The World Broke In Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, And The Year That Changed Literature

"The ingenious conceit of Bill Goldstein’s book is to follow, using excerpts from correspondence and diaries, the intertwined personal and literary lives of four writers (Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster and T.S. Eliot) as 1922’s three literary shocks – the publications of Ulysses, The Waste Land and In Search of Lost Time – ripple through their lives, and their work. In letting these four writers speak in their own words – their own witty, gossipy, often waspish words – Goldstein neatly avoids a dutiful chronicling of anything so weighty and abstruse as The Rise of Modernism. Cannily, he sacrifices historical sweep and gravitas for something much more grounded and intimate. In his hands, these literary lions prove surprisingly – and bracingly – catty."