The World Broke in Two - by 1922 modernist writers

Sep 21, 2026

The World Broke in Two frames 1922 as a decisive hinge in literary modernism by following four writers—Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence—whose personal and creative crises shaped their renewal. It situates their renewed work amid landmark publications such as Ulysses and The Waste Land, while emphasizing the blank-page tension, unfinished manuscripts, and the search for new forms, styles, and language. Rivalries and renewed recognition are shown as accelerants that reawaken ambition, reshape writing, and redefine the period’s literary future.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryStory & Novel

FormatPDF

Pages314

Reading Time8 h 4 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

1922 as a dividing line in literary history

Renewal through vision and new forms

Rivalries, publicity, and creative ambition

Begin Reading Table of Contents About the Author Photos Copyright Page Thank you for buying this Henry Holt and Company ebook. To receive special offers, bonus content, and info on new releases and other great reads, sign up for our newsletters. Or visit us online at [us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup](us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup)[ ](us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup)[For email updates on the author](For email updates on the author), click here. The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: [us.macmillanusa.com/piracy](us.macmillanusa.com/piracy). For Joanne Goldstein, who was born in 1922, and for Blake West, who lived through it with me. INTRODUCTION The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts. Willa Cather, Not Under Forty Some years are understood as pivotal in history—1492, 1776, 1865, 1914, 1945, 1968. Nineteen twenty-two is a dividing line in literary history. The World Broke in Two tells the story of 1922 by focusing on four legendary writers: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, who were all similarly and serendipitously moved during that remarkable year to invent the language of the future. Willa Cather began her 1936 book of essays, Not Under Forty, with the melancholy remark about changes in literary fashion: “The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts.” Cather was thinking of the publication of Ulysses in February and of The Waste Land in October of 1922, and the ways in which those works seemed, all at once, to herald a new modernist era in which the form of storytelling she prized, and had excelled at, was no longer of signal importance. Her own novel of the war, One of Ours, was published in 1922 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923. But Joyce ’s novel and Eliot’s poem, and the coincidence of their publication dates, had very quickly given 1922 a privileged place in the history of literary modernism in which she and her work seemed to have no share. She was a relic of an old literature the value of which had not been preserved against the new literature that Joyce and Eliot represented. For Woolf, Eliot, Lawrence, and Forster, the literary apocalypse of 1922 had less to do with publication dates than with the personal and creative challenges that indeed broke the world in two for them in 1922. Woolf, Forster, Eliot, and Lawrence were, at the start of 1922, writers in deep despair, privately confronting an uncertain creative future; each of them felt literally at a loss for words. None of these essential pillars of twentieth-century literature could foresee the work just ahead that was about to transform them as writers. The Waste Land was published in 1922—but the drama of the year for Eliot had less to do with the poem’s appearance than with how close he had come to not finishing it or having it published at all. Renewal came as each in turn experienced a sudden, if still tentative, spark of vision. In early spring, Woolf thought to write again of a character who had appeared in her first novel, The Voyage Out, published in 1915: this was Clarissa Dalloway. Forster, picking up the abandoned manuscript of what was to become A Passage to India, made his first significant progress on a work of fiction in eight years. Both of them began to read the first volume of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, in French, which inspired their work, and on which both drew as they continued to work through 1922 and beyond. Lawrence started Kangaroo, his neglected but perhaps most autobiographical novel, written at light speed during his hundred-day sojourn in Australia that spring and summer. And Eliot, stopping in Paris for two weeks with Ezra Pound, began editing his poem into a 450-line dis

FAQs

What does 1922 represent in The World Broke in Two?

1922 is presented as a dividing line and pivotal turning point in literary history, especially for the modernist transformation of storytelling and language.

Which four writers does the book focus on?

The introduction centers on Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence and their shared creative challenges.

How does the book explain the writers’ renewed creativity in 1922?

It links renewal to personal and creative challenges, moments of tentative vision, reading and working through influential texts, and pressures such as rivalry, jealousy, and the possibilities of publication and recognition.

Sep 21, 2026

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