Looking Back at 1925

In this first of 12 monthly articles, LARB founder Tom Lutz reflects on the significance of the year 1925.

By Tom LutzJanuary 25, 2025

• Literary Criticism

• Cultural Studies

• History

Editor’s Note: This is the first of 12 monthly articles on the centennial of 1925; some of it is excerpted from Tom Lutz’s 1925: A Literary Encyclopedia, to be published in March. For multimedia materials, see the website.

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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 then, as was 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 released in 1925 were Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro, announcing the national arrival of the Harlem Renaissance writers, artists, and critics; 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’s breakthrough modernist novel Manhattan Transfer; and other novels such as Edith Wharton’s overlooked commercial potboiler The Mother’s Recompense, Sherwood Anderson’s benighted Dark Laughter, O. E. Rølvaag’s immigrant saga Giants in the Earth, and Ellen Glasgow’s masterpiece Barren Ground. In addition, William Faulkner published his first 20 short pieces and finished the manuscript of his first novel.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., when he was asked to edit a series of African American classics for Penguin, reminisced about what Penguin Classics had meant to him as a young reader:

Thinking about the titles appropriate for inclusion in these series led me, inevitably, to think about what, for me, constitutes a “classic.” And thinking about this led me, in turn, to the wealth of reflections on what defines a work of literature or philosophy somehow speaking to the human condition beyond time and place, a work somehow endlessly compelling, generation upon generation, a work whose author we don’t have to look like to identify with, to feel at one with, as we find ourselves transported through the magic of a textual time machine; a work that refracts the image of ourselves that we project onto it, regardless of our ethnicity, our gender, our time, our place. 

Many of the books I just mentioned fit that bill, but not all of them do, not for all readers, and not for “generation upon generation.” As is often the case, some of the greatest were not recognized as such at their moment of entry. The Great Gatsby was considered a failure when it arrived, not as good as Fitzgerald’s earlier works. Hemingway’s book was barely noticed, and the same was true of Stein’s. Conversely, many authors considered central at the time are now barely read—for instance, Stephen Vincent Benét, Ernest Boyd, Van Wyck Brooks, Witter Bynner, James Branch Cabell, V. F. Calverton, Floyd Dell, and Babette Deutsch, to mention a few from the beginning of the alphabet. And some, like Academy Award winner and Broadway darling Achmed Abdullah or Greenwich Village proto-beatnik Maxwell Bodenheim, writers whose goings-on were regularly chronicled in the gossip columns in 1925, have all but disappeared.

The year was arguably the peak of literature’s centrality in American culture. There were more magazines, more journals, more reviews, more book news, and more book gossip than ever before or since. Literature’s rivals for cultural attention were on the rise—film was becoming a more significant part of people’s media diet, radio was just taking off, television technologies were incubating—but literature was still king. Even mediocre books got dozens of reviews, and the reviews were (very often) well-informed and intellectually engaged. The belief that literary writing was an essential and consequential business was nearly universal. Modernist ferment continued to excite discussion, while the pulp revolution in genre fiction—detective stories, science fiction, Westerns, romance—was booming. These popular books, even if sometimes condescended to, were also given thoughtful attention in contemporary reviews.

I wrote 1925 as we approached the 100th anniversary of the annus mirabilis. In reading the year, I could see the seeds of virtually every aspect of our cultural life, from art, literature, theater, and music to physics, philosophy, social science, and political discourse. The fear of environmental degradation, the corruption in our politics, the competing claims of utopianism and dystopia, the alarming growth of right-wing authoritarianism, the bitterly divided views on science, mass media, art, nature, justice, generations, community, freedom, sexuality, race, immigration—all can be seen in their budding or full-blown gore and glory in 1925. We have come far and yet not very far at all.

Although I had been studying and writing about the 1920s for decades and planning a book for years, I hadn’t quite found a unifying principle. My first book was about a single year—1903—but the justification for that project was scholarly, steeped in a series of then-current academic arguments about narrative, history, literary structure, and cultural theory. No similar set of concerns drew me to 1925. I have arguments to make about American culture at this particular moment—for example, about the culture’s fascination with surfaces and depths, which I’ll get to—but the real impetus is simply this: I’ve read a lot of books published in the decade, and I’ve studied a lot of other material—films, paintings, music, politics, newspapers, magazines—and I won’t teach it again. I feel, rightly or wrongly, that I owe it to the material to pass on what I’ve gleaned.

The older I get, the more it seems like a waste—the fact that thousands of people like me, heads full of books, people who have had the great privilege of devoting their lives to reading, die without sharing it beyond the classroom. Those of us who have published academic books know how little they are read, and those of us who teach know what a small fraction of our reading finds its way into our lectures, that an even smaller part of it is retained by the students when the exam rolls around, and a still smaller fraction after the exam. What follows in these monthly articles, and in the book, is some of what I’ve gathered over the decades, and it is presented, as often as possible, in the words of the time. To preserve a tangible piece of the zeitgeist, I include significant excerpts from the year’s prose and poetry. For context and exposition, whenever possible, I use reviews and comments made by people at the time as they encountered the work.

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In a recent piece here in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the University of Innsbruck’s Michael Docherty complained about a “hyperbolic framing gimmick” used in marketing popular history:

It’s a tendency that perhaps began with the rise of “the year of” and “the year that” books: pick a year in which some things happened, then extrapolate a series of claims that those things had hitherto overlooked significance in determining the contours of later history. The years 69, 1000, 1421, 1491, 1816, 1956, 1974—they’ve all had the treatment. The trouble is that, as Alan Bennett once wrote, saltily paraphrasing a line attributed to Arnold Toynbee, history is “just one fucking thing after another.” Thus, as “great year” history becomes a more palatable replacement in the popular imagination for “great man” history, we might play this parlor game indefinitely, though years are arbitrary divisions and none are without consequence. “Great year” history is a subcategory of “how X explains Y” history, where the conceit is that X appears far smaller than Y, but the historian turns mathematician to show how the tiny and easily overlooked part in fact equals the vast and complex whole. Publishers seem to think history needs to be packaged with a Pixar movie’s sense of causality.

That is nicely and saltily put, perhaps, but I don’t think it applies to what I am up to here. It is precisely because the welter of events in any given year cannot be ascribed to a single cause or a single effect that I have used an encyclopedic structure for my organizing principle. Each of the entries tells a story—they cannot, like a sauce, be boiled down to one or a few flavors, however complex.

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Nineteen twenty-five was a year of beginnings. Some were literary and cultural, like the Harlem Renaissance, which arrived on the national scene in the form of Locke’s mixed-genre anthology The New Negro, featuring work by almost every writer, artist, and activist associated with that literary moment and movement, including Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and many others. Anzia Yezierska, the first major Jewish American woman novelist, published her most important work, Bread Givers. The second novel by an Indigenous woman (and the first in over 30 years), Cogewea, The Half-Blood, was put into production by the innovative Four Seas Company of Boston after a decade of attempts to get it published; the novel, by Humishuma (a.k.a. Mourning Dove, a.k.a. Christine Quintasket), wouldn’t appear for two more years, but it was in the pipeline.

T. S. Eliot published his first collected poems (Poems, 1909–1925), which included the new poem “The Hollow Men,” said to have the most often quoted ending lines of any poem in history—“This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.” Countee Cullen published Color and Ezra Pound A Draft of XVI Cantos. These three volumes mark the establishment of a new American poetry. Martha Dickinson Bianchi published The Wandering Eros, hard on the heels of her editions of the work of her aunt, Emily Dickinson, the year before, part of the institutionalizing of a canonical 19th-century American literature, which was just starting to be taught in universities.

Other nonfiction of note included William Carlos Williams’s most enduring prose work, the bizarrely underwritten and overwritten In the American Grain; the massively influential Behaviorism by John B. Watson; James Weldon Johnson’s epochal The Book of American Negro Spirituals; the massive bestseller The Man Nobody Knows by Bruce Barton, which tells the story of Christ from the perspective of an advertising executive. The now long-forgotten and fascinating Why We Behave Like Human Beings, by anthropologist George Amos Dorsey, was a book of “creative evolution” that purported to be the most comprehensive examination of human life to date, inaugurating a popularization of social-scientific research. John Dewey, then the United States’ most influential philosopher, published Experience and Nature, often cited as the essential text of his career.

The year also saw the growing importance of film in the literary world. An excellent writer with the improbable name of Adela Nora Rogers St. Johns published The Skyrocket, a Hollywood novel—a new genre birthed just a few years earlier with Harry Leon Wilson’s Merton of the Movies (1922) and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Girl from Hollywood (1923). St. Johns helped cement the fundamental tropes of that genre: innocents disabused of their innocence by finding themselves backstage at the dream machine. Her friend, influential screenwriter and director Frances Marion, also published a Hollywood novel in 1925, Minnie Flynn. Carl Van Vechten, who had started his own Hollywood novel (Spider Boy, 1928), published Firecrackers in 1925, a book that was among the most open representations of sexual fluidity in the decade (however “discreet,” in his own word), and which was also more knowing about the boredom of the new Bohemians than most: “I desired complete freedom,” says the sex object, a beautiful young man. “What was there to do in life? Conform to the action of the puppets, dull one’s perceptions and lead the existence of the majority, an existence which appeared to me to have no meaning, or …?” Everyone else in the book, male and female, falls in love with him.

Such books, whatever else they did for readers, helped build a context for understanding their conflicted and mutable time. The culture was experiencing one of the widest generation gaps in American history, as well as increasing conflict between urban and rural outlooks, between recent immigrants and people whose families had immigrated two or four or six generations earlier, between the perspectives of descendants of colonists and Indigenous peoples, between those with money and people without, between workers and bosses, between William James’s healthy-minded religionists and zealous fundamentalists (and between them and spiritualists and atheists and doubters), between people of different races, and between people of a single race and those of mixed race. These gaps and conflicts were the animating stuff of the culture consumed across the United States—they were the tensions that fueled narratives of every kind, in literature, in the periodical press, in comics, in film, in advertisements, in song, and on the newest medium, radio. In displaying the fractures and fissures of the age, these stories gave the culture its forward (and sometimes backward) propulsion.

In other countries too, the year was massively significant in literary, cultural, and intellectual terms. Just a few examples: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Benito Mussolini’s war diaries, Leon Trotsky’s book on Vladimir Lenin (part of his debunking of Joseph Stalin’s book on Lenin from the year before), and Sigmund Freud’s Collected Papers in English. In film, the silent era crested. In art, both Art Deco and surrealism had their splashy debuts. In popular music, the Grand Ole Opry started country as we know it, Louis Armstrong made the first jazz quintet recordings, the first Texas blues were recorded, and New York blues recordings hit the national top 10. New music by Maurice Ravel, Igor Stravinsky, Alban Berg, Edgard Varèse, Jean Sibelius, Dmitri Shostakovich, Arnold Schoenberg, Sergei Prokofiev, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Edward Elgar, Ernest Bloch, and Béla Bartók premiered.

Other major cultural events took place. The Scopes trial started in Tennessee. The New Yorker began publication. Plans for the presidential monument on Mount Rushmore were approved. Werner Heisenberg published his breakthrough paper on quantum mechanics. The first two female governors in the United States—in Wyoming and Texas—were sworn in. Mussolini declared himself “Head of Government” in Italy, unanswerable to the Italian Parliament, and took the title “Il Duce.” Contract bridge was introduced, and its rules were published. The first televisions were built. The National Bar Association, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters were founded. Chrysler, Caterpillar, NAPA Auto Parts, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Fidelity Insurance, Howard Johnson’s, Progresso, Winn-Dixie, and Pella Windows were incorporated. Stalin fired Trotsky as head of the military and began the process of removing him from power entirely. The first motel was opened—the Motel Inn in San Luis Obispo, California. Tutankhamun’s mummy was discovered. Burma-Shave, Mr. Goodbar, Remington electric typewriters, Corona beer, Guerlain’s Shalimar perfume, and Goobers were introduced. The Scripps National Spelling Bee began. Hitler founded the Schutzstaffel. The Joint Board on Interstate Highways proposed a uniform numbering system for US highways. The Bauhaus design school moved into its new headquarters in Dessau, in a building designed by Walter Gropius. Ho Chi Minh founded the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League. The word “plastics” came into general use, and was the name of the first trade magazine for plastic manufacturers. An international convention in Geneva banned the use of chemical and biological weapons. George Balanchine became chief choreographer for the Ballets Russes in Paris. American expatriate Josephine Baker premiered her La Revue Nègre at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.

And mass communication was exploding. The telegraph was introduced in the 1840s, the telephone in the 1870s, but it wasn’t until 1900 that both systems managed to cover the majority of the country, and at that point they were still the exception in everyday communication. By the 1920s, they had become common facets of everyday life. Although the first radio transmissions were made at the turn of the century, it wasn’t until the 1920s that radios became common features in people’s homes, and the first broadcast networks emerged. And though the first motion picture theater was opened in 1905, and movies had become big business in the teens, it wasn’t until the 1920s that cinema became an essential and omnipresent part of popular culture.

Accompanying these new media came an increase in advertising of all kinds. Historians estimate that around $10 million was spent on advertising in 1865, $200 million in 1900, and $2.6 billion annually by 1925. Not only were the new media available, but people also had more time to consume them: the average industrial worker worked 66 hours in 1860, 60 hours in 1890, and 48 hours in 1920, and spent a significant number of those extra free hours consuming many times as much media as previous generations.

For literary culture, this increase in communication was a two-edged sword. On the one hand, shipping books and magazines anywhere in the country quickly and creating national advertising campaigns were easier. Other forms of promotion too, such as literary chats, promptly became available on the radio. The period saw significant innovations in the mass marketing of literary matter, including the founding of Reader’s Digest (1922) and the Book of the Month Club (1926). On the other hand, the new media were potent competition for literary work. The astounding growth of the film, radio, and recording industries created rivals to literature’s cultural prestige, and some of the responses—like literary hours on the radio, the Literary Guild (founded 1927), and the like—were spearheaded by professors and other upper-class litterateurs in an attempt to combat what they saw as the ill effects—the dumbing down—caused by mass media.

As these highbrow types worried about the lowbrow mass media being consumed, they helped promote what Joan Shelley Rubin has called “middlebrow culture.” The people at the center of that effort saw a clear division between literary work and popular writing, between high art and low culture, and were determined to pull the culture up by its bootstraps. They weren’t alone: avant-gardists, conservatives, modernists, traditionalists, Marxists, and others framed the debate as between art and commerce, between high art and schlock, between pretentiousness and real talk, between elitism and populism, and between literature for the people and literature for a snobby clique. Depending on where they stood, readers saw an exciting, experimental revolution happening in literary culture or a Western tradition that was under threat but that, with effort and perseverance and education, could be saved.

A host of other cultural issues also came into stark outline. The women’s movements of the previous 50 years had transformed gender relations, resulting in the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1919, which gave women the right to vote, and in expanded possibilities for employment. Sexual literacy, urban anonymity, more effective condoms, and other developments were loosening sexual mores. The automobile increased people’s freedom of movement and opportunities for privacy. Fierce cultural battles that accompanied these new freedoms and opportunities played out on editorial pages, in pulpits, and in the pages of literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.

The battle between capital and labor came to a head after 1919, when the largest and most widespread labor actions in history occurred, with millions of people on strike. Labor forced many concessions, some of which were more or less permanent. At the same time, business and government, under the cover of the Red Scare, crushed strikes, while President Calvin Coolidge declared that “the business of America is business.” Union membership was decimated over the decade, and judicial decisions constrained union power. The revolution in race relations underway since the Civil War came to fruition in phenomena such as the Harlem Renaissance, while also prompting social backlash and a resurgent Ku Klux Klan. Literature responded to all of this day by day, incorporating the conflict and the change, the progress and the reaction, the unprecedented openness to the future and the unparalleled anti-modernism, the elation and the misery.

Once a month over the course of this centennial year, I’ll post a few entries from the encyclopedia, keyed to a website where I’ve collected audio and visual materials. Since I knew the book would run roughly 1,000 pages, I assumed readers would dip in and out, and so I tried to make the entries satisfying on their own, independent of the rest. But of course, I hope you find it all as compelling as I do and keep coming back for more …

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Featured image: Hugo Gernsback imagines telemedicine, Science and Innovation (Feb. 1925).