Abstract
The year 1922 is famously the annus mirabilis of literary modernism. Notable works central now to the modernist canon were published in this year, including Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, T S Eliot’s The Waste Land, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. At the time of their publication, these works were largely unknown to the vast readership engrossed in the global best-seller of that year, ASM Hutchinson’s If Winter Comes. Its record sales garnered the novel considerable press attention.1 Its sales from 1921 to 1923 outstripped those of both Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and Edith M Hull’s popular desert romance, The Sheik, 2 two notable bestsellers of this period. Hutchinson’s novel would go on to become one of the most widely read novels of the 1920s.3 Despite its phenomenal success in its day, however, it has received little scholarly attention. John Lucas (1997) and Ross McKibbin (1998) have provided brief but nuanced class-inflected readings of the novel, and it has received passing commentary in scholarship on war fiction.4 Now, this novel, once vastly popular and critically acclaimed, has a new relevance for the growing field of middlebrow scholarship, especially for the masculine middlebrow.5
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Notes
Hackett, A, 70 Years of Bestsellers, 1895–1965 (New York: Bowker, 1967), 126.
Lucas, J, The Radical Twenties (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 1997), 55; McKibbin, R, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Hammill, F, Women, Celebrity and Literary Culture Between the Wars (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 11.
Hutchinson, A S M, If Winter Comes (New York: Little Brown and Co, 1922); 172, 184, 185, 218.
Ross, S J, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 30.
Balio, T, ‘Prestige Pictures’, in Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939, T Balio (ed.) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 179–210.
Holtby, W, Letters to a Friend (London: Collins, 1937), 126.
Clarke, T, My Northcliffe Diary (London: Gollancz, 1931), 233.
Lawrence, D H , ‘The Future of the Novel’ (1923, as ‘Surgery for the Novel or, a Bomb’), in A Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, B Steele, (ed.) (London: Grafton, 1986), 137–41; Lawrence, ‘Morality and the Novel’ (1925a), in B Steele, (ed.) (London: Grafton, 1986), 149–54; Lawrence, D H, ‘The Novel’, (1925b), in B Steele (ed.), 155–56; West, R, The Strange Necessity (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928); Leavis, Q D, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto and Windus, 1939); Eliot, T S, ‘London Letter’, The Dial (September 1922), 329–31; Orwell, G, ‘Good Bad Books’ (1945) in Collected Essays, Volume 4: Journalism and Letters, Orwell, S and I Angus (eds) (London: Harcourt Brace and World, 1968), 19–23; and Hemingway, E, Torrents of Spring (1926) (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1998). Hemingway’s reference is brief, but telling. In Torrents of Spring, Hemingway’s parody of Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter (1925), the first line of the novel has the character Yogi Johnson wondering, ‘Could it be that what this writing fellow Hutchinson had said, “if winter comes can spring be far behind?” would be true again this year’ (1: 1998). Johnson’s ignorance of the original source of the quotation, the poet Shelley, and his depiction as a reader of Hutchinson who knows his work so well as to be able to quote from him, marks him out immediately, in Hemingway’s cruel portrayal, as a figure of mockery.
Mais, S P B, Some Modern Authors (London: Grant Richards, 1923), 85.
Washburn, C, ‘Sophistication’ (1925), in Opinions (New York: E P Dutton, 1926), 64.
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© 2015 Kirsten MacLeod
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MacLeod, K. (2015). What People Really Read in 1922. In: Macdonald, K., Singer, C. (eds) Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, 1880–1930. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137486776_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137486776_2
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