Belated happy New Year, everyone, and welcome to the (can it be?) eighth year of My Life 100 Years Ago.*
This year’s J.C. Leyendecker New Year’s baby apparently just registered his new car and immediately has to repair it, which I gather is par for the course for ca. 1925 vehicles.
Cars can be fun, though, as you can see from the most Roaring Twenties magazine cover ever. You can cavort and smoke and…well, let’s just say don’t base your driving behavior on hundred-year-old magazine covers.
Cars were also celebrated on the covers of Vogue**
and Life (“We got one now,” the family exults in the caption),
while, over at Motor, ironically, cars are a mere afterthought.
On to the top posts of 1924!
Which is not a very competitive category because my productivity this year was less than stellar, with a mere three posts. Here they are:
3. Children’s Books: Your 1924 Holiday Shopping Guide
Highlights of 1924 include When We Were Very Young, A.A. Milne’s first collection of Christopher Robin poems; a fun book of poems about a day in the life of two Parisian kids; and, for older kids, two Agatha Christies and The Cross Word Puzzle Book, the first-ever crossword collection, which, infuriatingly, I can’t download from South Africa.
Last year’s roundup.
1. A Double Rainbow of 1924 Magazine Covers
Longing for sun in rainy, wintery Cape Town, I took refuge in a rainbow of summer 1924 magazine covers. (Now, in sunny, summery Cape Town, I’m wistfully scrolling Facebook for my DC friends’ photos of the recent snowstorm.)
In spite of my slack production, this blog had by far its most views ever in 2024, proving, depending on your world view, either that 1) sticking to something, however intermittently, pays off, or 2) life is unfair.*** The most popular posts this year overall were from past years. (The #1 new post was only #15 overall.) To make this a real Top 10, here are seven of them.
7. Young Dorothy Parker at Vanity Fair
Parker’s “Any Porch,” her first published poem, is one of my favorite a hundred years ago things ever. It’s been a while—I’ll have to catch up with her in 1925.
6. Are you a superior adult? Take this 1918 intelligence test and find out!
This vocabulary-based IQ test is totally legit because asking people if they know what a parterre and a cameo are is not socially biased AT ALL.
5. Three 1920 Women Illustrators I’m Thankful For
For this Thanksgiving post, I was going to write about ten women I was thankful for, but Neysa McMein (who was Dorothy Parker’s best friend) ended up being so fascinating that I never would have gotten dinner on the table if I hadn’t cut back.
4. Can you beat me at this 1919 intelligence test? Probably!
I did not distinguish myself on the IQ tests here, to put it mildly, but luckily I found a 1919 article reassuring me that they’re a bunch of hogwash.
3. Langston Hughes, Teenaged Poet
Langston Hughes wrote one of his greatest poems, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” as a teenager—and also wrote about fairies and Mexican children’s games.
2. My Quest to Earn a 1919 Girl Scout Badge
This is part one in my two-part quest to earn a Girl Scout badge from 100 years ago. Sadly, Part 2, where I actually succeeded in earning a couple, is less popular.
1. Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows, “If We Must Die,” and Congressional Confusion
In last year’s most popular new post, I wrote about McKay’s poem “If We Must Die” and the confusion over whether it was entered into the Congressional Record, and if so, by whom.
It took a while for the twenties to start roaring, but halfway through the decade flappers are everywhere, Art Deco has come into its own, and the Jazz Age is well underway. I’m looking forward to what 1925 will bring.
*If you want to get technical, for the first two years it was My Life in 1918.
**The first few websites I saw attributed this cover to Sonia Delaunay, which surprised me since as far as I knew she was an artist, not an illustrator. The cover’s definitely by Lepape—you can see his signature in the top left hand corner—but according to this website it’s a portrayal of Delaunay’s “simultaneous” technique.
***Or, I guess, 3) search engine algorithms are weird.
New on Rereading Our Childhood, the podcast I cohost:
My Life 100 Years Ago 