'This is a brilliant book about the birth of modernism, one that taught me something on every page ... You will feel – and be! – much smarter after you read it' Edmund White

'This is a brilliant book about the birth of modernism, one that taught me something on every page ... You will feel – and be! – much smarter after you read it' Edmund White ‘The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,’ the American author Willa Cather once wrote. Yet for Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence, 1922 began with a frighteningly blank page. Eliot was in Switzerland recovering from a nervous breakdown. Forster was grappling with unrequited love. Woolf and Lawrence, meanwhile, were both in bed with the flu. Confronting illness, personal problems and the spectral ghost of World War I, all four felt literally at a loss for words. As dismal as things seemed, 1922 turned out to be a year of outstanding creative renaissance for them all. By the end of the year Woolf had started Mrs Dalloway, Forster had returned to work on A Passage to India, Lawrence had written his heavily autobiographical novel Kangaroo, and Eliot had finished – and published to great acclaim – ‘The Waste Land’. Full of surprising insights and original research, Bill Goldstein’s The World Broke in Two chronicles the intertwined lives and works of these four writers in a crucial year of change.

"A fascinating and engrossing tale ... Goldstein creates an original, moving and at times wryly amusing account of four literary demi-gods during the course of these few months that shaped a new direction in English literature, incorporating a wealth of detail which builds, layer upon layer, until the picture is satisfyingly complete" - Times Literary Supplement

"A splendidly written chronicle of 1922 and the birth of literary modernism" - Sunday Times

"Goldstein’s triumph is the way he evokes these great writers as real people in all their banality and oddness … his book is wonderfully readable and full of top-notch gossip " - The Times

"Goldstein flits between writers, charting the progress of his sorry quartet towards fulfilment as though following plot strands in a soap opera … brilliantly researched and splendidly written" - Sunday Times

"The intimate peek into the lives, rivalries, and heartbreaks of these celebrated writers sustains an entertaining story about how great literature is made, and will please scholars and hardcore fans alike" - Publisher's Weekly

"Goldstein writes assuredly and well of the work of his chosen four exemplars... and he brings fresh eyes to all of them. An engaging, lightly worn literary study" - Kirkus

"Goldstein's ardently detailed, many-faceted story of a pivotal year illuminates all that these tormented visionaries had to overcome to "make the modern happen"" - Booklist

"Goldstein has done tremendous and valid work here to find the small but crucial changes in these writers’ lives that resulted in their various attempts to capture consciousness on the page" - Herald (Glasgow)

"The World Broke in Two beautifully captures a seismic moment of cultural rupture that, despite its shock and awe, left something new and exciting in its path" - BookPage

"The enduring interest of 1922 lies in the brilliance, madness, beauty, comedy and devastation with which writers that year fused the fragments of the ages to a noisily vapid postwar present … Readers who, from sources other than Goldstein, know these monuments – haunting and inscrutable, vital and deathly, visceral and recondite, funny and weird – will cherish the immediacy that “The World Broke in Two” brings to the biographies of their creators" - International New York Times

"Scholarly … Goldstein traces his subjects’ activities during the year to show how they reached breakthroughs that got their careers back on track" - Library Journal