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As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)

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the first, and probably the most popular, of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County stories, a short, dark and compelling novel set in what he called “my apocryphal county”, a fictional rendering of Lafayette County in his native Mississippi. It was his ambition, he said, after the comparative failure of  The Sound and the Fury , “deliberately to write a tour de force”. Apart from Mark Twain ( No 23 in this series ), no other American writer before Faulkner had ever immersed his readers so completely in the vernacular language and culture of a society that was, and perhaps still is, so deeply foreign to mainstream American experience. The death and burial of a southern matriarch , Addie Bundren, is told from some 15 viewpoints, including that of the dying woman herself. The Bundren family’s demanding stream-of-consciousness narrative (Faulkner was a modernist pioneer) is intercut with the voices of the local doctor and preacher, together with neighbours and friends. From the first line, th
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The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)

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Chandler, who has yet to appear in this series, once said: “Hammett is all right. I give him everything. There were a lot of things he could not do, but what he did, he did superbly.” He added, in a summary that helps define Hammett’s achievement: “He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.” He also gave his characters a distinctive language and convincing motivations in a genre that had grown stereotyped, flaccid and uninvolving. The Maltese Falcon  is the Hammett novel that jumps from the pages of its genre and into literature. It’s the book that introduces  Sam Spade , the private detective who seduced a generation of readers, leading directly to  Philip Marlowe . Dorothy Parker, never a pushover, confessed herself “in a daze of love” such as she had not known in literature “since I encountered Sir Lancelot” and claimed to have read the novel some
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The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)

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The novel, a  roman à clef  describing an anguished love affair between the expatriate American war veteran Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley, a femme fatale representative in the writer’s mind of 1920s womanhood, is mostly located in Spain, Hemingway’s favourite country. For some critics, the heart of the novel is the bullfight, and how each character responds to the experience of the  corrida . At the same time, the escape into the wild is a great American theme that recurs in the works of Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain (Nos 16, 17 and 23 in this series). In addition,  The Sun Also Rises , like most novels of the 1920s, is a response to the author’s recent wartime service. The key to Hemingway, the thing that unlocks the most important doors to his creative life , was a deeper, more personal darkness, his complicated experience of the first world war. There are two versions. Either he was rejected for poor eyesight; or he failed to enlist and instead joined up as an ambulance driv
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Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)

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the Great War had many consequences. A year after  Mrs Dalloway  (No 50 in this series), a startling literary voice with Bloomsbury connections appeared on the London scene with a highly original satire on postwar England.  Sylvia Townsend Warner  was a young poet who told her editor at  Chatto & Windus  that she had written a "story about a witch". Within a year,  Lolly Willowes  had become the talk of the town. Today, Townsend Warner holds her place in this series as a proto-feminist who is also a major minor classic. Laura "Lolly" Willowes is a twentysomething middle-class Englishwoman who, on the death of her father, at first becomes a conventional maiden aunt living with her brother in London. Then, "groping after something", she makes a bid for personal freedom, an escape to Great Mop, "a secluded hamlet in the heart of the Chilterns", where she finds herself happily becoming a witch in communion with the devil. In the 1920s, the
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The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)

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No question: Lawrence is uneven, and troubling. In the last century he was fiercely attacked, and wildly overpraised, not least by the critic FR Leavis who clobbered generations of students with his verdict that Lawrence was "the great genius of our time". At the same time, my generation ingested Lawrence – his novels, poems, and stories – like junkies. Here, at last, was a writer who was unequivocally all about the human soul, and who loved nothing better than to explore every nuance of family and marital, and sexual, relations. For readers who had grown up with JM Barrie , CS Lewis, Arthur Ransome, E Nesbit and all the repressed masters of post-Victorian children's literature, Lawrence seemed to offer the most exhilarating liberation. We, by contrast, would feel the blood thunder in our veins, become spontaneous and vital and instinctual. We would, as Lawrence put it, "break down those artificial conduits and canals through which we do so love to form our uttera
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The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)

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39-year-old  John Buchan , recuperating from a duodenal ulcer, turned to writing (in a matter of weeks) a "shocker" or "dime novel" in the first months of the first world war, he was already the admired author of more than 10 works of fiction and spoken of in literary circles as a name to watch. Indeed, Buchan might quite plausibly have become a great Scots novelist following in the footsteps of Walter Scott and RL Stevenson. Instead, with ideal timing, he wrote another kind of classic,  The Thirty-Nine Steps , an archetypal English spy thriller. Long before the outbreak of war, the English reading public had become gripped by invasion fever. This was a volatile cocktail of jingoism and xenophobia inspired by the Anglo-German naval arms race and stoked by bestsellers such as  The Great War in England in 1897  by William Le Queux and the infinitely greater 1903 classic  The Riddle of the Sands  by Erskine Childers. Buchan, who worked for the British War Propaga
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