20th century in literature
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History of modern literature
The early modern period
16th century in literature | 17th century in literature
European literature in the 18th century
1700s | 1710s | 1720s | 1730s | 1740s | 1750s | 1760s | 1770s | 1780s | 1790s | 1800s
Modern Literature, 19th century
1800s | 1810s | 1820s | 1830s | 1840s | 1850s | 1860s | 1870s | 1880s | 1890s | 1900s
Modern Literature, 20th century
Modernism | Structuralism | Deconstruction | Poststructuralism | Postmodernism | Post-colonialism | Hypertext fiction
1900s | 1910s | 1920s | 1930s | 1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s
Modern Literature in Europe
European literature
Modern Literature in the Americas
American literature | Argentine literature | Brazilian literature | Canadian literature | Colombian literature | Cuban literature | Jamaican literature | Mexican literature | Peruvian literature
Australasian Literature
Australian literature | New Zealand literature
Modern Asian Literature
Chinese literature | Indian literature | Literature of Pakistan | Kannada literature | Tamil literature | Telugu literature | Hindi literature | Urdu literature | Indian writing in English | Bengali literature | Marathi literature | Malayalam literature | Japanese literature | Vietnamese literature
African Literature
African literature | Nigerian literature | South African literature
Other topics
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See also: 19th century in literature, other events of the 20th century, 21st century in literature, list of years in literature.

Literature of the 20th century refers to world literature produced during the 20th century. The range of years is, for the purpose of this article, literature written from (roughly) the 1900s through the 1990s.

The main periods are captured in the bipartite division, Modernist literature and Postmodern literature, flowering from roughly 1900 to 1940 and 1960 to 1990¹ respectively, divided, as a rule of thumb, by World War II.

The somewhat malleable term of contemporary literature is usually applied with a post-1960 cutoff point.

Technological advances during the 20th century allowed cheaper production of books, resulting in a significant rise in production of popular literature and trivial literature, comparable to the development in music. The division of "popular literature" and "high literature" in the 20th century is by no means absolute, and various genres such as detectives or science fiction fluctuate between the two. For the most part of the century mostly ignored by mainstream literary criticism, these genres develop their own establishments and critical awards, such as the Nebula Award (since 1965), the British Fantasy Award (since 1971) or the Mythopoeic Awards (since 1971).

Towards the end of the century, electronic literature develops as a genre due to the development of hypertext and later the world wide web.

The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded annually throughout the century (with the exception of 1914, 1918, 1935 and 1940-1943), the first laureate (1901) being Sully Prudhomme. The New York Times Best Seller list has been published since 1942.

The best-selling works of the 20th century are estimated to be Quotations from Chairman Mao (1966, 900 million copies), Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997, 120 million copies), And Then There Were None (1939, 115 million copies) and The Lord of the Rings (1954/55, 100 million copies). The Lord of the Rings was also voted "book of the century" in various surveys.²³⁴⁵ Perry Rhodan (1961 to present) boasts as being the best-selling book series, with an estimated total of 1 billion copies sold.

1900-1918

Main articles: 1900s literature and 1910s literature

The Fin de siècle movement of the Belle Époque persisted into the 1900s, but was brutally cut short with the outbreak of World War I (an effect depicted e.g. in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, published 1924). The Dada movement of 1916-1920 was at least in part a protest against the bourgeois nationalist and colonialist interests which many Dadaists believed were the root cause of the war; the movement heralded the Surrealism movement of the 1920s.

• Thomas Mann publishes Buddenbrooks in 1901
• Joseph Conrad publishes the novella Heart of Darkness in 1902, after the serial release in 1898 and The Secret Agent in 1907
• Jack London publishes The Call of the Wild in 1903
• Serbian writers use the Belgrade literary style, an Ekavian writing form which set basis for the later standardization of the Serbian language
• D. H. Lawrence publishes Sons and Lovers
• Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham
• Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
• Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
• Thomas Mann publishes Death in Venice
• Dadaism

Interwar period

Main articles: 1920s literature and 1930s literature

Further information: Surrealism, Roaring Twenties, and Modernist literature

The 1920s were a period of literary creativity, and works of several notable author appeared during the period. D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was a scandal at the time because of its explicit descriptions of sex.

• Virginia Woolf publishes Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and A Room of One's Own
• T. S. Eliot publishes The Waste Land
• James Joyce publishes Ulysses
• Franz Kafka publishes The Trial
• Hermann Hesse publishes Siddhartha
• Alexey Tolstoy publishes Aelita
• George Bernard Shaw publishes Back to Methuselah
• Eugene O'Neill awarded Pulitzer Prizes for Beyond the Horizon in 1920, Anna Christie in 1922, and Strange Interlude in 1928.
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is often described as the epitome of the "Jazz Age" in American literature.
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque recounts the horrors of WWI and also the deep detachment from German civilian life felt by many men returning from the front.
• This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald portrays the lives and morality of post-World War I youth.
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway is about a group of expatriate Americans in Europe during the 1920s.
• W. H. Auden publishes Poems.
• Aldous Huxley publishes Brave New World.
• William Faulkner publishes As I Lay Dying in 1930.
• Henry Miller - publishes Tropic of Cancer in France in 1934. When published in the United States in 1961 it results in a groundbreaking obscenity case before the U.S. Supreme Court that allowed its publication.
• John Steinbeck publishes his Great Depression classics, Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

World War II

Further information: 1940s literature

• Orson Welles
• George Orwell
• J. R. R. Tolkien writes The Lord of the Rings (published 1954/55)

Postwar period

Main article: 1950s literature

The intermediate postwar period separating "Modernism" from "Postmodernism" (1950s literature) is the floruit of the beat generation and the classical science fiction of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein.

Cold War period

Main articles: 1960s literature, 1970s literature, 1980s literature, and Postmodern literature

Further information: Feminist literature

• Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Cat’s Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse Five (1969)
• Umberto Eco Il nome della rosa (1980 - English translation: The Name of the Rose, 1983), Il pendolo di Foucault (1988 - English translation: Foucault's Pendulum, 1989)

1990s

Main article: 1990s literature

• The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
• Harry Potter series
• Boris Akunin
• slam poetry

References

See also

• 20th century#Literature
• History of modern literature
• Modern Library's selection of best 20th century novels
• Museum of Modern Literature, Germany
• Experimental literature

by language

• French literature of the 20th century