Ten Wafer-Thin Candidates for the #1937Club

Twice a year, book bloggers Karen Langley (Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings) and Simon Thomas (Stuck in a Book) sponsor a wonderful collaborative exercise in which dozens of folks from around the Internet select one or more books from a particular year to read and write about. You can follow along on Twitter with the #1937Club hashtag and follow the accumulation of contributions on their two blogs. I’ve been one of these readers in recent years, and so it’s only appropriate to invite the members of the Wafer-Thin Books group to join in the fun. Here are ten books first published in English in 1937. I’ve deliberately omitted the two most famous American novellas of 1937, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and The Red Pony, because you folks deserve better than that.

I should also note that a number of these books were over the 150-page limit when first published, but in subsequent reissues, all have managed to slim down–the most extreme case being William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows, which was 267 pages long in its first edition, despite the fact that it’s barely more than 40,000 words.

Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis (Viking, 152 pages)
This book has a special place in my heart, of course, as I discovered it back in 2009 and have been able not only to bring it back to print (Boiler House Press, 2021) but watch it become a global phenomenon, with nine different translations to date and a tenth (Arabic) due later this year. But I also think Gentleman Overboard is a perfect little book: the simples of stories, about a man who falls off a ship in the middle of the Pacific and his long and futile wait for his rescue, clean, uncluttered prose, and a compelling existential impact. Anyone who’s had the experience of feeling isolated and forgotten can relate to this novel.

The Sea of Grass by Conrad Richter (Knopf, 149 pages)
Conrad Richter’s critical standing has faded significantly since his death in 1968. Although he won the Pulitzer for The Town (1951) and the National Book Award for The Waters of Kronos (1961), his primary subject (the settling of the West) and his deceptively simple style have led him to be considered a regionalist and traditionalist–much as Willa Cather (another favorite of Alfred A. Knopf) was before she was championed by several generations of scholars. This story of the clash between three cultures–the early ranchers who raised huge herds on the free “sea of grass” on unclaimed land; the homesteaders who began staking claims to that land for farming; and the “civilized” East in the form of rancher Jim Brewton’s wife Lutie–could, however, be seen now as a parable for the economic clashes between wealth and working/middle classes we see today.

The Buried Candelabrum by Stefan Zweig, translated by Eden and Cedar Paul (Viking, 148 pages)
The Buried Candelabrum is the last of Zweig’s novellas and something of transition, from his years as a famous and successful Viennese writer to his last years as an emigre, no longer the urbane European humanist but a homeless wanderer–and most significantly, no longer Austrian but Jew in the eyes of his own country. Thus, there is an extra meaning to be found in this story about a Jew who spends his life trying to save a legendary seven-stemmed menorah in the 5th Century AD, particularly in light of Zweig’s ultimate decision to take his life while in exile in Brazil: “We Jews are no longer fighters,” his protagonist says. “Sacrifice alone is our strength.”

Remembered Laughter by Wallace Stegner (Little, Brown, 154 pages)
Stegner was an instructor at the University of Utah when Remembered Laughter won a nationwide contest run by publisher Little, Brown and Company to select the best short novel of 1937. Hundreds of candidates were submitted and the competition was fierce, with the publisher eventually publishing four other contenders, including A Cargo of Parrotts by R. Hernekin Baptist (see this Neglected Books feature from 2013). Stegner undoubtedly drew some inspiration from Ethan Frome, for this is a story about secrets and longings in a small family–in this case, two sisters and the Scots-born man who comes to run their Iowa farm. It’s subtly observed and respectful of the reader’s intelligence.

They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell (Harpers, 267 pages)
Maxwell’s second novel, this draws upon his own childhood and his mother’s death in 1918 during the influenza epidemic. Maxwell tells the story from three perspectives: first, as seen and understood by Bunny, the tender-hearted eight-year-old son; then by his brother Robert, just entering teenage; and finally, by James, their father, devastated by the loss and struggling to know how to deal with it. I don’t think I’ve ever been so affected by the depiction of death and its impacts on a group of characters as in They Came Like Swallows: it’s truly an American masterpiece.

Sally Bowles by Christopher Isherwood (Hogarth Press, 150 pages)
This was the first of the stories based on Isherwood’s time in Berlin during the rise of the Nazi party, later expanded in Mr. Norris Changes Trains, Goodbye to Berlin, and finally The Berlin Of Sally Bowles (1975), which collected all his Berlin stories. It focuses on English cabaret performer Sally Bowles, whose bravado is considerably less than suggested by Liza Minnelli in Cabaret. A first edition of Sally Bowles will set you back at least $1,000, so it’s best to read this in Goodbye to Berlin, where it’s the second story.

Home is Where You Hang Your Childhood by Leane Zugsmith (Random House, 158 pages)
A fine collection of short stories by a forgotten writer, a Kentucky-born daughter of Jewish immigrants who moved to New York and was active in radical politics most of her life. Like Tess Slesinger’s, Zugsmith’s stories deal with infidelity, divorce, the stranglehold of families on adult children, and the impact of the Depression, but in much briefer, impressionistic sketches. The title story deals with children caught as ropes in the tug-of-war between divorcing, squabbling parents and is a classic that any child of divorce can relate to.

The Unholy City by Charles G. Finney (Vanguard, 168 pages)
Decade in and decade out, publishers try to foist the work of Charles G. Finney (best known for The Circus of Dr. Lao) as either SF or fantasy author or both, when in fact, he is sui generis, part fantasist, part satirist, part something not quite of this Earth. In this novel, an American survives an airplane crash in … well, if it’s China, it’s not the one on this planet. After escaping a barbarous tribe, he makes his way to the Unholy City, a megalopolis of 20+ million people, where he and his Chinese(?) companion wander in and out of all the worst dives in town. Somewhere along the way there is a civil war of sorts, I think. Sorry, I read this about 50 years ago and it’s a little fuzzy–but I promise, it was fun in a sort of Quin’s Shanhai Circus way.

All’s Fair by Richard Wormser (Modern Age, 148 pages)
Richard Wormser was an enormously prolific author of pulp fiction and Westerns as well as a journeyman screenwriter. But this early opus taps into his radical roots as he combines a story about a strike at a bauxite (called baugnite in the book) mine in the West. “The blood’s washed off the town’s sidewalks” over seven years of conflicts between miners and the mining company, but to keep things from getting too dull, Wormser also enlists his young labor organizer, Mac, in tracking down the men responsible for the kidnapping and murder of a local teenage boy. It’s not profound, but it is as fast and furious as any good pulp of its time. It’s available on the Internet Archive (without restrictions).

“I Have a Thing to Tell You” by Thomas Wolfe (The New Republic, under 60 pages)
I’m cheating a bit, as this was never issued as a book on its own. It originally appeared in The New Republic in three parts in March, 1937. You can find the originals on the Internet Archive: Part I, Part II, Part III. It was also later including in Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe (1961). It draws upon Wolfe’s experiences in Germany, which he visited several times for extended stays and which he considered as important as his native North Carolina (“the other half of my heart’s home”). The narrator, an American publishing agent heading home to New York, has an initially pleasant train journey from Berlin, but at the last German station, in Aachen, he witnesses a scene that brings home the extreme danger faced by Jews desperate to leave the country. It’s a powerful example of how we can be unaffected directly by fascism — and yet find it impossible to remain unaffected. Wolfe’s closing words almost seem to presage his own death a little more than a year after its publication:

Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year; something has spoken in the night; and told me I shall die, I know not where. Losing the earth we know for greater knowing, losing the life we have for greater life, and leaving friends we loved for greater loving, men find a land more kind than home, more large than earth.