'The World Broke In Two': Four Writers, One Transformational Year
Using excerpts from letters and diaries, historian and critic Bill Goldstein follows writers Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot through the tumultuous literary year of 1922.
The title of literary historian Bill Goldstein's book refers to a familiar quote from writer Willa Cather. In a 1936 essay, sensing that the literary landscape had shifted under her feet and that her own work was passing out of fashion, she lamented,"The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts."
She was referring to the appearance, in that year, of three towering works of modernism: James Joyce's Ulysses, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and the English publication of the first volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
The ingenious rigorously limits itself to the span of days from January 1st to December 31st, 1922.
