Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One's Own

A Room of One’s Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf, first published in September 1929. The work is based on two lectures Woolf delivered in October 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, women’s colleges at the University of Cambridge. In her essay, Woolf uses metaphors to explore social injustices and comments on women’s lack of free expression, and constructs a critical and historical account of women writers. Woolf examines the careers of several female authors, exploring whether women were capable of producing, and in fact free to produce, work of the quality of William Shakespeare, and addressing the limitations that past and present women writers face. (Wikipedia)

Read on Faded Page and Project Gutenberg

William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

The Sound and the Fury is a novel by the American author William Faulkner. Published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner’s fourth novel, and was not immediately successful. In 1931, however, when Faulkner’s sixth novel, Sanctuary, was published—a sensationalist story, which Faulkner later said was written only for money—The Sound and the Fury also became commercially successful, and Faulkner began to receive critical attention. Set in Jefferson, Mississippi, in the first third of the twentieth century, the novel centers on the Compson family, former Southern aristocrats who are struggling to deal with the dissolution of their family and its reputation. Over the course of the novel, the family falls into financial ruin, loses its religious faith and the respect of the town of Jefferson, and many of them lose their lives. It employs several narrative styles, including stream-of-consciousness. Perhaps as a result of disappointment in the initial rejection of his first novel, Flags in the Dust, Faulkner had now become indifferent to his publishers and wrote this novel in a much more experimental style. In describing the writing process for this work, Faulkner later said, “One day I seemed to shut the door between me and all publisher’s addresses and book lists. I said to myself, ‘Now I can write.’” (Wikipedia)

Read free ebook through Standard Books or read on Faded Page

Lloyd C. Douglas’s Magnificent Obsession

Magnificent Obsession is a 1929 novel by American author Lloyd C. Douglas. An American minister and author, Douglas was one of the most popular American authors of his time, although he did not write his first novel until he was fifty. The story traces the life of Robert Merrick, resuscitated by a rescue crew after a boating accident. The crew is thus unable to save the life of Dr. Hudson, a physician renowned for his ability to help people, who was having a heart attack at the same time on the other side of the lake. Merrick decides to devote his life to making up for the doctor’s, and becomes a physician himself. Douglas later wrote a book in response to the flood of letters he received from readers who wanted to know where they could find the book to which he referred in the novel, Dr. Hudson’s Secret Journal. The Robert Merrick character decoded the journal, from which he learned the secret of his extraordinary success as a doctor. (According to the book, the secret was the literal practice of doing good deeds secretly, and thereby reaping spiritual power to use in becoming an excellent doctor.) Magnificent Obsession was one of four of Douglas’ books eventually made into blockbuster motion pictures. (Wikipedia)

Read free ebook through Standard Books or read on Project Gutenberg

Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz

Berlin Alexanderplatz is a 1929 novel by Alfred Döblin. It is considered one of the most important and innovative works of the Weimar Republic. In a 2002 poll of 100 noted writers, the book was named among the top 100 books of all time. It is the best known work of Döblin, a German novelist, essayist, and doctor. A prolific writer whose œuvre spans more than half a century and a wide variety of literary movements and styles, Döblin is one of the most important figures of German literary modernism. The story of Berlin Alexanderplatz concerns a murderer, Franz Biberkopf, fresh from prison. When his friend murders the prostitute on whom Biberkopf has been relying as an anchor, he realizes that he will be unable to extricate himself from the underworld into which he has sunk. He must deal with misery, lack of opportunities, crime, and the imminent ascendency of Nazism. During his struggle to survive against all odds, life rewards him with an unsuspected surprise, but his happiness does not last. The novel has been adapted three times for film, most notably by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1980 as a fourteen-part miniseries. (Wikipedia)

Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel

Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life is a 1929 novel by Thomas Wolfe. It is Wolfe’s first novel, and is considered a highly autobiographical American coming-of-age story. Wolfe was a major American novelist of the first half of the twentieth century. His enduring reputation rests largely on his first novel and on the short fiction that appeared during the last years of his life. He was one of the first masters of autobiographical fiction, and along with William Faulkner, he is considered one of the most important authors of the Southern Renaissance within the American literary canon. The character of Eugene Gant is generally believed to be a depiction of Wolfe himself. The novel briefly recounts Eugene’s father’s early life, but primarily covers the span of time from Eugene’s birth in 1900 to his definitive departure from home at the age of nineteen. The novel’s setting, Altamont, is based on Wolfe’s home town of Asheville, North Carolina, and the descriptions of people and family led to estrangement from many in his hometown. Though often regarded as a “sentimental tale of growing up”, the novel is characterized by a “dark and troubling” depiction of the times, “full of loneliness, death, insanity, alcoholism, family dysfunction, racial segregation and a profoundly cynical view of World War I.” (Wikipedia)

Read free ebook through Standard Books or read on Faded Page and Project Gutenberg

Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth

Daughter of Earth (1929) is an autobiographical novel by the American author and journalist Agnes Smedley. The novel chronicles the years of Marie Rogers’ tumultuous childhood, struggles in relationships with men (both physical and emotional), time working with the Socialist Party, and involvement in the Indian independence movement. The fictional character of Marie Rogers lives a life similar to Agnes Smedley’s. Born in 1892, Smedley was an American journalist, writer, and activist who supported the Indian Independence Movement and the Chinese Communist Revolution. She was raised in a poverty-stricken miner’s family in Missouri and Colorado. While the novel is fiction, the content is predominantly autobiographical: a dramatized retelling of the formation of her feminist and socialist consciousness. In the 1987 republication, Alice Walker states in her foreword “it is the true story (give or take a few minor changes, deletions, or embellishments) of one woman’s life. Marie Rogers of Daughter of Earth is Agnes Smedley”. Daughter of Earth has become a standard piece of proletarian literature because of its focus on the struggles of the working class. (Wikipedia)

Mahatma Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth

The Story of My Experiments with Truth is the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, covering his life from early childhood through to 1921. It was written in weekly installments and published in his journal Navjivan from 1925 to 1929, and it appeared in English translation in Gandhi’s other journal, Young India. In the book’s preface, Gandhi recalled that he had actually undertaken to sketch out his autobiography as early as 1921 but had to set the work aside due to his political engagements. Starting with his birth and parentage, Gandhi reminisces of his childhood, child marriage, relation with his wife and parents, experiences at the school, his study tour to London, efforts to be like the English gentleman, and experiments in dietetics. Also covered are his going to South Africa, his experiences of colour prejudice, his quest for dharma, social work in Africa, return to India, his slow and steady work for political awakening, and social activities. The book ends abruptly after a discussion of the Nagpur session of the Indian National Congress in 1915. The autobiography is noted for its lucid, simple and idiomatic language and its transparently honest narration, and has become a key document for interpreting Gandhi’s life and ideas. (Wikipedia)

Read free ebook through Standard Books or read on Internet Archive

Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles

Les Enfants Terribles is a 1929 novel by Jean Cocteau, published by Editions Bernard Grasset. It concerns two siblings, Elisabeth and Paul, who isolate themselves from the world as they grow up, an isolation which is shattered by the stresses of their adolescence. It is revealed that the siblings enjoy a relationship characterised by a psychodrama known in the book as “The Game”, which can only be played in their shared bedroom, elevated by the Game-play into “The Room”. The game involves the siblings trying to annoy or irritate each other, Elisabeth through histrionic behaviour and Paul through a taciturn refusal to be affected by her, where the winner is the one who leaves the contest with the last word. It was first translated into English by Samuel Putnam in 1930 and published by Brewer & Warren. A later English translation by Rosamond Lehmann, with the title translated as The Holy Terrors, was published in the US in 1955, and in Canada in 1966. The book is illustrated by the author’s own drawings. The novel was made into a film of the same name, a collaboration between Cocteau and director Jean-Pierre Melville, in 1950, and inspired the opera by Philip Glass. (Wikipedia)

Henri Matisse

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant new directions in painting and sculpture. The intense colourism of the works he painted between 1900 and 1905 brought him notoriety as one of the Fauves (French for “wild beasts”). Many of his finest works were created in the decade or so after 1906, when he developed a rigorous style that emphasized flattened forms and decorative patterns. In 1917, he relocated to a suburb of Nice on the French Riviera, and the more relaxed style of his work during the 1920s gained him critical acclaim as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. After 1930, he adopted a bolder simplification of form. When ill health in his final years prevented him from painting, he created important works in the medium of paper collage. His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art. (Wikipedia)

Paintings by Henri Matisse on Wikipedia

Charles Ives

Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist composer, actuary, and businessman. Ives was among the earliest renowned American composers to achieve recognition on a global scale. His music was largely ignored during his early career, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Later in life, the quality of his music was publicly recognized through the efforts of contemporaries like Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, and he came to be regarded as an “American original”. He was also among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatory elements, and quarter tones. Though his musical experiments, including his increasing use of dissonance, were not well received by his contemporaries, his experimentation foreshadowed many musical innovations that were later more widely adopted during the twentieth century. Hence, he is often regarded as the leading American composer of art music of the twentieth century. Sources of Ives’ tonal imagery included hymn tunes and traditional songs; he also incorporated melodies of the town band at holiday parade, the fiddlers at Saturday night dances, patriotic songs, sentimental parlor ballads, and the melodies of Stephen Foster. (Wikipedia)

Read free ebook through Standard Books or read on Faded Page and Project Gutenberg

Robert Capa

Robert Capa, born Endre Ernő Friedmann, was a Hungarian-American war photographer and photojournalist. He is considered by some to be the greatest combat and adventure photographer in history, and is known for being the only civilian photographer that landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day. He covered five wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II’s campaigns across Europe and North Africa, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and the First Indochina War, with his photos published in major magazines and newspapers. From 1936 to 1939, Capa worked in Spain, photographing the Spanish Civil War. It was then that Capa took the photo now called The Falling Soldier (1936), purported to show the death of a Republican soldier. In 1947, for his work recording World War II in pictures, US general Dwight D. Eisenhower awarded Capa the Medal of Freedom. That same year, Capa co-founded Magnum Photos in Paris, the first cooperative agency for worldwide freelance photographers. (Wikipedia)

Auguste Lumière

Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumière was a French engineer, industrialist, biologist, and illusionist. In 1894 and 1895, he and his brother Louis invented an animated photographic camera and projection device, the cinematograph, which met with worldwide success. He and his brother’s work on the cinematograph was inspired by Lumière’s attendance at a demonstration of Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope. The brothers screened their first film using this device in December 1895, and following the success of this initial venture opened a number of cinemas worldwide. However, Auguste was skeptical of the potential of the device, remarking “My invention can be exploited . . . as a scientific curiosity, but apart from that it has no commercial value whatsoever”. After his work on the cinematograph, Lumière began focusing on the biomedical field, becoming a pioneer in the use of X-rays to examine fractures. He also contributed to innovations in military aircraft, producing a catalytic heater to allow cold-weather engine starts. (Wikipedia)

Works by the Lumière brothers on Wikimedia Commons

J. B. Priestley’s The Good Companions

Written in 1929, The Good Companions follows the fortunes of a concert party on a tour of England. It is English novelist, playwright, screenwriter, broadcaster, and social commentator J. B. Priestley’s most famous novel and established him as a national figure. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was adapted twice into film. The Good Companions was an instant hit on publication but was not particularly well regarded by critics. Nevertheless it remained popular for more than forty years. It then fell out of favour, not only because the novel was written from a (rather old-fashioned) middle-class perspective, but also because it dealt with a phenomenon (a travelling music hall troupe) that no longer existed. More recently there has been a reappraisal of this and other Priestley works: a new edition of The Good Companions appeared in October 2007 with a foreword by Dame Judi Dench, accompanying a reappraisal of the various versions by Ronald Harwood, André Previn, and Alan Plater among others. (Wikipedia)

Read free ebook through Standard Books or read on Internet Archive

Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Maracot Deep

The Maracot Deep is a short 1929 novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle about the discovery of the sunken city of Atlantis by a team of explorers led by Professor Maracot. Maracot is accompanied by Cyrus Headley, a young research zoologist and Bill Scanlan, an expert mechanic working with an iron works in Philadelphia who heads the construction of the submersible which the team takes to the bottom of the Atlantic. The novel first appeared in October 1927 as a serial in The Saturday Evening Post. Although a short novel, it provides interesting glimpses into beliefs about the sea during the early twentieth century, and particularly Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s own outlooks. The British writer and physician is best known for the character Sherlock Holmes, the center of four novels and fifty-six short stories that cemented Conan Doyle’s place in the genre of crime fiction. The Maracot Deep’s dramatic end, involving the fight between the ultimate Good and Evil, hints at the deep spiritual nature which Conan Doyle had developed in his later years. Whereas the adventures of Sherlock Holmes reflect Conan Doyle’s more keen, analytical side, novels like The Maracot Deep show how he seriously took to spiritualism in his later years. It is not marked by any particular religion, though there are strong Christian and Hellenistic undertones. (Wikipedia)

Read free ebook through Standard Books or read on Project Gutenberg

Duke Ellington

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was an American jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra from 1923 through the rest of his life. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Ellington was based in New York City from the mid-1920s and gained a national profile through his orchestra’s appearances at the Cotton Club in Harlem. A master at writing miniatures for the three-minute 78 rpm recording format, Ellington wrote or collaborated on more than one thousand compositions; his extensive body of work is the largest recorded personal jazz legacy, and many of his pieces have become standards. He also recorded songs written by his bandsmen, such as Juan Tizol’s “Caravan”, which brought a Spanish tinge to big band jazz. Ellington recorded for most American record companies of his era, performed in and scored several films, and composed a handful of stage musicals. Although a pivotal figure in the history of jazz, in the opinion of Gunther Schuller and Barry Kernfeld, “the most significant composer of the genre”, Ellington himself embraced the phrase “beyond category”, considering it a liberating principle, and referring to his music as part of the more general category of American Music. Ellington was known for his inventive use of the orchestra, or big band, as well as for his eloquence and charisma. He was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize Special Award for music in 1999. (Wikipedia)

Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton was an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Her poetry details her long battle with bipolar disorder, suicidal tendencies, and intimate details from her private life, including relationships with her husband and children, whom she physically and sexually assaulted. It was after a second manic episode in 1955 that she met Dr. Martin Orne, who became her long-term therapist at the Glenside Hospital and who encouraged her to write poetry. She found early acclaim with her poems; a number were accepted by the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and the Saturday Review. Sexton later studied with Robert Lowell at Boston University alongside poets Sylvia Plath and George Starbuck. Sexton paid homage to her friendship with Plath in the 1963 poem “Sylvia’s Death”. Her first volume of poetry, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, was published in 1960, and included the poem “Her Kind”, which uses the persecution of witches as an analogy for the oppression of women in a patriarchal society. She collaborated with musicians, forming a jazz-rock group called Her Kind that added music to her poetry. Within twelve years of writing her first sonnet, she was among the most honored poets in the US. (Wikipedia)