America Between the WarsNorth America after WWI and before WWII
Jump to: 1919 and the 1920s
Within a decade, though, fortunes were lost just as quickly when the rampant speculation in stocks led to the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Combined with a severe drought, the 1929 Crash ushered in the Great Depression, years of widespread unemployment and economic hardship which did not truly lift until the U.S. mobilized for World War II. Novels in a series are generally listed together under the category appropriate to the first novel in the series. Click on the title to see the listing at Powell's Books or another online source. 1919 and the 1920s
Warren Adler, Funny Boys (2008), about gangsters in 1920s New York.Howard Bahr, Pelican Road (2008), about railroad engineers in 1923 and during an impending collision in 1940. W.K. Berger, The Purples Amy Bloom, Away (2007), about a Russian immigrant in New York who lost her family to violent anti-Jewish pogroms. Michael Byers, Percival's Planet (2010), about the search for "Planet X" from 1928-1930, which led to the discovery of Pluto. Review Alan Cheuse, The Light Possessed (1990), about a fictional New Mexico artist modeled after Georgia O'Keeffe Frank Delaney, Shannon (2009), about a young American priest suffering from shell shock who travels through Ireland in the 1920s. E.L. Doctorow, Homer and Langley (2009), about two reclusive brothers, one intuitive and blind, the other affected by mustard gas during World War I, who on their death in 1947 are found to have been hoarding newspapers for decades in their Fifth Avenue mansion in New York. Ivan Doig, Work Song (2010), about an educated man who arrives in Butte, Montana, in 1919 and becomes caught up in the tensions between the owners of a copper mine and the miners, who are determined to organize a union. Louise Erdrich, The Master Butcher’s Singing Club (2003), about German immigrants in North Dakota during the years after World War I. Robert L. Fenton, Three Wise Men (2008), about Jewish gangsters in the Prohibition years of the 1920s; self-published. Sharon Ewell Foster, Passing by Samaria (1999), about a young black woman who moves to Chicago in 1919; Christian message. Denise Giardina, Storming Heaven (1988), about the West Virginia Mine Wars and the coal miners' struggle for a union during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Denise Giardina, The Unquiet Earth (1994), about coal mining in West Virginia from the 1930s to the 1990s. Glen David Gold, Carter Beats the Devil (2001), about a stage magician in 1920s San Francisco who finds himself in hot water when President Warren Harding dies under mysterious circumstances after volunteering for the magician's show. Chris Greenhalgh, Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky (2010), about the 1920 love affair between fashion designer Coco Chanel and the exiled Russian composer Igor Stravinsky after Chanel invites Stravinsky and his invalid wife and four children to stay at her estate. Review at The Washington Post Sarah Bruce Kelly, Jazz Girl (2010), about African-American pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams, born with a caul and treated as an outcast in her teens by her Pittsburgh neighbors because of her odd gifts.
William Kennedy, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978), about a poker-player and small-time hustler in Albany, New York, during the Depression; #2 in the Albany Cycle. William Kennedy, Ironweed (1983), about an alcoholic vagrant who returns home to Albany, New York, during the Depression; received the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; #3 in the Albany Cycle. William Kennedy, Very Old Bones (1992), about the illegitimate son of an artist, who attends a family gathering in 1958; #5 in the Albany Cycle. William Kennedy, Roscoe (2001), about machine politics in Albany, New York, in 1945; #7 in the Albany Cycle.
Gerard Mac, Tell Them I'll Be There Lee Martin, Quakertown (2001), about a gifted gardener, his daughter, and the two men she loves, one white, one black, in North Texas during the 1920s. Review Erin McGraw, The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard (2008), about a Kansas woman married as a teenager who leaves her husband and children and goes to Hollywood, where she sews costumes for movie stars. Mary Alice Monroe, Time Is a River (2008), about a contemporary woman recovering from breast cancer who discovers the 1920s journal of her fly-fisher grandmother in North Carolina and reopens an old scandal. Vincent Nicolosi, In the Fullness of Time (2010), about a man who recalls the rumors circulating around the 1923 death of President Harding, once his hometown neighbor, when he learns of the Kennedy assassination. Howard Norman, The Haunting of L (2002), about a photographer's assistant in a remote Manitoba town who falls in love with his employer's wife and comes to share her obsession with spirit photographs. Review at The Atlantic Monthly Mary Doria Russell, Dreamers of the Day (2008), about an Ohio schoolteacher whose trip to the Middle East coincides with the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, where she meets Lawrence of Arabia, an old friend of her sister. Shawna Yang Ryan, Locke 1928 Dawn Shamp, On Account of Conspicuous Women (2008), about four women in 1920s North Carolina and their involvement with the women's suffrage movement. Irving Stone, Clarence Darrow for the Defense Laura Mazzuca Toops, Hudson Lake (2007), about a clash between Bix Beiderbecke's jazz band and the rural Indiana town of Hudson Lake in the summer of 1926 when they land a season-long gig at the Blue Lantern dance hall. Joseph Wallace, Diamond Ruby (2010), a baseball story about a young, left-handed Jewish woman signed up to pitch for the Brooklyn Typhoons in 1923. Paul Watkins, The Promise of Light (1992), about a bank clerk on a small New England island in the 1920s who discovers he was adopted and sets out to learn more about his past. The 1920s: Mysteries
Ace Atkins, Devil's Garden (2009), a noir mystery in which Pinkerton agent Dashiell Hammett is hired to defend silent film star Fatty Arbuckle from a charge of rape that led to a woman's death, one of the most notorious scandals of the 1920s.Tom Bradby, Blood Money (2009), a thriller about a New York policeman investigating mob violence during the 1929 Wall Street Crash.
Michael Kilian, The Uninvited Countess Michael Kilian, A Sinful Safari
Annette Meyers, Murder Me Now (2001), about a woman poet during the Roaring Twenties who discovers a corpse at a house party and teams up with a private investigator to solve a mystery which seems to have its origins in the sinister Black Hand organization; #2 in the Olivia Brown mystery series. The Great Depression
Ace Atkins, Infamous (2010), about the 1933 hunt for George "Machine Gun" Kelly after he and his wife kidnap an Oklahoma oilman.Russell Banks, The Reserve (2008), about an heiress in upstate New York whose life spins out of control during the Great Depression after her father dies and she meets a charismatic artist. Matt Bondurant, The Wettest County in the World (2008), about a gang of moonshiners in rural Virginia during Prohibition. Sandra Brown, Rainwater (2009), a romance about a woman who runs a boarding house in central Texas while caring for her difficult ten-year-old son, when a new boarder arrives in 1934 just before violence erupts in the town. Sandra Dallas, Prayers for Sale (2009), about two women who become friends in 1936 in a Colorado mining town that has suffered during the Great Depression. Review Rebecca Dean, The Palace Circle (2009), about a Southern belle who marries into the British aristocracy shortly before World War II and then, disappointed to discover her husband married her only to produce heirs, has an affair with his best friend. E.L. Doctorow, Billy Bathgate (1989), about a fifteen-year-old boy hired as an errand boy by a mobster in the Bronx during the Depression. Ivan Doig, English Creek (1984), a coming-of-age novel about a boy in rural Montana during the 1930s Ivan Doig, Bucking the Sun (1996), a literary novel about the building of the Fort Peck dam in 1938. Tony Earley, Jim the Boy (2000), a coming-of-age novel about a ten-year-old boy in a small North Carolina town in 1934; the sequel, The Blue Star is set during World War II. Ellen Feldman, Scottsboro (2008), about nine black youths arrested on a train for fighting with white boys in Alabama in 1931, where the charge suddenly escalates to rape of two girls who were also on the train. Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants (2006), about Depression-era circus performers and a circus elephant. Michelle Hoover, The Quickening (2010), about two Midwestern farm women whose friendship is threatened by the secrets they keep from each other. Samantha Hunt, The Invention of Everything Else (2008), about an unlikely friendship between the eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla and a young chambermaid in the Hotel New Yorker during the 1940s. Hillary Jordan, Mudbound (2008), about a city woman who marries for the first time at age 31 in 1939, and then reluctantly moves to a farm in the Mississippi Delta with her husband. J.D. Landis, The Valley (2006), about the flooding of a Massachusetts valley in 1938 after the building of the Quabbin Dam; available in digital format only. Adam Mansbach, The End of the Jews (2008), a novel about several generations of an artistic Jewish family, from the 1930s to the present. Annette Meyers, Repentances (2004), about a Jewish immigrant in 1936 New York who discovers that his family, whose passages he paid in order to rescue them from the Nazi threat in Europe, have all died, and about a girl who grows up haunted by events stemming from that tragedy. Shandi Mitchell, Under This Unbroken Sky (2009), about a Ukrainian immigrant and his family and the hardships the experience homesteading in Western Canada in the late 1930s. Ron Rash, Serena (2008), about a 1930s North Carolina lumber baron who marries an ambitious, beautiful and vengeful woman from Boston who takes an active role in his business. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), about an Oklahoma family who migrates to California looking for work during the Great Depression; a classic rather than a true historical novel since Steinbeck researched and wrote it during the Depression. Rhea Tregebov, The Knife Sharpener's Bell Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982), about a young black woman in an abusive relationship in rural Georgia during the 1930s; won a 1983 Pulitzer Prize. The Great Depression: Mysteries
Megan Abbott, Bury Me Deep (2009), about a young woman abandoned by her doctor husband in 1931 who becomes involved with a fast crowd and falls for with a charming but roguish politician; inspired by a sensational actual crime.William Bernhardt, Nemesis: The Final Case of Eliot Ness (2009), a thriller about Chicago lawman Eliot Ness on the trail of a serial killer in the fall of 1935 after he has moved to Cleveland. Robert Clark, Mr. White's Confession (1998), about a police detective in 1939 Minnesota who becomes obsessed with unraveling the oddities in the case against a reclusive photographer for the murder of two dance hall girls. Bev Marshall, Walking Through Shadows Sharyn McCrumb, The Devil Amongst the Lawyers (2010), about a journalist in Appalachia in 1935 who competes with a hoard of non-local journalists as he tries to uncover the truth behind a woman's trial for murder with the help of his cousin Nora, gifted with second sight. Linda L. Richards, Death Was the Other Woman (2008), an old-fashioned hard-boiled mystery set in 1930s Los Angeles, with a twist: the private eye's secretary is the real sleuth; #1 in the Kitty Pangborne mystery series. Linda L. Richards, Death Was in the Picture (2009), about a private eye's "girl Friday" who discovers the seamy side of Hollywood after her boss is hired to investigate a murder case; #2 in the Kitty Pangborne mystery series. Top of Page
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(2010), about a gang of Jewish rumrunners in Prohibition-era Detroit; self-published.
(2010), about three brothers, Irish immigrants in New York during the 1920s, a stockbroker, an aspiring priest, and a popular singer. 
(2007), about a Chinese community in California and the disruptions that follow when the wife a man left behind in China arrives unexpectedly with two other women.
(1949), a biographical novel about Clarence Darrow, the lawyer who founded the American Civil Liberties Union and defended John Scopes in his 1925 trial for teaching the theory of evolution.
(2001), a man-about-town dabbles in solving mysteries in the U.S. during the 1920s; #1 in the Jazz Age series.
(2002), a man-about-town detective investigates the murder of a foreign countess; #2 in the Jazz Age series.
(2003), a gallery owner who is also a detective goes on safari and investigates a murder; #3 in the Jazz Age series.
(2009), about a girl whose Jewish family decides to leave Canada in the 1930s to settle in the Soviet Union, where she struggles to adapt to life under Stalin and survive the anti-Semitism that follows World War II.
(2002), a literary murder mystery set in 1941 Mississippi.