking her up just now I was impressed with the complexity of her life story and the arc of her creative output. I encourage you to make her acquaintance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_RenaultChandler: Started writing mysteries in his forties after losing his job as an oil company executive. Though not prolific (he published six novels and left a final one unfinished as his death) he had major role in establishing the hard-boiled detective genre, epitomized by his gumshoe, Philip Marlowe. There were detective novels long before Chandler, but they were mostly entertainments, dependable commodities—Have you read the new Agatha Christie? Chandler, I think, had a certain panache, a modern/L.A.-based stylishness that drew readers other than mystery-readers—they also seem enmeshed in the zeitgeist of 30s and 40s film (Chandler was also a screenwriter—he adapted Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train and James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity).
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-01-05/los-angeles-raymond-chandler-guardian-strand-poetry-oxford
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Raymond-Chandler
https://www.chipublib.org/raymond-chandler-biography/
Dust: A guy at the coffee shop pressed this on me one morning and I made the acquaintance of Fante’s alter ego, Arturo Bandini, struggling writer in Depression-era L.A. This novel represents the birth of my midlife quest to dig out the work of the other writers, the ones we might all have read except for their bad luck—in the machinery of publishing, in health, in being on the wrong side of prevailing prejudices or zeitgeist, etc.—or as they used to call it on that long-ago TV show, Laugh-In, “the flying fickle finger of fate.”
Faulkner: I was intimidated by Faulkner’s reputation for difficulty until well into my thirties, and was kind of surprised by the fun I had reading his prose, and by the fact that, despite my being a Northern boy to my core, the Southernness of the stories—strange, old-timey, mythic—sucked me in rather than putting me off. And the humor, I hadn’t expected that, either. I didn’t quite get what made some his novels novels. I was baffled, on my first reading of The Sound and the Fury (1929) by how the parts were supposed to fit together. Some of the books called novels seemed more like a batch of stories—Go Down, Moses (1942), for instance. His first Yoknapatawpha County novel, published in 1929 as Sartoris, was published again after his death as Flags in the Dust (1974); only much later did I get the skinny on this: the publisher rejected the original manuscript—much too long and diffuse, he said; Faulkner reluctantly agreed to the truncated version, Sartoris (one thinks of Ray Carver’s situation with his editor Gordon Lish). Flags in the Dust may not have the heft/gravitas of the two biggies—Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936)—but it’s a great read (and damn funny in spots).
The Wild Palms/If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem is another of novels built out of separate-but-somehow-obliquely-related pieces (two in this case). Read about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_I_Forget_Thee,_Jerusalem
[Lord, I haven’t even gotten to my favorite Faulkner (in my top handful of anyone’s), As I Lay Dying (1930) . . . but there’s note on it in Reading Projects [9]: You Are What You Read.]
Isherwood: If we know Isherwood at all, most of us know him as the source of the musical/film Cabaret. But I’d always been a bit fuzzy as to that (maybe you, too?) Here’s how it worked: Isherwood joined his friend, poet W. H. Auden, in Berlin, where, at the time, it was easier to live as a gay man; he completed his second novel, made notes for his next book, Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935), and for Goodbye To Berlin.
Wiki explains the sequence of events around that work like this:
[It was] his portrait of the city in which Adolf Hitler was rising to power—enabled by poverty, unemployment, increasing attacks on Jews and Communists, and ignored by the defiant hedonism of night life in the cafés, bars, and brothels. Goodbye to Berlin included stories published in the leftist magazine, New Writing, and it included [the] novella Sally Bowles, in which he created his most famous character, based on a young Englishwoman, Jean Ross, with whom he briefly shared a flat. In the United States, the Berlin novels were published together as The Berlin Stories in 1945. In 1951, Goodbye to Berlin was adapted for the New York stage by John van Druten using the title I Am a Camera, taken from Isherwood's opening paragraphs. The play inspired the hit Broadway musical Cabaret (1966), later adapted to film as Cabaret in 1972.
In all, Isherwood led a complex, eventful life—the rest of the Wiki lays it out well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Isherwood
[Isherwood in 1938]
Capricorn: When I was in college, my paramour said I should check out The Rosy Crucifixion [Miller’s trilogy: Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus] . . . if I did, I remember naught of it. But this led to reading the two Tropics—Cancer (1934) and this one. Then The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), an “impressionist travelogue” (according to Wiki). The Tropic books are considered autobiographical novels, known for their frankness vis-à-vis sex (etc.) and for their discursiveness. I don’t know how they’d read today—they might be books you need to read in your twenties (especially if you have a thing about the famous ex-pat writers—Miller knew them all, but was a bit older) . . . or maybe not at all if, as a guy on YouTube just explained, the rampant misogyny rules them out.
His affair with Anais Nin was the basis for the film Henry and June (1990). As Nazism spread he left Paris for Greece (stayed with the Durrells, as depicted in the Masterpiece series, The Durrells in Corfu), then returned to the States. A fortune teller once told Miller he’d live forever—he made it to 88. Had many loves, wrote many books, was also a painter. Some years ago, remembering that I’d once talked up Maroussi, I got a fresh copy and . . . found it insufferable. Go figure.
At Swim-Two-Birds: A long-time, under-the-radar guilty pleasure for lovers of Irishness, metafiction, youthful literary pretension, and . . . well, actually, the novel’s a bit difficult to describe neatly, but the reading of it is a kooky delight. Flann O’Brien was the pen name of Irish civil servant, Brian O'Nolan. Read the novel’s Wiki entry, you’ll find appreciations by the likes of Jorge Luis Borges and Dylan Thomas, who famously said: “This is just the book to give your sister—if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl." The Guardian has it on the list of 100 Best Novels Written in English (#64).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Swim-Two-Birds
Hopkins Manuscript: Click for the note from Reading Projects [10]: Persephone Books.
The Day of the Locust: Here’s the note on this one from a forthcoming post, Silver Screen:
I ate up Nathanael West’s novels in college, especially the darkly comic Miss Lonelyhearts (1933). His other novels: The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) and A Cool Million (1934), subtitled, The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin. And, indeed, part by part [though not as expeditiously as the Black Knight (see below)], Pitkin is dismantled in what Wiki calls “a brutal satire of Horatio Alger's novels and their eternal optimism.”
The Day of the Locust was West’s Hollywood novel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_LocustOh, right, the Black Knight: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=350807130385625
[‘Tis but a scratch.]
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel! I remember loving that as a kid. It might have been at my grandparents' house (a late-1800s Victorian in northern California), along with the all-wood Erector set and other treasures found in the wonderfully mysterious "toy cupboard."
I’m the ancient one born in 1939 and therefore part of the energy behind this page. I’ve read quite a few of the books mentioned. The one I’ll read now is Magna (or maybe Miss Lulu Betts) by Zona Gale. I currently live 20 miles south of Wisconsin and have attended grad school at UW and lived in three different WI towns/cities so it’s time I read Gale. I’d heard of her but knew nothing about her. She seems to be my kind of woman!