John Steinbeck in 1939 Born

Memoir Club (1920–1941)[edit]

Main article: Memoir Club

Bloomsberries



Mary MacCarthy and son 1915



E.M. Forster 1917



Duncan Grant (L)
John Maynard Keynes 1912



Roger Fry 1913



David Garnett c. 1902

1920 saw a postwar reconstitution of the Bloomsbury Group, under the title of the Memoir Club, which as the name suggests focussed on self-writing, in the manner of Proust's A La Recherche, and inspired some of the more influential books of the 20th century. The Group, which had been scattered by the war, was reconvened by Mary ('Molly') MacCarthy who called them "Bloomsberries", and operated under rules derived from the Cambridge Apostles, an elite university debating society that a number of them had been members of. These rules emphasised candour and openness. Among the 125 memoirs presented, Virginia contributed three that were published posthumously in 1976, in the autobiographical anthology Moments of Being.^[211] These were 22 Hyde Park Gate (1921), Old Bloomsbury (1922) and Am I a Snob? (1936).^[212]