The World Broke in Two tells the cap­ti­vat­ing sto­ry of the intel­lec­tu­al and per­son­al jour­neys four leg­endary writ­ers, Vir­ginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, make over the course of one piv­otal year. As 1922 begins, all four are lit­er­al­ly at a loss for words, con­fronting an uncer­tain cre­ative future despite suc­cess in the past. The lit­er­ary ground is shift­ing, as Ulysses is pub­lished in Feb­ru­ary and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time begins to be pub­lished in Eng­land in the autumn. Yet, dis­mal as their prospects seemed in Jan­u­ary, by the end of the year Woolf has start­ed Mrs. Dal­loway, Forster has, for the first time in near­ly a decade, returned to work on the nov­el that will become A Pas­sage to India, Lawrence has writ­ten Kan­ga­roo, his unjust­ly neglect­ed and most auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal nov­el, and Eliot has fin­ished — and pub­lished to acclaim — ​“The Waste Land.” This book cap­tures both the lit­er­ary break­throughs and the intense per­son­al dra­mas of these beloved writ­ers as they par­tic­i­pate in the inven­tion of modernism.