Books Set In

Best Books Set in the 1920s — 12 Novels From the Jazz Age to the Roaring Twenties

The 1920s was a decade of violent contradiction — liberation and repression, jazz and Prohibition, the Harlem Renaissance and the Ku Klux Klan's resurgence, Europe's post-war modernism and America's gilded excess. The novels that capture it are among the most essential in English: The Great Gatsby is only the most famous. From Woolf's revolutionary stream-of-consciousness to Hemingway's understated Paris, from the Harlem of Nella Larsen to the Egypt of Agatha Christie's early career, the 1920s produced a literary landscape of extraordinary richness. These twelve books let you live in it.

Jazz Age New York & Paris

Prohibition, flappers & modernism

The decade that changed everything

The 1920s in Fiction: What to Expect

The 1920s in American fiction is almost always about the tension between new freedom (jazz, women's suffrage, sexual liberation) and old constraints (Prohibition, racial segregation, class rigidity). The Fitzgerald novels capture the surface; the Harlem Renaissance writers (Larsen, Hurston) capture what was underneath it.
The 1920s in British fiction is the decade of modernism: Woolf, Eliot, Aldous Huxley. The Bloomsbury Group's experiments with consciousness and form were responses to the trauma of World War One and the inadequacy of Victorian literary conventions to represent what came after.
Paris in the 1920s was the city of expatriate Americans (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein) and the centre of the European avant-garde simultaneously. The two scenes overlapped and influenced each other in ways that shaped the rest of the century.
Crime fiction was born in the 1920s as a popular form: Agatha Christie published her first Poirot novel in 1920, Dorothy L. Sayers in 1923, and the Golden Age conventions (country house murders, brilliant amateur detectives) were established in this decade.
The Harlem Renaissance — the cultural explosion of Black American literature, music, and art centred in Harlem in the 1920s — produced some of the most important American writing of the century: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay.

Literary — The 1920s on the Page

Pick #1

The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald • 1925 • Literary Fiction

Long Island and Manhattan, 1922 Old money vs new money The defining American novel

Jay Gatsby throws parties at his Long Island mansion for a woman he cannot have. Nick Carraway watches from next door. Tom and Daisy Buchanan exist in a world of old money that cannot be penetrated or escaped. Fitzgerald's novel — 47,000 words, written in five months — captures the decade's specific enchantment and its specific corruption: the way money and beauty together create an illusion of freedom that is always already over. The green light at the end of Daisy's dock is the most resonant image in American fiction. The 1922 New York of the novel — the parties, the Valley of Ashes, the Plaza Hotel, the bridge into Manhattan — is the Jazz Age at its most luminous and its most hollow. Re-read it as an adult: what seemed like romance is tragedy, and what seemed like glamour is grief.

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Pick #2

Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf • 1925 • Literary Fiction / Modernism

London, a single June day in 1923 Stream of consciousness Woolf's technical masterpiece

Clarissa Dalloway prepares for a party. Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran, moves toward suicide. The two characters never meet — their narratives run in parallel through a single London day — and Woolf's formal achievement is to show how the same city contains both the social performance of the powerful and the invisible suffering of the broken. The novel was revolutionary in 1925 and remains technically astonishing: Woolf's stream of consciousness moves between characters through shared sensory experience (a car backfiring, a skywriting plane) with a fluency that no subsequent novelist has quite matched. The London of the novel — Westminster, Regent's Park, the specific quality of a June afternoon — is rendered with the attention of someone who loved it and feared it simultaneously. Michael Cunningham's The Hours is the essential companion novel.

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Pick #3

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway • 1926 • Literary Fiction

Paris and Pamplona, 1920s The Lost Generation expatriates Hemingway's first and best novel

Jake Barnes, an American journalist with a war wound that has rendered him impotent, moves through 1920s Paris with Lady Brett Ashley and a circle of expatriate writers and drinkers, then travels to Pamplona for the bullfights. Hemingway's first novel invented a style (the iceberg theory: what is left out is what matters) and gave the post-war generation its name ("You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein told him). The Paris of the novel — the cafés of the Left Bank, the specific social world of American expatriates — is the Paris that still lives in the cultural imagination. The Pamplona bullfighting sequences are the finest prose Hemingway ever wrote: spare, precise, and invested with a dignity that the characters themselves have lost. The novel that taught American prose to leave things out.

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Pick #4

Passing

Nella Larsen • 1929 • Literary Fiction

Harlem and midtown Manhattan, 1920s A Black woman passing as white The Harlem Renaissance's finest novel

Irene Redfield, a light-skinned Black woman living in Harlem, encounters her childhood friend Clare Kendry — who has been passing as white, married a white racist, and built a life on the lie of her racial identity. Clare is drawn back to the Harlem world she left, and the novel traces the mounting tension between the two women with a Jamesian precision that conceals multiple competing explanations for what is actually happening. Larsen's novel is simultaneously about race, class, sexuality, and desire — the ambiguity is structural rather than accidental. The Harlem of the novel (the NAACP parties, the jazz clubs, the specific social world of Black middle-class New York in the 1920s) is rendered with the authority of someone who was part of it. Rebecca Hall's 2021 Netflix film adaptation is beautifully made. The most formally sophisticated novel of the Harlem Renaissance.

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Pick #5

Ragtime

E.L. Doctorow • 1975 • Historical Fiction

New York and America, 1900–1920s Real and fictional characters woven together Doctorow's masterwork

Three families — a white upper-middle-class family from New Rochelle, a Black ragtime musician named Coalhouse Walker, and a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe — move through early twentieth-century America while historical figures (Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Sigmund Freud) appear as characters in their stories. Doctorow's novel is one of the great experiments in American historical fiction: it blurs the line between real and fictional, treats history as narrative, and shows how race and class structured the century's possibilities for different groups simultaneously. The ragtime music of the title — Black music reaching white ears in the transitional years before jazz — is both period detail and structural metaphor. The 1981 Milos Forman film is excellent; the Broadway musical is outstanding.

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Pick #6

A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway • 1964 • Memoir

Paris, 1921–1926 Hemingway's memoir of his apprenticeship The most seductive memoir about Paris ever written

Hemingway reconstructed his 1920s Paris years from notebooks written at the end of his life — the poverty, the cafés (Café de Flore, La Closerie des Lilas), the conversations with Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound, the writing of The Sun Also Rises, the cold hunger of the apartment at 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine. The book is simultaneously a memoir, a literary history, and a sustained act of self-mythologising: Hemingway is settling scores and polishing legends simultaneously, and the result is both unreliable and irresistible. The Paris it describes — cheap wine, good bread, the Luxembourg Gardens in winter, the specific texture of living badly and writing well — is the Paris that every writer who has ever gone there goes to find. Published posthumously; one of his finest books.

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British & Historical — The Other 1920s

Pick #7

Brideshead Revisited

Evelyn Waugh • 1945 • Literary Fiction

Oxford and England, 1920s Class, Catholicism, and beautiful decay Waugh's most personal novel

Charles Ryder, middle-class and artistically aspiring, befriends Sebastian Flyte at Oxford in the early 1920s and falls into the orbit of the Marchmain family — their vast Yorkshire estate of Brideshead, their Catholicism, their glamour, their self-destruction. Waugh's novel, written during World War Two as an elegy for the aristocratic England he saw dying, is saturated with the specific texture of 1920s Oxford (the aesthetic young men, the idleness, the beauty) and the country house world that surrounded it. The novel moves between Sebastian's golden undergraduate years, his decline into alcoholism, and Charles's adult life, returning to Brideshead in the war years. The 1981 Jeremy Irons television adaptation is the finest literary adaptation in British television history and worth watching alongside the novel.

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Pick #8

The Paris Wife

Paula McLain • 2011 • Historical Fiction

Paris and Chicago, 1920–1926 Hadley Hemingway's voice The wife who was left behind

Hadley Richardson Hemingway narrates the years of her marriage to Ernest — from their meeting in Chicago through the Paris years (the cafés, the expatriate community, the writing of The Sun Also Rises) to the affair with Pauline Pfeiffer that ended the marriage. McLain's novel gives voice to one of literary history's most overlooked figures: the woman who supported Hemingway during his apprenticeship, who carried his manuscripts to the station (and lost them — one of the great literary disasters of the century), and who was discarded when he became famous. The Paris of the novel is the same Paris as A Moveable Feast but seen from the other side of the marriage — the loneliness, the fear, the gradual recognition that she is losing him. One of the finest biographical novels about the 1920s literary world.

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Pick #9

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

Therese Anne Fowler • 2013 • Historical Fiction

Jazz Age New York, Paris, and beyond Zelda's side of the story The woman behind the legend

Zelda Sayre — Alabama belle, aspiring dancer and writer — meets Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, marries him, and spends the next fifteen years watching her own talents absorbed into his legend and her own identity erased by mental illness and institutionalisation. Fowler's novel gives Zelda the narrative Scott denied her: the Jazz Age parties are there, the Paris years, the friendship with the Murphys and the encounters with Hemingway — but now we see how Zelda experienced them rather than how Scott romanticised or diminished them. The 1920s world of the Fitzgeralds (the Plaza Hotel, the Riviera, the specific glamour and specific damage of their marriage) is rendered with sympathy and historical intelligence. Read alongside A Moveable Feast and The Great Gatsby for the complete picture.

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Pick #10

Vile Bodies

Evelyn Waugh • 1930 • Literary Fiction / Satire

London, late 1920s The Bright Young Things Waugh's satirical masterpiece

Adam Fenwick-Symes returns from Paris, loses his manuscript to a customs official, and attempts to earn enough money to marry his fiancée Nina while drifting through the world of the Bright Young Things — London's society party circuit of the late 1920s, all cocktails and fancy dress parties and gossip columns and impending catastrophe. Waugh's second novel is the definitive satirical portrait of the 1920s upper-class English social world: the pointlessness of the parties, the cruelty underneath the gaiety, the gathering darkness as the parties get louder and more desperate. The prose is almost entirely dialogue, moving at the pace of farce but building toward an ending of bleak power. More formally adventurous and more mordant than Brideshead Revisited. The best novel about the 1920s social scene in England.

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Pick #11

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Agatha Christie • 1926 • Crime Fiction

English village, 1926 The twist that changed crime fiction Christie's most debated novel

Roger Ackroyd is murdered in his study in the village of King's Abbott, and Hercule Poirot — retired to the village to grow vegetable marrows — is called upon to investigate. Christie's most famous novel (after And Then There Were None) contains one of the most controversial endings in the history of the genre: a twist so fundamental to the novel's architecture that some critics at the time called it cheating. Whether it is or not is the best argument in crime fiction. The 1920s English village it depicts — the social hierarchy, the gossip, the specific world of a prosperous Somerset community between the wars — is rendered with the sociological precision that Christie always disguised as entertainment. The genre's great controversial novel, still generating arguments a century later.

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Pick #12

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston • 1937 • Literary Fiction

Florida, 1920s A Black woman's journey to selfhood The Harlem Renaissance's most beloved novel

Janie Crawford, a Black woman in 1920s Florida, is married three times and finds freedom and love only with her third husband Tea Cake — whose community of migrant workers in the Everglades lives outside the white social system entirely. Hurston's novel, written in six weeks during a Guggenheim fellowship, is set in the 1920s Black South (Eatonville, Florida — Hurston's own hometown, the first all-Black incorporated municipality in America) and rendered in African American vernacular English with a linguistic beauty that Langston Hughes called a failure and Alice Walker later reclaimed as a masterpiece. Ignored for decades after publication, it was rescued by Walker's advocacy in the 1970s and is now considered one of the great American novels of the twentieth century. For the 1920s story that the Fitzgerald novels couldn't tell.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Great Gatsby really as good as everyone says?

Yes, but not for the reasons usually given. It is not a love story — it is a story about the impossibility of love across class in America, and about the lie at the heart of the American Dream. Most readers who encounter it at school miss this because they are asked to track the plot rather than read the prose. The second reading (as an adult, or re-read after school) usually produces the recognition of what it is actually doing: every sentence is doing work, every image is earning its place, and the novel's apparent simplicity is a formal achievement of the highest order. It is 47,000 words and contains more than most 200,000-word novels.

What is the Harlem Renaissance and why does it matter for 1920s fiction?

The Harlem Renaissance (roughly 1920–1935) was a cultural, social, and artistic explosion centred in the Harlem neighbourhood of New York City that produced some of the most important American literature, music, and visual art of the twentieth century. The Great Migration of Black Americans from the South to Northern cities created in Harlem a concentration of talent and aspiration that generated a new Black cultural identity. Writers included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen. The Harlem Renaissance is essential context for any reading of the 1920s: the decade's official mythology (Gatsby, Hemingway, the Lost Generation) is entirely white; the actual cultural richness of the period includes a parallel tradition that only recently has been given its proper place.

What other 1920s novels are worth reading beyond this list?

Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point (1928) is the definitive British intellectual novel of the 1920s — everyone is recognisably based on a real person and everyone is being mercilessly satirised. D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) captures the decade's sexual revolution. Dorothy L. Sayers's Whose Body? (1923) begins the Lord Peter Wimsey series — Golden Age detective fiction at its most elegant. Jean Toomer's Cane (1923) is the Harlem Renaissance's most formally experimental work. F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night (1934) is set in the 1920s and covers similar territory to Gatsby from a different angle. And Fitzgerald's short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) is the decade's mood in concentrated form.

What was Prohibition and how did it shape 1920s fiction?

Prohibition (1920–1933) banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol in the United States and is the most consequential failed social experiment in American history. Its effects included: the creation of organised crime (bootlegging made Al Capone; The Great Gatsby's Gatsby is a bootlegger); the proliferation of speakeasies (illegal bars) that became centres of jazz culture, racial mixing, and social transgression; and a general culture of law-breaking that undermined respect for all law. In fiction, Prohibition is the background against which the Jazz Age's apparent freedom operates — the parties, the jazz, and the bootleg gin are all illegal, which is part of their glamour. Fitzgerald understood this better than anyone: the parties at Gatsby's house are possible because of crime.