What People Really Read in 1922

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