Here you’ll find a list of books that are either set in the 1950s or were written during this time. This list is broken down by age but there are many books that can be enjoyed by some or all of the age groups. This list is just a sample of the thousands of books that we can access through the county-wide system. Some descriptions were taken from the catalog, others from our Literature database; Novelist (click to access from home.)

Click on Titles to be taken to the Catalog

ADULT FICTION AND NON-FICTION BOOKS (SOME MAY BE SUITABLE FOR TEENS OR EVEN CHILDREN. PLEASE ASK A LIBRARIAN FOR HELP WITH DETERMINING AGE SUITABILITY) 

11/22/63 By: King, Stephen – On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? The author’s new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination.

Brooklyn By: Toibin, Colm – Leaving her home in post-World War II Ireland to work as a bookkeeper in Brooklyn, Eilis Lacey discovers a new romance in America with a charming blond Italian man before devastating news threatens her happiness.

Cutting for Stone By: Verghese, A. – Marion and Shiva Stone, twin brothers born from a secret love affair between an Indian nun and a British surgeon in Addis Ababa, come of age in an Ethiopia on the brink of revolution, where their love for the same woman drives them apart.

Gilead By: Robinson, Marilynne – As the Reverend John Ames approaches the hour of his own death, he writes a letter to his son chronicling three previous generations of his family, a story that stretches back to the Civil War and reveals uncomfortable family secrets.

In Cold Blood: a True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences By: Capote, Truman – An account of the senseless murder of a Kansas farm family and the search for the killers.

On the Road By: Kerouac, Jack – On the Road is a thinly fictionalized autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac’s real life friends, lover, and fellow travelers. Narrated by Sal Paradise, one of Kerouac’s alter-egos, On the Road is a cross-country bohemian odyssey that not only influenced writing in the years since its 1957 publication but penetrated into the deepest level of American thought and culture.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest By: Kesey, Ken – McMurphy, a criminal who feigns insanity, is admitted to a mental hospital where he challenges the autocratic authority of the head nurse.

A Painted House By: Grisham, John – Racial tension, a forbidden love affair, and murder are seen through the eyes of a seven-year-old boy in a 1950s Southern cotton-farming community.

The Poisonwood Bible By: Kingsolver, Barbara – The family of a fierce evangelical Baptist missionary–Nathan Price, his wife, and his four daughters–begins to unravel after they embark on a 1959 mission to the Belgian Congo, where they find their lives forever transformed over the course of three decades by the political and social upheaval of Africa.

A Prayer for Owen Meany By: Irving, John – Owen Meany hits a foul ball while playing baseball in the summer of 1953 that kills his best friend’s mother, an accident that Owen is sure is the result of divine intervention.

The Rum Diary: the Long Lost Novel By: Thompson, Hunter S. – The irreverent writer’s long lost novel, written before his nonfiction became popular, chronicles a journalist’s enthusiastic, drunken foray through 1950s San Juan.

She’s Come Undone By: Lamb, Wally – Overweight and sensitive Dolores Price grows from painful childhood, through excruciating adolescence, to lonely adulthood, experiencing the heartache of being a misfit in a confusing world.

Shutter Island By: Lehane, Dennis – U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his partner, Chuck Aule, come to Shutter Island’s Ashcliffe Hospital in search of an escaped mental patient, but uncover true wickedness as Ashcliffe’s mysterious patient treatments propel them to the brink of insanity.

Song of Solomon By: Morrison, Toni – Macon Dead, Jr., called Milkman, son of the richest Negro in town, moves from childhood into early manhood, searching, among the disparate, mysterious members of his family, for his life and reality.

Stones from the River By: Hegi, Ursula – Trudi, a dwarf librarian, tells about the lives of people in the small German town of Burgdorf from World War I and into the 1950s.

A Walk to Remember By: Sparks, Nicholas – A nostalgic look back at the 1950s in a story of first love set in a small North Carolina town.

CHILDREN & TEEN FICTION AND NON-FICTION BOOKS (ADULTS CAN LIKE THESE TOO!)

Bone by Bone by Bone By: Johnston, Tony – In 1950s Tennessee, ten-year-old David’s racist father refuses to let him associate with his best friend Malcolm, an African American boy.

The Boys of San Joaquin By: Smith, D. James – In a small California town in 1951, twelve-year-old Paolo and his deaf cousin Billy get caught up in a search for money missing from the church collection, leading them to complicated discoveries about themselves, other family members, and townspeople they thought they knew.

Fire from the Rock By: Draper, Sharon M. – In 1957, Sylvia Patterson’s life–that of a normal African American teenager–is disrupted by the impending integration of Little Rock’s Central High when she is selected to be one of the first black students to attend the previously all white school.

Keeping Score By: Park, Linda Sue – In Brooklyn in 1951, a die-hard Giants fan teaches nine-year-old Maggie, who is a “Bums” (Dodgers) fan, how to use a technique to keep score of a baseball game which creates a special friendship between them.

Kira-kira By Kadohata, Cynthia – Chronicles the close friendship between two Japanese-American sisters growing up in rural Georgia during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the despair when one sister becomes terminally ill.

The Lions of Little Rock By: Levine, Kristin – In 1958 Little Rock, Arkansas, painfully shy twelve-year-old Marlee sees her city and family divided over school integration, but her friendship with Liz, a new student, helps her find her voice and fight against racism.

Mississippi Trial, 1955 By: Crowe, Chris – In Mississippi in 1955, a sixteen-year-old finds himself at odds with his grandfather over issues surrounding the kidnapping and murder of a fourteen-year-old African American from Chicago.

My Louisiana Sky By: Holt, Kimberly Willis – Growing up in Saitter, Louisiana, in the 1950’s, twelve-year-old Tiger Ann struggles with her feelings about her stern, but loving grandmother, her mentally slow parents, and her good friend and neighbor, Jesse.

Penny from Heaven By: Holm, Jennifer – As she turns twelve during the summer of 1953, Penny gains new insights into herself and her family while also learning a secret about her father’s death.

Stitches By: Small, David – In this memoir, David Small tells the story of his boyhood in the 1950s. Believing that science can fix everything, his radiologist father subjected David to numerous x-rays for various childhood ailments, resulting in cancer that was untreated for years. At age 14, unaware that he had throat cancer and was expected to die, David awoke from an operation left him nearly mute. Beautifully told from a child’s perspective, this pen and ink graphic novel is both dark and delightful.

Strings Attached By: Blundell, Judy – Kit Corrigan, seventeen, leaves her home in Providence, Rhode Island, hoping to find fame and fortune on Broadway. It’s 1950, and Billy, Kit’s ex-boyfriend, has joined the army, but his mob-connected father offers Kit a Manhattan apartment and a nightclub job if she agrees to keep him informed about Billy and his friends. Soon Kit is way over her head, caught in a web of intrigue, love, betrayal, and murder.

Tunes for Bears to Dance To By: Cormier, Robert – Eleven-year-old Henry escapes his family’s problems by watching the woodcarving of Mr. Levine, an elderly Holocaust survivor, but when Henry is manipulated into betraying his friend, he comes to know true evil.

Way Down Deep By: White, Ruth – In the West Virginia town of Way Down Deep in the 1950s, a foundling called Ruby June is happily living with Miss Arbutus at the local boarding house when suddenly, after the arrival of a family of outsiders, the mystery of Ruby’s past begins to unravel.

When Grandmama Sings By: Mitchell, Margaree King – An eight-year-old girl accompanies her grandmother on a singing tour of the segregated South, both of them knowing that Grandmama’s songs have the power to bring people together.

Here you’ll find a list of books that are either set in the 1940s or were written during this time. This list is broken down by age but there are many books that can be enjoyed by some or all of the age groups. This list is just a sample of the thousands of books that we can access through the county-wide system. Some descriptions were taken from the catalog, others from our Literature database; Novelist (click to access from home.)

Click on Titles to be taken to the Catalog

ADULT FICTION AND NON-FICTION BOOKS (SOME MAY BE SUITABLE FOR TEENS OR EVEN CHILDREN. PLEASE ASK A LIBRARIAN FOR HELP WITH DETERMINING AGE SUITABILITY) 

The Black Dahlia By: Ellroy, James – Bucky Bleichert, ex-prize fighter and policeman, investigates when a young woman’s mutilated body appears in a vacant Los Angeles lot.

Bless Me, Ultima By: Anaya, Rudolfo A. – A young New Mexico boy comes of age.

The Blind Assassin By: Atwood, Margaret – A multi-layered story of the death of a woman’s sister and husband in the 1940s, with a novel-within-a-novel as a background.

The Colorado Kid By: King, Stephen – A rookie newspaperwoman learns the true meaning of mystery when she investigates a twenty-five-year-old unsolved and very strange case involving a dead man found on an island off the coast of Maine.

Cryptonomicon By: Stephenson, Neal – More than fifty years after Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe are assigned to Detachment 2702, a secret cryptographic mission, their grandchildren–Randy and Amy–join forces to create a “data haven” in the South Pacific, only to uncover a massive conspiracy with roots in Detachment 2702.

The Godfather By: Puzo, Mario – Don Vito Corleone controls a major mafia family in the 1940s, but when one of his sons is murdered, he fights to dominate all of the other families as well.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet By: Ford, Jamie – When artifacts from Japanese families sent to internment camps during World War II are uncovered during renovations at a Seattle hotel, Henry Lee embarks on a quest that leads to memories of growing up Chinese in a city rife with anti-Japanese sentiment.

A Lesson Before Dying By: Gaines, Ernest J. – A young illiterate African American man witnesses two black robbers kill a white store owner in Louisana in the late 1940s, and he is the one convicted.

Ordinary Heroes By: Turow, Scott – Stewart Dubinsky plunges into the mystery of his family’s secret history when he discovers his deceased father’s wartime letters to his former fiancee, revealing his court-martial and imprisonment during World World II.

Outlander By: Gabaldon, Diana – Hurtled back through time more than two hundred years to Scotland in 1743, Claire Randall finds herself caught in the midst of an unfamiliar world torn apart by violence, pestilence, and revolution and haunted by her growing feelings for James Fraser, a young soldier.

The Power of One By: Courtenay, Bryce – Follows Peekay, a white British boy in South Africa during World War II, between the ages of five and eleven, as he survives an abusive boarding school and goes on to succeed in life and the boxing ring, with help from a chicken, a boxer, a pianist, black African prisoners, and many others.

Sons of Fortune By: Archer, Jeffrey – In the late 1940s, twin boys are separated at birth, Nat going home with his middle-class parents, and Fletcher to be raised by a wealthy couple, but their lives come together when they both run for governor of Connecticut.

Wish You Well By: Baldacci, David – A coming-of-age story set in New York City and the mountains of Virginia in the 1940s. Lou and Oz Cardinal leave New York with their mother and head to live on their great-grandmother’s farm.

CHILDREN & TEEN FICTION AND NON-FICTION BOOKS (ADULTS CAN LIKE THESE TOO!)

The Art of Keeping Cool By Lisle, Janet Taylor – In 1942, Robert and his cousin Elliot uncover long-hidden family secrets while staying in their grandparents’ Rhode Island town, where they also become involved with a German artist who is suspected of being a spy.

Green Glass Sea By Klages, Ellen – It’s 1943 and 10-year-old budding inventor Dewey Kerrigan sets off with her father to do secret war work in New Mexico. As the adults work on “the gadget,” the kids at Los Alamos are often left to their own devices. When the atomic bomb tests are finally successful, both children and adults grapple with the ethical implications as they realize how “the gadget” will be used.

House of the Red Fish By Salisbury, Graham – A year after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and the arrest of Tomi’s father and grandfather, Tomi and his friends, battling anti-Japanese-American sentiment in Hawaii and try to find a way to salvage his father’s sunken fishing boat.

The Loud Silence of Francine Green By Cushman, Karen – Francine Green doesn’t speak up much, and who can blame her? Her parents aren’t interested in her opinions, the nuns at school punish girls who ask too many questions, and the House Committee on Un-American Activities is blacklisting people who express unpopular ideas. There’s safety in silence. But when outspoken, passionate Sophie Bowman transfers into Francine’s class at All Saints School for Girls, Francine finds herself thinking about things that never concerned her before free speech, the atom bomb, the existence of God, the way people treat each other.

My Chocolate Year: a novel with 12 recipes By Herman, Charlotte – In 1945 Chicago, as her Jewish family anxiously awaits news of relatives left behind in Europe, ten-year-old Dorrie learns new recipes in the hope of winning a baking competition at school.

Play Ball, Jackie! By Krensky, Stephen and Morse, Joe – It’s 1947, and 10-year-old Matty Romano is going to his first baseball game with his father to see the Brooklyn Dodgers, his favorite team. It’s also the first day for Jackie Robinson, the first Black baseball player in the major leagues. The crowd is divided between those who are outraged and those who just want to see good baseball players, no matter what their color.

Players in Pigtails By Corey, Shana – Katie Casey, a fictional character, helps start the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which gave women the opportunity to play professional baseball while America was involved in World War II.

Slap Your Sides By Kerr, M. E. – Life in their Pennsylvania hometown changes for Jubal Shoemaker and his family when his older brother witnesses to his Quaker beliefs by becoming a conscientious objector during World War II.

Ten Cents a Dance By Fletcher, Christine – With her mother ill, it’s up to fifteen-year-old Ruby Jacinski to support her family. But in the 1940s, the only opportunities open to a Polish-American girl from Chicago’s poor Yards is a job in one of the meat packing plants. Through a chance meeting with a local tough, Ruby lands a job as a taxi dancer and soon becomes an expert in the art of “fishing”: working her patrons for meals, cash, clothes, even jewelry. Drawn ever deeper into the world of dance halls, jazz, and the mob, Ruby gradually realizes that the only one who can save her is herself. A mesmerizing look into a little known world and era.

Weedflower By Kadohata, Cynthia – After twelve-year-old Sumiko and her Japanese-American family are relocated from their flower farm in southern California to an internment camp on a Mojave Indian reservation in Arizona, she helps her family and neighbors, becomes friends with a local Indian boy, and tries to hold on to her dream of owning a flower shop.

Worlds Afire By Janeczko, Paul B. – One summer afternoon in 1944, hundreds of circus lovers crowded under the big top in Hartford, Connecticut, breathlessly waiting for the show to begin. Minutes later, the event took a horrifying turn when a fire broke out and spread rapidly through the tent, claiming the lives of 167 souls and injuring some 500 more. Sixty years later, Paul B. Janeczko recalls that tragic event by bringing to life some unforgettable voices — from circus performers to seasoned fans, from firefighters and nurses to the little girl known as Little Miss 1565, a child whose body was never claimed.

Here you’ll find a list of books that are either set in the 1930s or were written during this time. This list is broken down by age but there are many books that can be enjoyed by some or all of the age groups. This list is just a sample of the thousands of books that we can access through the county-wide system. Some descriptions were taken from the catalog, others from our Literature database; Novelist (click to access from home.)

Click on Titles to be taken to the Catalog

Adult Fiction and Non-Fiction Books (Some may be suitable for teens or even children. Please ask a librarian for help with determining age suitability) 

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg —Mrs. Threadgoode’s tale of two high-spirited women of the 1930s, Idgie and Ruth, helps Evelyn, a 1980s woman in a sad slump of middle age, to begin to rejuvenate her own life.

Kate Vaiden by Reynolds Price —Now in her mid-fifties, Kate Vaiden recalls her early life growing up, after the violent death of her parents, an orphan in small towns in North Carolina and Virginia in the 1930s and 1940s.

Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver —The story of Harrison William Shepherd, a man caught between two worlds — Mexico and the United States in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s — and whose search for identity takes readers to the heart of the twentieth century’s most tumultuous events.

The Legend of Bagger Vance By Steven Pressfield – African American Bagger Vance, middle-aged caddy to war hero and former golf champion Rannulph Junah in 1931, explains to Junah how golf resembles life, and Junah’s game improves.

Maus: a Survivor’s Tale By Art Spiegelman – The author-illustrator traces his father’s imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp through a series of disarming and unusual cartoons arranged to tell the story as a novel.

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden — Because her mother is dying and her father old, Chiyo, nine, is sold to a wealthy geisha house in Gion where she learns her trade and works it in the 1930s and 1940s.

Native Son by Richard Wright —Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Richard Wright’s novel is just as powerful today as when it was written — in its reflection of poverty and hopelessness, and what it means to be black in America.

The Orchid House by Lucinda Riley — For fans of The House at Riverton and Rebecca–a debut spanning from the 1930s to the present day, from a magnificent estate in war-torn England to Thailand, this sweeping novel tells the tale of a concert pianist, Julia, and the prominent Crawford family whose shocking secrets are revealed, leading to devastating consequences for generations to come.

Shanghai Girls by Lisa See — Forced to leave Shanghai when their father sells them to California suitors, sisters May and Pearl struggle to adapt to life in 1930s Los Angeles while still bound to old customs, as they face discrimination and confront a life-altering secret.

To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway — In an attempt to keep his family above water, Harry Morgan runs contraband rum shipments between Cuba and Key West during the 1930s, in a humorous tale that also follows an unlikely love affair.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee — Scout’s father defends a black man accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town during the 1930s. The great American novel.

Water for Elephants By Sara Gruen – Ninety-something-year-old Jacob Jankowski remembers his time in the circus as a young man during the Great Depression, and his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant, who gave them hope.

A Week from Sunday by Dorothy Garlock — Set in 1930s Louisiana, a young woman makes a new life for herself after she runs away from home.

Children & Teen Fiction and Non-Fiction Books (Adults can like these too!)

Al Capone Does My Shirts By Gennifer Choldenko – A twelve-year-old boy named Moose moves to Alcatraz Island in 1935 when guards’ families were housed there, and has to contend with his extraordinary new environment in addition to life with his autistic sister.

Bird in a Box By Andrea Davis Pinkney – In 1936, three children meet at the Mercy Home for Negro Orphans in New York State, and while not all three are orphans, they are all dealing with grief and loss which together, along with the help of a sympathetic staff member and the boxing matches of Joe Louis, they manage to overcome.

The Book Thief By Marcus Zusak – Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel–a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.

Bud, Not Buddy By Christopher Paul Curtis – Ten-year-old Bud, a motherless boy living in Flint, Michigan, during the Great Depression, escapes a bad foster home and sets out in search of the man he believes to be his father–the renowned bandleader, H.E. Calloway of Grand Rapids.

Ghost-Girl: a Blue Ridge Mountain Story By Delia Ray – Eleven-year-old April is delighted when President and Mrs. Hoover build a school near her Madison County, Virginia, home but her family’s poverty, grief over the accidental death of her brother, and other problems may mean that April can never learn to read from the wonderful teacher, Miss Vest.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret : a novel in words and pictures By Brian Selznick – When twelve-year-old Hugo, an orphan living and repairing clocks within the walls of a Paris train station in 1931, meets a mysterious toyseller and his goddaughter, his undercover life and his biggest secret are jeopardized.

Macaroni Boy By Katherine Ayers – In Pittsburgh in 1933, sixth-grader Mike Costa notices a connection between several strange occurrences, but the only way he can find out the truth about what’s happening is to be nice to the class bully. Includes historical facts.

My Heart Will Not Sit Down By Mara Rockliff – In 1931 Cameroon, young Kedi is upset to learn that children in her American teacher’s village of New York are going hungry because of the Great Depression, and she asks her mother, neighbors, and even the headman for money to help.

Out of the Dust By Karen Hesse – In a series of poems, fourteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family’s wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression.

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry By Mildred D. Taylor – A Black family living in the South during the 1930s is faced with prejudice and discrimination which their children don’t understand.

Turtle in Paradise By Jennifer R. Holm – Turtle, eleven, knows that life isn’t like the happy Hollywood movies her mother adores. It’s 1935 and jobs are scarce, so when her mother gets a job as a live-in housekeeper with a woman who doesn’t like children, Turtle heads off without complaint to stay with relatives she’s never met in Key West, Florida. Turtle’s dreamy mother insists that Turtle is going to live in paradise, but down-to-earth Turtle doesn’t expect much. Eventually Turtle warms to her eccentric relatives and begins to see the natural beauty hidden under the trash.

A Year Down Yonder By Richard Peck – During the hard times of 1937, fifteen-year-old Mary Alice is sent to live with her feisty, larger-than-life grandmother in rural Illinois and comes to a better understanding of this fearsome woman.

Your Eyes in Stars By M. E. Kerr – In their small New York town, two teenaged girls become friends while helping each other make sense of their families, neighbors, and selves as they approach adulthood in the years preceding World War II.

Here you’ll find a list of books that are either set in the 1920s or were written during this time. This list is broken down by age but there are many books that can be enjoyed by some or all of the age groups. This list is just a sample of the thousands of books that we can access through the county-wide system. Descriptions were taken from our Literature database; Novelist (click to access from home.)

Click on Titles to be taken to the Catalog

Adult Fiction and Non-Fiction Books (Some may be suitable for teens or even children. Please ask a librarian for help with determining age suitability) 

The Color Purple By: Alice Walker – Two African American sisters, one a missionary in Africa and the other a child-wife living in the South, support each other through their correspondence, beginning in the 1920s.

The Good Earth By: Pearl S. Buck – Wang Lung, a Chinese peasant, rises from poverty to become a rich landowner with the aid of his patient wife in the 1920s.

The Great Gatsby By: F. Scott Fitzgerald – In 1925, The Great Gatsby was published and hailed as an artistic and material success for its young author, F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is considered a vastly more mature and artistically masterful treatment of Fitzgerald’s early themes, which examine the results of the Jazz Age generation’s adherence to false material values. In nine chapters, Fitzgeralds presents the rise and fall of Jay Gatsby, as related in first-person narrative by Nick Carraway.

The Hours By: Michael Cunningham – The spirit of Virginia Woolf permeates the lives of several American readers as evidenced in this trio of tales about the author Woolf, a New Yorker planning a party to honour a writer, and a young mother reading Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

The House By: Danielle Steel – A workaholic attorney, Sarah Anderson finds her life transformed by an inheritance from an elderly client and by a magnificent mansion, built in the 1920s by a wealthy Frenchman, a legacy that leads Sarah to architect Jeff Parker.

Middlesex By: Jeffrey Eugenides – Calliope’s friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is a hermaphrodite, a situation with roots in her grandparent’s desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s.

New World Coming By: Nathan Miller – Miller characterizes the 1920s as a decade full of drinking, dancing, hedonism, and crime. Miller first concentrates on the writer who captured the decade’s insouciance and ennui in The Great Gatsby, periodically revisiting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s self-destructive slide, then returning to recount the period’s social and economic trends. Blacks moved north, women began voting, factories hummed, farms stagnated, stocks inflated, and speakeasies proliferated.

The Sun Also Rises By: Ernest Hemingway – The story of a group of Americans and English on a sojourn from Paris to Paloma, evokes in poignant detail, life among the expatriates on Paris’s Left Bank, during the 1920s and conveys in brutally realistic descriptions the power and danger of bullfighting in Spain.

Tinkers By: Paul Harding – On his deathbed, surrounded by his family, George Washington Crosby’s thoughts drift back to his childhood and the father who abandoned him when he was twelve.

Teen Fiction and Non-Fiction Books (Just because it says teens doesn’t mean adults won’t like them too!)

Harlem Stomp!: a cultural history of the Harlem Renaissance By: Laban Carrick Hill – Explores the literary, artistic, and intellectual creativity of the Harlem Renaissance and discusses the lives and work of Louis Armstrong, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and other notable figures of the era.

How it Happened in Peach Hill By: Marthe Jocelyn – When fifteen-year-old Annie Grey and her “clairvoyant” mother arrive in Peach Hill, New York, in 1924, each finds a reason for wanting to finally settle down, but to reach their goals they will have to do some serious lying and Annie will have to stand up for herself.

The Kat Who Walked in Beauty: the panoramic dailies of 1920 By: George Herriman – A companion to the complete Krazy Kat Sunday series collects rare and unique dailies from the 1910s and 1920s, many of which feature unrestricted layout and pictorial content, in a volume that also includes the first stand-alone Krazy & Ignatz strips and illustrations from the Krazy Kat Jazz pantomime ballet of 1922.

Operation Red Jericho By: Joshua Mowll – The posthumous papers of Rebecca MacKenzie document her adventures, along with her brother Doug, in 1920s China as the teenaged siblings are sent to live aboard their uncle’s ship where they become involved in the dangerous activities of a mysterious secret society called the Honourable Guild of Specialists.

The Star Fisher By: Laurence Yep – Fifteen-year-old Chinese-American Joan Lee and her family find the adjustment hard when they move from Ohio to West Virginia in the 1920s.

Vixen By: Jillian Larkin – In 1923 Chicago, seventeen-year-old Gloria Carmody rebels against her upcoming society wedding by visiting a speakeasy, while her Pennsylvania cousin, Clara, hides similar tastes and her best friend, Lorraine, makes plans of her own.

The Voice that Challenged a Nation By: Russell Freedman – An account of the life of a talented and determined artist who left her mark on musical and social history is drawn from Anderson’s own writings and other contemporary accounts.

White Lilacs By: Carolyn Meyer – In 1921 in Dillon, Texas, twelve-year-old Rose Lee sees trouble threatening her Black community when the Whites decide to take the land there for a park and forcibly relocate the Black families to an ugly stretch of territory outside the town.

WitnessBy: Karen Hesse – A series of poems express the views of various people in a small Vermont town, including a young black girl and a young Jewish girl, during the early 1920s when the Ku Klux Klan is trying to infiltrate the town.

Children’s Fiction and Non-Fiction Books (Adults can like these too!)

The 1920s: Luck By: Dorothy Hoobler – In 1927 the Dixons move from rural Georgia to Chicago, where African Americans have more opportunities, and there Lorraine meets a famous movie actress and her little brother Marcus finds that his artistic talents are useful.

Dave at Night By: Gail Carson Levine – When orphaned Dave is sent to the Hebrew Home for Boys where he is treated cruelly, he sneaks out at night and is welcomed into the music- and culture-filled world of the Harlem Renaissance.

Egyptology: search for the tomb of Osiris, being the journal of Miss Emily Sands, November 1926 By: Emily Sands – Presents information on ancient Egypt in the form of a journal of a young woman who went missing on a trip to search for the tomb of the god Osiris in 1926.

Henry and the Kite Dragon By: Bruce Edward Hall – In New York City in the 1920s, the children from Chinatown go after the children from Little Italy for throwing rocks at the beautiful kites Grandfather Chin makes, not realizing that they have a reason for doing so.

The Little Match Girl By: Jerry Pinkney – An American child of the 1920s who sells matches is visited by some visions which bring some beauty to her brief, tragic life.

An Old-fashioned ABC Book By: Elizabeth Allen Ashton – An alphabet book celebrating the art of Jessie Willcox Smith, whose popular illustrations were featured on the covers of “Good Housekeeping” throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

This Land is your Land By: Woody Guthrie – This well-known folk song is accompanied by a tribute from folksinger Pete Seeger, the musical notation, and a biographical scrapbook with photographs.

Uncle Jed’s Barbershop By: Margaree King Mitchell – Despite serious obstacles and setbacks Sarah Jean’s Uncle Jed, the only Black barber in the county, pursues his dream of saving enough money to open his own barbershop.

Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze By: Elizabeth Foreman Lewis – In the 1920’s a Chinese youth from the country comes to Chungking with his mother where the bustling city offers adventure and his apprenticeship to a coppersmith brings good fortune.