734 The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (#16 GBOAT) | 1925 - A Literary Encyclopedia (with Tom Lutz)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The History of Literature –

Episode 734: The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (#16 GBOAT) | 1925 - A Literary Encyclopedia (with Tom Lutz) Host: Jacke Wilson
Guest: Tom Lutz (author, editor, professor)
Release Date: September 18, 2025

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Main Theme

This episode of The History of Literature explores two intertwined topics:

1. An in-depth look at The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, ranked #16 in the podcast’s Greatest Books of All Time list, focusing on its remarkable world-building, the circumstances of its creation, and Tolkien’s linguistic, cultural, and personal influences.
2. An interview with Tom Lutz about his expansive book, 1925: A Literary Encyclopedia, examining why the year 1925 was a peak moment for literature, what made that year so special, and how its concerns—cultural, social, political—still resonate today.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

I. The Lord of the Rings – Rankings, Influence, and Tolkien’s Process

[04:00–20:51]

• Position in the Canon: Ranks #16 in the GBOAT list—"no shade" on it, considering the company ("ahead of the Odyssey by Homer, Madame Bovary by Flaubert, and the Bible by various authors. Or God." – Jacke Wilson, 07:08)
• Epic Quality: Unlike some novels written quickly, The Lord of the Rings "has the feel of something deeper, something more epic, something almost ancient or biblical." (07:41)
• World-Building: Tolkien’s achievement is “nearly unique” for the completeness and depth of Middle Earth. His world-building predates or inspires other titans (Lucas, Stan Lee, George R. R. Martin, D&D).
• Language First: For Tolkien, languages and words (“philology”) are the genesis:

  “For Tolkien, the invention of languages came first. The stories in the Lord of the Rings were made to provide a world for the languages to exist in, rather than the reverse.” (09:34)

• Old English Influences: Draws directly from Beowulf and Old English myth—“not for Beowulf. So he searched other Old English poems.” (10:58)
• Personal History: Tolkien’s deep connection to the countryside, his family’s Germanic roots, and his trauma and survival from World War I all pour into the texture of the story.
• Scholarly Detail: Years spent crafting maps, languages, inscriptions, and poems; “not written in a sprint... took years... with a thousand years of history behind it.” (13:53)
• Echoes in Fantasy: Nearly every major fantasy work since pays homage to Tolkien; writers “rarely say they’re planning to improve upon it...they just want to write something similar because they read the Lord of the Rings trilogy and they want more.” (15:50)

Memorable Quote:

“It’s the world that stuns us with its completeness, like the actual world does, but it also gives us a hunger for more.” (16:48, Jacke Wilson)

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II. Interview: Tom Lutz and the Literary Landscape of 1925

[20:51–56:28]

What Made 1925 Special?

• Explosion of Major Works:
  “Everything from...the inaugural year of the Harlem Renaissance to the most important work of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dreiser, Dos Passos, Cather, Sinclair Lewis, H.L. Mencken. It’s T.S. Eliot’s first collected poems. It’s Pound’s first Cantos. It’s Faulkner’s first stories and novel.” (22:06, Tom Lutz)
• Global Reach:
  “Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Proust, Dorothy Richardson, Joyce, Kafka, Mayakovsky...it is the most important year in American history because of what was published, and globally too.” (22:15, Tom Lutz)
• Contextual Reasons:
  Rise of mass literacy, literature as central cultural delivery, institutional support (e.g., postal subsidies), advances in print technology, and relative “affluence” and “cosmopolitanism” post-WWI (36:00–38:52).
• Cultural Centrality:
  “Print, yes, was still the center of the culture...it was very much at the center. And, yes, it’s the delivery system for all story...” (23:17, Lutz)

Literary Culture and Criticism in 1925

• “Books— even mediocre books—would get dozens of reviews, and they’re thoughtful and intellectually engaged.” (24:10, Jacke Wilson)
• “It was understood to be not just a kind of buyer’s guide ... it was a prime place where the conversation about everything important was happening.” (25:44, Lutz)

Recurring Themes: Then and Now

• Immigration:
  “Major legislation...restricting immigration based on race and ethnicity. Anti immigrant rhetoric...White supremacist discourse was normalized. Antisocialist rhetoric was everywhere.” (29:10, Lutz)
• Identity:
  “A lot of the ways that we talk about identity are having their foundational moments right at this point in history as well.” (30:13, Lutz)
• Religious and Cultural Dissonance:
  “It’s about what turned out to be...a very important part of the way Americans in general relate to ethnicity, which is not by embracing the culture...but embracing the aesthetics of that culture.” (31:42, Lutz)
• Modern Resonance:
  “We’re talking about 100 years old, but it could have been written yesterday in that sense.” (34:00, Jacke Wilson)

The Research Process & Approach

• Lutz describes pure pleasure in writing, following literary threads and discoveries.

  “The actual writing of this book was pure pleasure. I just, I loved every minute of it...Once I hit on this idea, it was just pure pleasure.” (40:37, Lutz)

A Sample Entry: Dorothy Parker

[43:32–49:38]

• Parker’s reputation as a wit and Algonquin Roundtable mainstay:
  “Dorothy Parker was a writer more famous for her quips than her writing. And she inspired quips. Her friend Alexander Woollcott said she was a combination of little Nell and Lady Macbeth.” (43:51, Lutz)
• Lifelong battles with depression, suicide attempts, and outsize influence on American humor and criticism.
• The interconnectedness of literary culture: entries on lesser-known figures illuminate how “thousands of books and writers and reviewers and editors...make a Dorothy Parker possible.” (51:18, Jacke Wilson)
• Evocative passage:

  “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now while they’re happy.” (Dorothy Parker, from Lutz’s entry, ~47:00)

Diversity and Scope of 1925’s Literature

• Breadth from avant-garde to popular genres, with major beginnings in science fiction, noir, fantasy, philosophy, Western—“an incredible buffet.” (53:43, Lutz)

The Literary Encyclopedia as Endless Exploration

• Advice for future encyclopedists:
  “One of the beautiful things is that you can spend some time in a book...you can really follow them through. And there’s just so much more than you would ever expect.” (54:05, Lutz)

Closing Banter

• Jacke's joke:
  “Well, that is a beautiful answer, but unfortunately it is incorrect. The correct answer is that the advice should be to make sure to do an entry on the History of Literature podcast.” (55:59, Jacke Wilson)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Tolkien’s Creative Process

  “To me…a name comes first and the story follows.” (09:10, quoting Tolkien via Jacke)

• On Literary Centrality

  “Print, yes, was still the center of the culture. And, yes, it’s the delivery system for all story.” (23:17, Tom Lutz)

• On Criticism’s Role

  “Not just a kind of buyer’s guide...it was a prime place where the conversation about everything important was happening.” (25:44, Lutz)

• On Literature’s Enduring Themes

  “Sometimes it seems like a century’s…seems to have made no difference whatsoever.” (29:54, Lutz, on racism, authoritarianism, etc.)

• On Dorothy Parker’s Legendary Wit

  “Let’s face it honey, my verse is terribly dated.” (Parker, ~44:30 via Lutz) “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers…The first greatest [favor], of course, is to shoot them now while they’re happy.” (~47:00, Parker via Lutz)

• On Researching the Encyclopedia

  “The actual writing of this book was pure pleasure. I just, I loved every minute of it…never a dull moment.” (40:37, Lutz)

• On Literary FOMO

  “Once I’m writing about Gertrude Stein, somebody pops up in one of the biographies of Stein, who I’ve never heard of before. So I just chase them down and see what did you get up to?” (54:05, Lutz)

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Suggested Listening Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction / Why Tolkien Matters – 04:00–20:51
• Introduction of Tom Lutz and 1925’s Literary Landscape – 21:36–28:52
• Themes of 1925 and Modern Parallels – 28:52–35:58
• 1925’s Social and Economic Context – 35:58–38:52
• Writing and Researching the Encyclopedia – 40:06–43:32
• Dorothy Parker Entry Reading – 43:32–49:38
• Exploring the Book’s Discoveries and Literary Depth – 49:38–53:43
• Advice to Future Literary Encyclopedists, Closing Banter – 54:05–56:12

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Tone and Style

The episode is warm, witty, discursive, and affectionate towards literary history. Jacke’s asides bring a sense of personal engagement and gentle humor. Tom Lutz is scholarly but accessible, enthusiastic, and embraces the joy of literary discovery.

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For First-Time Listeners:

This episode offers a rich dual focus:

• A lovingly detailed survey of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, an origin story for the modern fantasy epic.
• An exploration of 1925 as an unsurpassed literary year, providing both macro context and vivid snippets of the “literary ecosystem” that made such works possible.

The conversation blends admiration for literary giants with lively investigations into forgotten or overlooked writers, all while reflecting on how literature acts as both mirror and engine of cultural identity—then and now.

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Transcript

[A]

The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hello dear listeners and my friends. This is Jack Wilson reminding you that the History of Literature Podcast is going on tour. It's still a few months away, but the deadline is this month, September. That's your chance to put down your deposit if you would like to go. Let me tell you a little more about the trip. In May of 2026, I will be accompanying a small group of travelers on a trip through London, Oxford and Bath with stops at literary sites, houses of authors, restaurants where they ate, and so on. There will be a chance to meet some like minded people as we all enjoy literature and life. Nice hotels and restaurants, lots of meals and fellowship, traveling together in the land of Shakespeare and Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, Dr. Johnson and more. And some special guests, people you've heard on the show will be joining us to shake our hands and answer our questions and generally participate in this celebration of books and writers and all the things we like best here at the podcast. As I said though, the signup is only open through September. That's so we can plan the trip. That's right, you have until the end of the month to secure your spot. So head over to John Shores Travel, that's our partner who's taking care of all the logistics and put down your deposit. That's John Shores S H O R S. Or you can go to historyofliterature.com and follow the links there. Join us for an experience you can't get anywhere else because you deserve it.

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Hello, Today on the podcast we look at the miraculous year of 1925. What made that year, which occurred a century ago, such an amazing literary year? We'll ask the man who wrote an encyclopedia devoted to exploring that question. And we continue our march up the list of the greatest books of all time with a look at number 16, the Lord of the Rings. One podcast to rule them all. Insert joke here about it not being this podcast. What? Who wrote this introduction? Fire the interns. I'll do that and come back with more on today's history of Literature. Okay. Welcome to the podcast. I didn't fire any interns. In fact, I felt so bad, I doubled their wages. Welcome to the podcast. I'm broke, Jack Wilson. And you can see why. You can see why I'm broke. What was that sentence? Potter? What did Potter say? And It's a Wonderful Life. I can see why. Approving long distance phone charges from Washington. Yes, yes, that's me. Overspending. Remember the days of long distance phone charges? My father would present the bill, he'd put it out at the kitchen table with our calls marked. This is a call you made. And it'd be all added up and you think, okay, well, jeez. That was. We talked for 72 minutes. I didn't realize it was that long. Oh, geez. The whole thing is $30. That was a lot of money back then, kids. My salary at the shoe store was 350 an hour plus commissions. I was excited because minimum wage was 335, but I was making 3.50. That's $3.50 plus commissions. I was loaded. Except $30. See, you think. Well, it was so lovely talking to her. Always a her on that phone in my room. That was exciting. What price love and all that, but maybe the price of love is something under $30 a month. In 1988, maybe it was about five bucks. Okay, so we have a big show today. Let's get straight to it. We have another book on our list of the greatest books of time. The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien, coming in at a nice spot on the list. At number 16, you could make a case that numbers 11 through 20 are actually better than numbers 1 through 10. Looking at the list as a whole, Better, more popular, Depends on your criteria. I'm following this Internet list and it's a list of lists. I'm not second guessing it too much, but I will say that it's no shade on the Lord of the Rings to come in at 16. It is, after all, ahead of the Odyssey by Homer, Madame Bovary by Flaubert, and the Bible by various authors. Or God. Some books are written in a sprint and are meant to be enjoyed that way. Simenon comes to mind here in his Maghre novels. The Lord of the Rings, though, has the feel of something deeper, something more epic, something almost ancient or biblical. And I think we, we owe a lot of that to the circumstances of its composition and of course, to Tolkien's polymathic intelligence. He was a professor, a full time professor at Oxford for 34 years. His scholarship and his experiences are important for understanding this world that he created. And he did create a world of all of the world builders. I mean, who else even compares George Lucas, you might say, with the world he built in Star Wars? Or Stan lee or George R.R. martin? Well, guess what? Those three were all heavily influenced by Tolkien. Perhaps you say, well, this is all well and good, but for real world building, a novel can't compare to the kind of real world building that you can do in a game like Dungeons and Dragons. Well, guess what? We not only have Tolkien to thank for inspiring that D and D game, the original D and D was basically a Tolkien ripoff, so much so that the Tolkien estate sued them, and they ended up changing the names of the things from hobbits to halflings and so on. Tolkien's influences, the people and texts and everything that influenced him, reach back into the mists of time. We look at Old English literature like Beowulf. Epic poetry, fantasy, folklore, things that don't seem to have much of a beginning. They well up from the people language itself. There wasn't so much a single author who influenced Tolkien or even a single set of stories as it was language. That's what makes his world building so incredible and nearly unique. He was inspired by the words themselves. I am a philologist, he said, and all my work is philological. My work is fundamentally linguistic in inspiration, he said. Elsewhere, for Tolkien, the invention of languages came first. The stories in the Lord of the Rings were made to provide a world for the languages to exist in, rather than the reverse. To me, he said, a name comes first and the story follows. And he got these names and words and ideas from the literature of the Old English period, from the poetry, as like Beowulf, for example, there's a line in Beowulf that lists creatures, refers to giants and ogres and elves and demon corpses, not really describing them, just in a kind of throwaway line, naming them in a suggestive way. In Beowulf, the original. In the original, these are called Atenes, Ilphr, Orkneyes. And Tolkien borrowed the terms elves, orcs, and so on. He didn't have a lot of details to go on, so not for Beowulf. So he searched other Old English poems, looking for anything to sketch this out, and using all of these little scraps of information to further fuel his own ideas for what this world would have been like when people believed in these creatures and these creatures existed. He was asked as an expert, as a scholar, he was asked to investigate a Latin inscription that had been found at the site of a 4th century British Roman cult temple. It described a God hero that had lost a ring. It mentioned dwarves. It put lots of things in Tolkien's mind. And so when he came. It came time for him to write some stories for his children. In the early 1930s, he devised some tales and drawings of gnomes and goblins, along with a language that elves spoke, a mythology that they believed in, and all of these ideas. And then one day he was grading papers when a blank page appeared in the stack and he wrote on it, in a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit. Just that sentence inspired. And from that, he created a whole world, which he said was set in an ancient time, between the age of Faerie and. And the dominion of men, end quote. The book became a hit. It was called the Hobbit. And he developed this book into a sequel of sorts into the Lord of the Rings. Those three books of the Lord of the Rings fit nicely into a legendarium that he had been developing for decades. So you see what I mean, when this book has some. Some heft to it, it's got history itself. It's got Tolkien's history, the work that he put in, sort of his life's passions and obsessions. This all comes to bear in this novel. He also, in his life, had a deep connection with the English countryside, the moss and muck of it. And his family had Germanic roots that went back centuries. They were craftspeople, forest dwellers, millers, clockmakers, people who worked with their hands, devising machinery. He was also a combat soldier in World War I, where he witnessed horrors and contracted trench fever, a disease carried by lice. There were hordes of lice feasting on flesh, and he saw it all. He and his fellow soldiers were shelled and gassed, wiped out, and he was eventually sent home because of the illness. The war ended, and he got a job working on the Oxford English Dictionary. There's always stories about the Oxford English Dictionary, which is an amazing book. Maybe we should do an episode on that. Actually, we sort of have. We talked to a novelist who said her novel in the Oxford English Dictionary. Remember that one where the women who picked up the scraps of paper for the unsuitable words and made an alternative dictionary out of it? Well, that was. This was. Tolkien was actually working there. I think T.S. eliot did, too. Probably a lot of authors did. We'll have to think about putting that together in an episode. I think it'd be a good one. Okay, so Tolkien. Here's what I mean by what's so interesting about the Oxford English Dictionary. Tolkien worked on words of Germanic origin, beginning with the letter W. God bless the Oxford English Dictionary. The way they had to break it down in order to be as thorough as they were. Tolkien spent the 1920s immersed in his studies. The languages, the myths and legends, but mostly the languages. It was almost as if the languages were so suggestive, with each word pregnant with meaning, pregnant with history, pregnant with all the people who had spoken those words, who were no longer on the planet, but who once were. The words themselves had been shaped and formed by people who had beliefs and who lived hard and lived well, who shared the world with other races like elves and giants, who could make things like rings, things that had power, and who could call upon some magic. All these centuries of people speaking these words, shaping them and giving them this power. And then Tolkien himself, living for decades with these words and all his other experiences too. The childhood in the countryside, the young boy whose parents died when he was young, the soldier In World War I, the scholar studying languages, the father, the husband, the friend. All this went into the books. They were not written in a sprint, but they took years as Tolkien made maps of Middle Earth and devised a calligraphy and diagrams and inscriptions for the rings, and poems to discuss charms and deaths and drinking riddles and prophecies and magical spells. All this taking years for him to dream up and compose. That's the richness. It's not a book to be written quickly and read with disposability in mind. It's a three part book that has a thousand years of history behind it and a decade or more of a focused person creating it. And it feels that way, with that richness and depth to it, the heft, as if it's chronicling a piece of a much larger world with much longer history, a vastness that's being presented through a single story. It's the OG of fantasy books in the modern era. It's had a ton of imitators, by people who rarely say that they're planning to improve upon it. And if they're honest, they acknowledge they're influenced by it. They don't claim they'll write something better, they just want to write something similar because they read the Lord of the Rings trilogy and they want more. It's the world that stuns us with its completeness, like the actual world does, but it also gives us a hunger for more. More of the history, more of the backstories, more of the interactions of people and races, languages and histories. There are a finite number of pages in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but there are stories and suggested stories that reach toward infinity. It's a remarkable achievement. And guess what? On our History of Literature podcast tour, we are going to visit the land of Tolkien and see where he lived and walked, where he and his Fellow Inklings like C.S. lewis broke bread and talked about Middle Earth and Narnia. Oxford is one of the stops on our tour and you can join our small group of travelers who are headed there in May of 2026. We would love to have you join us. Learn more about [e-mail] or by going to John Shore's Travel and Looking for the History of Literature podcast tour with Jack Wilson. But act soon. Signups are open through the end of September and you need to put down a deposit to secure your spot. Okay, Lord of the Rings. We have an episode on Tolkien in our archives if you'd like to hear more about his life in 1925. What was he up to? That was the year that Tolkien took a position as a professor of Anglo Saxon at the University of Oxford. Meanwhile, in America and around the world, great literary events were happening. Why this year in particular? Arguably, it was the peak of literature's centrality. Widespread literacy. But before movies, before television, before radio had really taken off. I know there were movies, but I mean, this was before movies had kind of started to dominate us. Even before radio had really taken off, literature was king. What happens if you go deep into this amazing year, looking not just at the T.S. eliot's and James Joyce's of the world? You have Scott Fitzgerald's, the people we talk about all the time. But what if you go deeper and look at all the magazines, all the books and book reviews, all the poets and little magazines, and you put them all in the context of social movements and political struggles and everything else swirling around at that time. What would you find? What would you learn? Tom Lutz will tell us what he found and what he learned and why that matters to us and our society 100 years later. After this. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Hey folks, if you're like me, you find yourself looking for help in some strange places. Like the woman who cuts my hair. Very nice person. But if you're dealing with serious problems like anxiety, depression or other clinical issues, you need guidance from a credentialed therapist. 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Be in the app, online and in store. Okay. Joining me now is Tom Lutz, who is the author of 10 books and including the At Home in the World trilogy. He's the founding editor in chief and publisher of Los Angeles Review of Books and a distinguished professor at University of California, Riverside. He's here today to discuss his book 1925 A Literary Encyclopedia. Tom Lutz, welcome to the History of Literature.

[B]

Thanks so much. I'm glad to be here.

[A]

So my copy of the book is 796 pages, which is a big book. But as you write, the the year 1925 was arguably the peak of literature's centrality. What made 1925 such a central year for literature?

[B]

Well, there are two kinds of answers to that, I think. One is that it is the central year just because of what happened to be published that year, which is everything from inaugural year of the Harlem Renaissance to the most important work of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dreiser, Dos Passos, Cather, Sinclair Lewis, H.L. mencken. It's T.S. eliot's first collected poems. It's Pound's first Cantos. It's Faulkner's first stories. And Novel. It's the first significant novels by a Jewish American woman and by an indigenous woman. It's the founding of the New Yorker, et cetera, et cetera. It's just. It is the most important year in American history because of what was published, and globally, too. Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Proust, Dorothy Richardson, Joyce Yates, Kafkajid, Mayakovsky. Um, and obviously it's 800 pages. We could be here all day just on this first question.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

But if the question is really about what made this your central. What made for that efflorescence, There are a number of different kind of reasons. I could go into them as well.

[A]

Okay, well, I mean, one thing that you note is this is really before. I mean, it's. It's obviously, it's before television, but it's also before film and radio kind of started to take over. I mean, literature was the delivery mechanism for. For people who were interested in culture.

[B]

Yes. I mean, film was becoming more important. A bit less than half of the people in the country went to the movies once a week. But compared to today, when consumption of film and TV is many hours per day for almost everyone, it was still a small part of their daily diet of culture. And radio was becoming more central. But only a fifth. In 1925, only about a fifth of the households in the country had a radio set. So print, yes, was still the center of the culture. And of course, most films were based on literary sources, and many books were on the radio, too. So it was very much at the center. And, yes, it's the delivery system for all story. And for most of what we now think of as our daily media diet, obviously, newspapers were important as well, but.

[A]

Yeah, but in those newspapers, I mean, this must have been really something for you to see as you were going through the year 1925, is how many reviews these books got that you say that even mediocre books would get dozens of reviews, and they're thoughtful and intellectually engaged. And I mean, I guess we kind of see that on the Internet today, maybe, but it doesn't seem like the same thing as having a book come out and then to have newspapers around the country with dedicated book reviewers who were ready to take these books seriously.

[B]

Yes, of course, for many of us still today, literature is the queen of the sciences. It is the most sophisticated, finely calibrated, capacious instrument we have for understanding humankind. So. And it was considered as such then. And there was a real understanding that it wasn't just the books themselves. It wasn't there. There wasn't a kind of funnel of literariness that was coming out of the book and into the. Into the reader. It was part of a larger cultural conversation. And the criticism was. It was understood to be not just a kind of buyer's guide to what was out there. It was a prime place where the conversation about everything important was happening.

[A]

Right. And we might be used to a lot of the dialogue around books today being about, here's a good book to take to the beach. Here's something to get away from it all, Here's a way to divert yourself or escapism. And seems like in 1925, people were reading to engage with the great political or psychological or philosophical questions of their time.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, genre fiction was really important, and the bestsellers were doing what bestsellers do best, which is. Probably has a lot to do with escapism and pure pleasure of narrative drive and that kind of thing. It's not like every novel written was a disguised tract of philosophy or social commentary. But, yes, there was a general understanding that even in the genre fiction and even in the bestsellers, there were things worth talking about that were important beyond the literary realm.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. And I'm not sure that the ratio was that different than it is today, but the kind of recognition of it was more widespread.

[A]

Yeah. I think I've got a phrase here that you had that I noted that the belief that literary writing was an essential and consequential business was nearly universal. I'm not sure I would say that about today's world. It seems like literature or literary writing has become more of a niche or a specialty that it's viewed that some people will appreciate it, but it's not something that's maybe considered to be that way, by the way, by the universal public.

[B]

Yeah. Now, of course, I don't know about you, but I could read an extra book a week if I never went onto Instagram.

[A]

Yeah. We've got these magic rectangles we carry around in our pocket, and they kind of deliver all the entertainment we could possibly want at a touch of a button.

[B]

Absolutely. And the amount of talk we have on tv, online, in podcasts, about film and TV and games and social media and all of the other forms in which we now do the collective cultural work of figuring out who we are and where we are and where we're going, that's taking place in a lot of different forms and forums. Not sure that, all told, the talk about it is that much less. But certainly literature as we understand it, in terms of classic Literature, in terms of great literature, in terms of literary fiction, in terms of literary poetry. These things are a much smaller part of the general diet and smaller part of the diet of people like me who have given their life to literature.

[A]

Now, you Note that in 1925 there were some themes and topics that you were seeing in these works that are still relevant today. What kinds of things did you notice that still resonate?

[B]

Well, immigration, for instance.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Major legislation. It was introduced that restricting immigration based on race and ethnicity. Anti immigrant rhetoric dominated the political landscape. White supremacist discourse was normalized. Antisocialist rhetoric was everywhere. The Scopes trial pitted fundamentalist religious understandings against science. Hitler published Mein Kampf. Mussolini published his war diaries. Stalin published his book on Lenin. The kind of rise of authoritarian governments around the world. And sometimes it seems like a century's. Seems to have made no difference whatsoever.

[A]

Yeah, and I'll add another one. It seems like in 1925 there were a lot of works that were about identity and people saying, this is who I am and what does it matter who I am and how I consider myself to be? We see a lot of that as well, still going on.

[B]

Absolutely. And I think that a lot of the ways that we talk about identity are having their foundational moments right at this point in history as well. I talk a fair amount about a fairly, I think, still somewhat obscure novel by Anzia Yaziuska, which is called the Bread Givers, the first major novel by a Jewish American woman. She has a very interesting bit at the end of that novel. She's the daughter of a rabbinical scholar, a kind of independent rabbinical scholar. He's not employed by anybody to be a rabbinical scholar, but he lives off his daughter's work. But he is the representative of the old traditional ways in the book. And she is, the heroine is a woman much like Anzia Jazerska herself, who went to Columbia Teachers College. She's an assimilating person who is kind of moving up the social and economic ladder. And at the end, her beau, or maybe her husband, it's a little unclear, is fascinated by the father and wants to learn Hebrew from the father. He was born in Poland, as she was, and he really wants to remember what. What they know about Poland. She's not particularly interested, but he is. And he. And he says. And at one point they decide they're going to be bring the father into their home. He starts to chant from the Torah about how women are dirt and women are terrible and women are the cause of all Evil. And the daughter starts to have steam coming out her ears and is getting upset again and thinking, why have I brought this man back into my life? And her husband takes her down the hallway until they're far enough away that they can no longer hear the words that he's saying. Just the music of the chant. And the husband says, listen, isn't that beautiful? And I think that that's a really profound moment in the talk about ethnicity because it's about what turned out to be, I think, a very important part of the way Americans in general relate to ethnicity, which is not by embracing the culture that a group is coming from, but embracing the aesthetics of that culture. So you have to take the words of the Torah out. You have a sense of women's dignity and equality. You get rid of that part of the Torah and you just appreciate the music of the chant.

[A]

Yeah. It reminds me of something I heard an author say once at a party where he said, I'm an atheist, but I like prayer. And it always struck me that even though you would think he would find that to be sort of, at best, an irritating waste of time or something, but instead he liked the impulse in people that drove them to that. He liked the humility. He liked the request for. For help or the appeal to something larger. And it completely divorced it from any one particular religious belief, but it made it very human and kind of. It respected the impulse behind it, even if it couldn't share the actual belief system.

[B]

Yeah. And in fact, I had a similar conversation with my mother when I was a young proselytizing atheist myself, and. And she said that your problem is that you just don't understand how beautiful it is.

[A]

Yeah. Right. So, yeah, I mean, we're talking about 100 years old, but it could have been written yesterday in that sense.

[B]

Yes. And, of course, all of the passing novels that were being written at the time engaged these questions of whether, as Autobiography of an Ex Colored Man, James Weldon Johnson's great novel, at the very end, the man who has had a successful career as a composer and as a white composer wonders why he gave away everything that was good and vibrant in himself to have this success. And so this kind of question of what we gain and what we lose when our identity conforms to the middle of the road rather than when it keeps its relation to its own past.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And there are. Ruth Benedict and the anthropologists at the time were all talking about the way that cultures pick and choose along the spectrum. And I think there's an entire spectrum of Choices for how to think about identity in the novels and poetry of the 1920s. And those are just a couple of them.

[A]

Right, okay. So I want to ask you some specific questions about your book and we'll do that after we take a break. But before we leave behind these kind of macro questions, I was wondering if 1925, I mean, obviously we're in between two world wars. Did it seem like the year or the events of the year was driving this? Or did it seem like we were in a period of relative calm and that it was giving literature some room to breathe and artists some room to work? What did the history of the year 1925 outside of literature seem like it was doing to the literature?

[B]

Well, there are many, many answers to that as well. Of course there are economic facts. Right. It's a time of new affluence, post war boom. But it's also the 20s was, you know, the Fed was not exercising monetary policy, weighed us down. There was lots, lots of bust cycles within the 20s themselves. So 25 was a. Was a little boomier. And in fact, that explains a little bit about why so many what we now consider, you know, important tax. Were published that year. Because 1924 was tough. And some things that were like Dreiser's American Tragedy was originally supposed to be published in 1924, but the. But they were happy to let it get edited into 1925 because they were having cash flow problems. Right. And by 26 things were drying up a little. And so there. And they were. And they saw the. They had money in 1925 and they published as many things as they could wait for the next crash. So there was a bit of that, but in larger terms, yes, an era of affluence that made for the kind of discretionary income that makes for book sales and everything else. There's also all of these social reasons, this new cosmopolitanism in the culture that is the result of massive immigration for decades before. This massive internal migration, the Great Migration, for instance, but also rural to urban migration, Western migration, meant that more and more people were meeting more and more people from different backgrounds and experience. And of course, the war had sent many people from all walks of life to Europe and back. The frothiness, the kind of energy of the culture had a lot to do with just the movement of people and the way in which people were now kind of being exposed to and learning and reacting to sometimes very, very positively, sometimes very, very negatively to these changes. Those are important. There are technological reasons, there are advances in communication technologies and Transportation. That meant that writing spread faster and faster than ever before. There were institutional reasons. The rural free delivery, for instance, was instituted. So that meant that the Saturday Evening Post and the brand new New Yorker magazine and they could all be delivered to the, you know, the west Texas and northern Wyoming and every everywhere in the country. And there were some reduced postal rates for printed matter. So it was a policy to get that printed matter spread around the country subsidized. Knew some new printing technologies as well, paper technology. So all, all of that combined the ch, you know, kind of a very fact of film, fact of radio, all of this kind of are. They're parts of the context for the literary explosion of the twenties as well.

[A]

Right. Okay, let's take a quick break and then come back with more from Tom Lutz. When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send.

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Limited time in participating US Restaurants Foreign. Okay, we're back. So Tom, in the acknowledgments, you thank those who put up with me constantly showering you with factlets. About 1925. What was the experience like for you to research and write this book?

[B]

This book was. The actual writing of this book was pure pleasure. I just, I loved every minute of it. Last. I felt very free. You know, I had retired. Retired now from my university position and I, I felt very free from any kind of strictures. Like I felt like free to kind of be as opinionated as I wanted to be, to be as wide ranging as I wanted to be. I knew the book was going to be enormous and therefore virtually unpublishable. And, and it's true that my and, and the big publishers were absolutely uninterested in it. Thankfully Rare Bird lit took it on but it was a struggle to get it published. I knew it would be a struggle to get published. And I was willing to just do it and publish it myself if need be. So it was an act of pure literary freedom. I just every day popped into this book, spent all day on it, popped out of it, never a dull moment. I just. I just loved it. Now in the longer terms, I really started this book in 1990. 91. I decided that my second book was going to be about the 1920s. So I started reading the 20s seriously and I started putting together. I wrote some academic articles. I wrote some chapters for academic books. I wrote some pieces of my other books. My book on slackers has some 20 stuff in it. My book on crying has some 20 stuff in it. My. My book on called Aimlessness, which is about the essay, has some 27. So it kind of showed up everywhere else in my. In my work. But I had never quite figured out how I wanted to do the book itself. So it. That part of it was not always fun. The reading, of course, is always fun. But the. That, that part of the process that those first 30 years were tough.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Once I hit on this idea, it was just pure pleasure.

[A]

Yeah. And I wonder, I mean, it seems like the timing worked out because the freedom that you described and it comes across in just kind of the joy and the vibrancy that comes out of the individual entries. And I did also notice the part where it says to all the agents and editors who said the book was too long. Pah, it's not long enough. So maybe we can talk a little bit about what you would have liked to add later. But let's talk about what's actually in the book first. I asked if you might choose a favorite entry to share with listeners so they can get a sense of the approach. And I worried that you would say, I have thousands of children, I can't choose among them. And so I suggested that the one on Dorothy Parker might be a good one. I don't know if you would like to read that one for us or if you have a different one in mind.

[B]

No, I'm happy to do Dorothy Parker. And it is true, I would have had real trouble spent the last week trying to figure out and trying on 50 of them. So I'm glad that you picked one and I'll go ahead and read that.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

So Dorothy Parker. Dorothy Parker was a writer more famous for her quips than her writing. And she inspired quips. Her friend Alexander Wolcott said she was a combination of little Nell and Lady Macbeth. A critic and the leading female voice around the Algonquin Roundtable. She was a mainstay of the brand new New Yorker starting in its first year 1925, wrote a column on books signed Constant Reader. Parker published this and other magazine Criticism, undistinguished stories, 49 in total and frankly none of them that great and some 300 poems. Although she isn't revered as a poet, nor should she be, her poem Cassandra drops into verse from the inaugural edition of the New Yorker is typical. It's a bit risque, perhaps a bit more like newspaper poetry than literary work. And I'm going to skip the reading of that. I'll just read the last few lines. But oh my love, if we made the flight, I see the end of our pastoral plan, why you would be staying in town each night and I'd elope with the furnace man. It's that kind of like light, slightly saucy humor in rhymed couplets. And she later told an interviewer, let's face it honey, my verse is terribly dated. She also wrote three plays and co wrote eight screenplays, the best known of which is A Star is born from 1937, written with her husband Alan Campbell and Robert Carson. She's best known, as I say, for her one liners. My wife, who worked as a theater critic for many years, is fond of Parker's recommendation about a play. She had seen her entire review. Read, quote, if you don't knit, bring a book. Some Some of her quips have become background like men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses, which was published as a two line poem in New York World with the title News Item, News Item and Makes passes at girls. And some like her many quips about drinking too much. I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. Haven't worn as well. I'm particularly fond of one about writing quote. If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of the Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now while they're happy. Joan Acocella said of her book review column, constant reader columns are not really book reviews. They are stand up comedy routines. You don't have to listen to her opinion. She says if she didn't like the book, maybe that was just her hangover speaking. She began 1925 smarting from the failure of the play Close Harmony written with Elmer Rice, which opened on December 1, 1924. And closed before Christmas. She worked hard through the year. She wrote her reviews, helped write two parody issues of Life magazine magazine, wrote her first screenplay with George S. Kaufman, wrote Chapter 7 of the Collective novel Bobbed Hair, which appeared serially in Colliers, and wrote a few more poems, which she would collect as enough rope. 1926, she published one of those poems, Rainy Night, another knowing, gloomy poem in the New Yorker in September. A similar 1925 poem was rhyme Against Living with these. If wild my breast and sore my pride, I bask in dreams of suicide. The feints at self harm in these poems and in the collection's title were more serious than some took them to be. She attempted suicide in 1922 and again in 1925. After the 1925 attempt, Alexander Wolcott visited her in the hospital and said, dottie, if you don't stop this sort of thing, you'll make yourself sick. She had seen how, quote, utterly repulsive, unquote, she looked. He told her later she would never have done it. You looked a drooling mess. Yes, she told him, if she had any consideration, she would shoot herself cleanly and be done with it. But when she wasn't suicidal, she was at work creating her Persona, her legend and her world. For the second issue of the New Yorker, she wrote A Certain lady about a Mrs. Legend who lives on Riverside Drive. It details Mrs. Legend's painfully conventional beliefs and trifling opinions and is a New Yorker etiquette manual of sorts, a list of the kinds of things one shouldn't think or say. This kind of tastemaking is central to what the magazine offered people and which it has continued to offer for the last hundred years. Parker, along with Alexander Wolcott, George S. Kaufman, Alice Duer, Miller, Mark Connolly, Ray Irvin, James Thurber, E.B. white, Robert Benchley, and editors Harold Ross and Jane Grant helped usher in a new kind of clever sarcasm, an evolution of that practiced by H.L. mencken and his American Mercury and Smart Set Writers, and by George Schuyler and his Messenger Cognoscente. As her biographer John Keats wrote, she mirrored, expressed and helped to establish a new style in life and art for the nation. She told an Associated Press reporter who came to interview her on her 70th birthday in 1963. If I had any decency, I'd be dead. Most of my friends are. She died three years later.

[A]

It's a wonderful little snippet. I never tire of Dorothy Parker, but I just felt like I wanted you to read this one because it was kind of mirrored my experience with the book that I. The beauty of the book is that I started reading in the A's and I wound up at the Algonquin Roundtable. And then I jumped ahead to Dorothy Parker and I read and enjoyed that for a couple of pages. And then my eye drifted down to a paragraph on Anne Parrish, who I didn't know, but her young adult book, the Perennial Bachelor was the eighth best selling book of the year. And then down to Isabel Patterson, who was born on a cattle ranch in Canada and who worked as an assistant to the sculptor who went on to sculpt Mount Rushmore. And she herself was the writer of a book review column for the New York Tribune for 25 years. And then she became one of the three godmothers of libertarianism along with Ayn Rand. And I didn't know anything about these people. And it was all kind of a reminder of the, the thousands of books and writers and reviewers and editors that make a Dorothy Parker possible. And then we get entries on Pablo Picasso and plastics. And suddenly I'm immersed in the whole era, the world of 1925, and references and things start to make sense to me. I see where Fitzgerald and Hemingway were coming from, I see what they emerged from. And I can just kind of see them more clearly in their context instead of the context I'm used to reading them as, which is a reader in the 21st century looking back 100 years. But it's like I can see them from their own era.

[B]

Well, you are my ideal reader. Fantastic.

[A]

Right. And I think a lot of listeners will be as well. I mean, this is such a prominent era. I mean, all of my episodes that come from this era of the modernists and Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Joyce and Virginia Woolf, they always do very well. I think there is something kind of, it's part nostalgia, part romantic. There's something that really draws people, I think, to this era in particular.

[B]

Yeah. And partly because it doesn't matter what your tastes are, what your proclivities are as a reader, you'll find it here. Hugo Gernsbach published his first novel, the Guy that the Hugos, the science fiction awards are named after, and Dashiell Hammett and, you know, the, all of the, all of the noir novelists are. And story writers are just getting started. So there's, and there's, and there's, there's fantasy, there's, there's romance. The westerns were huge, both in film and, and in literature. And this kind of the high, high art, the Avant garde modernist stuff, which I love, but which is often an acquired taste, is accompanied by the classic realist novels by various forms of. That are hodgepodges between the two. And as I say, the kind of unbelievable depth like the people like William Garard, who I had never read before I did this book, who was a spectacular novelist and strange fellows like Maxwell Bodenheim, who wrote trashy novels but was, it was a fascinating character. Just it's, it's deep and wide. And Nella Larson starts writing passing in 25 and, and Zora Neale Hurston has her first publications. Langston Hughes gets discovered. It's just so, it's just an amazing. And in philosophy as well, you know, Alfred North Whitehead and John Dewey. John Dewey's Experience of nature is 1925. In nonfiction, it's just an incredible buffet.

[A]

Okay, I've got a final question for you here, which might be a little tricky. I'm going to ask you to imagine an editor and author in the year 2125 who is putting together a literary encyclopedia of our year 2025. What advice would you have for him or her?

[B]

Number one, have fun. And the thing is that even though I think that there are 500 entries in this, there thousands of books published, I mean, some of my entries do have many books in them like the mystery entry on mysteries or entry on some of these other things. So there are, there are lots of books. There may be 1500 books altogether, but again, that's a small fraction. So one of the beautiful things is that you can spend some time in a book and you can decide whether you, you're going to really read it or if you're going to scan it and move on, you're just going to dump it and not, not, not bother with it. So even in as extensive a survey as I've done here, and I guess it's hard to imagine a more extensive survey having been done on a year anywhere literary in literate terms. I mean, I don't know of any myself. So even so, I'm just, I'm just, it's the tip of the, of the literary iceberg. So one can just go and go and go. And I think that one of the things that made it fun for me is that one picks up a thread. Once I'm writing about Gertrude Stein, somebody pops up in one of the biographies of Stein, who I've never heard of before. So I just chase them down and see you and what did you get up to? And you can just kind of follow your, follow your nose through and that obviously we all have our taste and the things that we love and you can really follow them through. And there's. There's just so much more than you would ever expect. And obviously today it would be very daunting. I mean, we're gone from a world in which 50,000 books a year were getting published to a world in which 500,000 books a year are getting published. So it's an order of magnitude different.

[A]

Well, that is a beautiful answer, but unfortunately it is incorrect. The correct answer is that the advice should be to make sure to do an entry on the History of Literature podcast.

[B]

Oh, there we go. There we go.

[A]

At least throw a paragraph our way. Absolutely. Okay, well, let's leave things there. Tom Lutz, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.

[B]

It was my pleasure, Jack.

[A]

Okay, that's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature with your sweaty and desperate host begging for a little morsel of praise there at the end. My thanks to Tom Lutz for joining us. Things are in the works, people. It's a, it's a good September for the podcast. We have the tour coming up, John Shore's Travel, if you want to join us. And we have some other announcements too. We're on the verge of some big announcements, but we have some smaller announcements in the meantime. We're on Blue sky, ackwilson, that's Jack with an E. And at Holpod, H O L, P O D. We're also active on instagram [e-mail] where you can sign up for our newsletter, which comes once a month and includes my personal favorite feature, Emma's Note, where our producer, Emma Wilson shares her thoughts each month. And we have our new Patreon account or new development at our Patreon account, I should say patreon.com literature, where we now offer a low ad version of the podcast. You sign up there and you can listen to an episode of the podcast without the inserted ads. We're grateful to all of our patrons for helping to make this show possible and to all of you, I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. Hi, I'm Rick Rubeck. And I'm Royce Yudkoff. Welcome to our chart topping podcast from the Harvard Business School. Think big, buy small. This series lets you in on a special way to become an entrepreneur. How to buy your own business, be your own boss and get the financial benefits of your efforts. Entrepreneurship through acquisition and involves searching for an existing, enduringly profitable smaller business and buying it, usually from a retiring founder back for a brand new season. Our conversations are with guests from all backgrounds and different stages of the entrepreneurship through acquisition journey, from those considering whether this path is right for them all the way through to those who have sold the businesses they bought as searchers and then ran as CEOs. Thousands of smaller firms are sold every year, and many people have successfully acquired an existing business that is enduringly profitable. So why not you too? We've been helping students understand this less traveled path to personal and professional independence in our courses at the Harvard Business school for nearly 15 years. But you don't have to attend the Harvard Business School to take advantage of these opportunities. The goal of the Think Big Buy Small podcast is to help you, our listeners, decide if entrepreneurship through acquisition is for you and if it is, to help you take your first steps on the journey to buying your own business. Follow Think Big Buy Small wherever you get your podcasts. It's hard to remember now, but the Internet used to be fun. I can't believe how easy it is.

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