The Best 1920s Books for Kids

The twenties moved fast and knew it. In ten years a farm boy flew alone from New York to Paris, a swimmer beat every man’s time across the English Channel, archaeologists lifted a lamp into a pharaoh’s sealed tomb, a sled team ran serum six hundred miles through an Alaskan blizzard, and a cornet player from New Orleans rearranged what music was allowed to sound like. Radios appeared in front rooms, Model Ts appeared in barnyards, movie palaces appeared downtown, and somebody figured out how to sell bubble gum. It is a decade that hands children’s writers one irresistible true story after another — and gives novelists a world of speakeasies, ocean liners, dime museums, and brand-new skyscrapers to send a determined kid into.

Bookroo’s collection of 73 books about the 1920s runs from first-grade readers about Balto to Newbery-honored memoir, and our editors picked twelve that carry the decade best. The shortlist walks the ten years roughly in order — 1921 Tulsa, 1924 Egypt, 1925 Nome, 1926 in the Channel, 1927 over the Atlantic, 1929 in an air derby — and mixes true stories with the era’s best invented ones. Below the picks, the age shelves sort the rest into illustrated true stories for younger readers and chapter books and novels for readers who want to spend a few hundred pages in the twenties.