Who were the great writers a century ago and are they still remembered? - Ian McMillan

I want to use this first column of 2022 though, to look back at what was happening in the world of writing and reading in 1922, maybe to remind me of people I’ve read and enjoyed, maybe to be introduced to people I’ve never read, and maybe to get a salutary lesson in the fickle nature of fame.

At first glance, 1922 seems fairly quiet in literary terms; the Nobel Prize was won by someone I’ve never heard of, but I’d love to find out more about.

He was called Jacinto Benavente and he was a Spanish playwright who wrote realistic dramas which attempted to portray the rural life of Spain at the time. Nobel Prize winners are often feted at the time of the award but then slip from view and it would be interesting to investigate the man and his work.

Well, if Benavente has faded from view, how about the best sellers of 1922? They must impinge on our modern consciousness somehow, mustn’t they?

Maybe not: the best seller in the US in 1922 was If Winter Comes, by ASM Hutchinson. I know, me neither. If Winter Comes, with a title taken from a Shelley poem, is apparently a melodramatic novel about unhappy marriage, divorce and death.

And it’s passed me by: it was a huge seller a hundred years ago and I have never come across it before. I quite fancy reading it, though. I’ll add it to the list.

The author of this forgotten best seller, ASM Hutchinson, is an example of that early 20th century phenomenon The Man of Letters, someone who made their living from writing all kinds of different things like romantic novels, family sagas and short stories and when he wasn’t doing that he was editing a newspaper called The Daily Graphic.

It’s fair to say he didn’t put his feet up much. It’s also fair to say that he has been confined to the Withdrawn section of life’s great public library.

In some ways, though, 1922 was a momentous year for writing and publishing. TS Eliot’s groundbreaking modernist masterpiece The Waste Land was published that year, as was James Joyce’s astonishing capturing of one day in the life of Dublin, Ulysses.

The Beautiful and Damned by one of my favourite authors and great chroniclers of the jazz age, F Scott Fitzgerald, was published as was Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room.

So, at the same time as ASM Hutchinson was writing maybe a short story in the morning and doing a bit of editing in the afternoon, Ulysses was ushering modernism into being.

Hutchinson or TS Eliot, eh? I know who I’d rather be!