The World Broke in Two:
Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot,
D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster
and the Year that Changed Literature
"In 1922, Eliot, Forster, Lawrence, and Woolf each discovered a private literary way to recapture and to bridge the lost time that the (Great) war represented."
Willa Cather stated in 1936 that "the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts," and since then, college freshmen have been fretting about it like a soup-bone. With its leave-nothing-to-the-imagination subtitle, "Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature," Bill Goldstein's book, The World Broke In Two, which focuses on some of the major figures in the Western literary world in the year 1922, has that unsettling idea at its core.
Willa Cather stated in 1936 that "the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts," and since then, college freshmen have been fretting about it like a soup-bone. With its leave-nothing-to-the-imagination subtitle, "Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature," Bill Goldstein's book, The World Broke In Two, which focuses on some of the major figures in the Western literary world in the year 1922, has that unsettling idea at its core.
The professional and personal lives of Goldstein's key characters and a large cast of others are described with insightful detail ("Hearing of Virginia's latest relapse in May, Tom wrote in sympathy to Leonard"), the founding editor of the New York Times Books website. The year 1922 was indeed "a great literary period," as Ezra Pound wrote to T. S. Eliot. The book was meaningful to me personally as a reminder of the enjoyment I have had reading the books discussed, especially with the added biographical background of E. M. Forster and the others. The book is a tribute to the birth of modernism in literature.
5 comments:
Hi James, I love to read but I have always had a problem with modernist literature. I have attempted books like Nightwood, the Sound and the Fury and Miss LonelyHearts and in all 3 cases it was torture to get through. But that's just me and others feel differently and when I read a book of short stories by Faulkner I was really impressed by his talent.
I remember reading about this and being interested, I suppose when it came out, but then it fell off my radar. Thanks for reminding me--my library has copies.
Hi Kathy,
Some of the modernists, like Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, are a little more accessible. You might enjoy them more than those authors you mentioned.
Hi reese,
I would recommend this book for your consideration as it presents interesting biographical information about authors from the 1920s.
Wow, that looks really good, thank you!!
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