20th Century > 1930s
For Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway
The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla Unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal.
Year: 1940
Genre: 1930s
In Dubious Battle
by John Steinbeck
At once a relentlessly fast-paced, admirably observed novel of social unrest and the story of a young man's struggle for identity, set in the California apple country, where a strike by migrant workers against rapacious landowners spirals out of control, as a principled defiance metamorphoses into blind fanaticism. Caught in the upheaval is Jim Nolan, a once aimless man who find himself in the course of the strike, briefly becomes its leader, and is ultimately crushed in its service.
Year: 1936
Genre: 1930s
Of Mice and Men
by John Steinbeck
While the powerlessness of the laboring class is a recurring theme in Steinbeck's work of the late 1930s, he narrowed his focus when composing "Of Mice and Men", creating an intimate portrait of two men facing a world marked by petty tyranny, misunderstanding, jealousy, and callousness.
Year: 1937
Genre: 1930s
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
by Ernest Hemingway
In this definitive collection of Ernest Hemingway's short stories, readers will delight in the author's most beloved classics such as The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Hills Like White Elephants, and A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, and will discover seven new tales published for the first time in this collection. For Hemingway fans The Complete Short Stories is an invaluable treasure.
The Crossing
by Cormac McCarthy
In the late 1930s, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family's ranch. But instead of killing it, he decides to take it back to the mountains of Mexico. With that crossing, he begins an arduous and often dreamlike journey into a country where men meet ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat-lightning--a world where there is no order "save that which death has put there."
The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
The story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads--driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.
Year: 1939
Genre: 1930s
The Green Mile
by Stephen King
Convicted killers all, each awaits his turn to walk "the Green Mile," the lime-colored linoleum corridor leading to a final meeting with Old Sparky, Cold Mountain's electric chair. Prison guard Paul Edgecombe has seen his share of oddities over the years working the Mile, but he's never seen anything like John Coffey--a man with the body of a giant and the mind of a child, condemned for a crime terrifying in its violence and shocking in its depravity.
Year: 1996
Genre: 1930s, Death Row, Historical Fantasy
The Orchard Keeper
by Cormac McCarthy
Set is a small, remote community in rural Tennessee in the years between the two world wars, it tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father. Together with Rattner's Uncle Ather, who belongs to a former age in his communion with nature and his stoic independence, they enact a drama that seems born of the land itself.