I had a wonderful high school English teacher who introduced me to the era which still has my heart:
the American literary canon from roughly 1900 to the 1930s. The muckrakers, the troublemakers, the Jazz Age, and the Lost Generation*: there’s never been anything like it since.
(In fact, one of my dark jokes to a friend who is thinking of evacuating the US for her own safety is that she should move to Paris and start a salon of expatriate American writers who rise after noon, pound out a chapter of an era-defining literary novel on a typewriter, have unnecessarily complicated romantic relationships with each other, drink wine in bistros until 6 AM, and then do it all again the next day. Really, this is the dream existence.)
For the past couple of years I’ve been drawing that era closer again, as the real world reminds us why that literature was written in the first place. There really is nothing new under the sun. As long as you can forgive the writing style of the time, in which fusty and pompous monologuing was the norm (until Fitzgerald and Steinbeck drunkenly knocked it off the table once and for all, for which thanks), you will find so much from a century ago which is relevant to today.
Particularly the politics.
What’s also unique about this canon is its interaction with copyright law. After all, it’s the 2020s, as you might have noticed. That means that many of these works are going out of copyright.
And you do know where to look for materials that are out of copyright, of course: Project Gutenberg.
Here’s Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the book which disrupted the industrial era. It’s been banned in many places, including US states where politicians don’t want young people reading about child labour in unsafe factories.
If you’re staying in the muckraking era: Ida Tarbell. Disrupting the energy sector. Free.
Keep going.
Because you’ll find the man himself: three of Sinclair Lewis’ definitive works. For free.
(You do need to go to a bookstore to buy “It Can’t Happen Here”, his 1930s tale of an authoritarian US President called Buzz Windrip. “Windrip” being a play on “rip wind”, the American term for flatulence; the Scottish term for flatulence being “trump”. But I digress.)
Dos Passos. Free. DOS PASSOS, FREE. (As above, his U.S.A. trilogy needs a trip to the bookstore: thank me later.)
Some of Fitzgerald’s not-Gatsby work, which has always been criminally overlooked: free.
Faulkner. Free.
Keep going. You’ll find more.
Oh and wait until you dig around the Internet Archive.
You’ll find everything you need which came after that era, but which many of those writers saw coming from forty years away.
The HUAC hearings. Free.
You can’t do business with Hitler, a warning to American businessmen who viewed fascism as a business opportunity. Free.
Hofstadter’s 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, which I had to reference multiple times in academic essays in 2025. Free.
Baldwin. You should have listened. Free.
Keep going.
*Except Hemingway.
Fuck that guy.
