The Guardian's 100 Best Novels Written in English Bondage by W Somerset Maugham (1915) 45. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920) 46. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922) 47. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922) 48. A Passage to India by EM Forster (1924) 49. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925) 50. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925) 51. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925) 52. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926) 53. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926) 54. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929) 55. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930) 56. Brave New World by Aldous
Anita Loos a devoted admirer of H. L. Mencken and when he was in New York, she would take a break from her "Tuesday Widows" and join his circle, which included Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Hergesheimer, essayist Ernest Boyd and theater critic George Jean Nathan. Loos adored Mencken with what may have been love and preferred this group over the Round Table. She gradually realized Emerson paled in comparison to someone like Mencken, and disappointingly, high-IQ gentlemen didn't fall for women with brains, but those with more "downstairs". In 1925, on the train to Hollywood for another Talmadge picture,