Five Best: Books on the Roaring ’20s

1. When it comes to uproarious observations on the British class system, P.G. Wodehouse’s “Jeeves and Wooster" stories remain unrivaled. Bertie Wooster is an amiable and well-intentioned English gentleman, but he is also more than somewhat naive and sometimes a bit too eager to please. Mishaps and misunderstandings form part and parcel of his daily routine. Thankfully, he has Jeeves, his trusted and ever-resourceful valet, to sort things out. Wodehouse’s erudite wit is delivered in this early collection of intertwined short stories through such delightful phrases as when Jeeves, rather than agreeing that someone is a snob, replies, in his wholly polite manner, “he is somewhat acutely alive to the existence of class distinctions, sir." A loving homage to 1920s British upper-class society, “The Inimitable Jeeves" includes plenty of references to gambling, rural churches and their long-winded vicars, gentlemen’s clubs, women authors and more, all voiced in Wodehouse’s own inimitable fashion.

The Gift of Black Folk

By W.E.B. Du Bois (1924)

2. In the same year that black artists such as Josephine Baker, Florence Mills, Adelaide Hall, Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake were appearing on musical stages in New York and London, W.E.B. Du Bois published “The Gift of Black Folk." Du Bois’s insights into issues concerning race in the 1920s include how white authors had been portraying black characters over time: “Today he is slowly but tentatively, almost apologetically rising—a somewhat deserving, often poignant, but hopeless figure; a man whose only proper end is dramatic suicide—physically or morally." Within this context, one can contemplate the title character in DuBose Heyward’s novel “Porgy" (1925) and Joe in Edna Ferber’s novel “Show Boat" (1926), to offer just two examples, and their subsequent musical portrayals. Du Bois’s account of black contributions to the history, thought and culture of the United States offers a vivid black perspective on American identity that is infused with the need for social change and equality.

The Seven Lively Arts

By Gilbert Seldes (1924)

3. The playful wisdom of the cultural critic Gilbert Seldes is on full display in “The Seven Lively Arts," his impassioned call for popular culture to be taken seriously. Seldes didn’t see comic strips, movies and musical comedies as threats to more lauded art forms: His enemies were those second-rate insincere “bogus arts" with their “ill-rendered profundity" that “pretend to be better than the popular arts, yet they want desperately to be popular." Seldes announced the publication of his book at New York’s Winter Garden Theatre, home to eye-popping revues that featured everything from modernist design and operatic evocations to ragtime dances and partially clothed women—a manifestation of Seldes’s own inclusive aesthetic goals. His unapologetic and lively endorsements of some of the era’s most visible figures—including Charlie Chaplin, Irving Berlin, Florence Mills, Al Jolson and Fanny Brice—are among the book’s highlights.

The Great Gatsby

By F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

4. “The Great Gatsby" has a sweeping sense of nostalgia for an imagined past that keeps the book alive and popular a century after it was published. Much of the novel’s action takes place on Long Island, N.Y., a locus of Jazz Age culture. F. Scott Fitzgerald fills his story with many references to the defining aspects of the 1920s: Jordan Baker is a lady golfer; Daisy and Gatsby dance a foxtrot (“I remember being surprised by his graceful, conservative fox-trot," writes our narrator); and Gatsby is, among other things, an alleged bootlegger. This spirited novel explores the complicated relationships between the past and the present, between appearances and reality, and the tragedies that result when they collide.

Passing

By Nella Larsen (1929)

5. Two childhood friends meet by chance in the rooftop restaurant of Chicago’s Drayton Hotel, a whites-only establishment, in Nella Larsen’s novel “Passing." Both women, however, are light-skinned blacks. Irene passes as white when it is convenient—she is married to a black doctor and lives in Harlem; Clare’s entire existence is predicated on passing—she enjoys the comfortable lifestyle her racist husband provides for her. When Irene meets Clare’s husband for the first time, she inquires, “so you dislike Negroes, Mr. Bellew?" He replies, “I don’t dislike them, I hate them." Through her poignant tale of two black women, Larsen, one of the most acclaimed writers of the Harlem Renaissance, explores the complexities and challenges of race relations, social class and identity in the 1920s.