The Literature of the Jazz Age

   by Larry Carlson, Professor of English

In "Echoes of the Jazz Age" (1931), F. Scott Fitzgerald observed of the Twenties that "It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire." The truth of his observation is easily seen in the literature of the period. Fitzgerald's three collections of short stories—Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), and All the Sad Young Men (1926)—dramatize the exuberance and many of the excesses of the Roaring Twenties, particularly among youth, as do his three novels published during the decade—This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), and The Great Gatsby (1925).

The exuberance and rebellious spirit of the decade are also embodied in the stylistic experimentation and iconoclastic subject matter of modernist poets such as E. E. Cummings and playwrights such as Eugene O'Neill, two of many artists who flourished in the bohemian world of Greenwich Village, one of the lively intellectual centers of the Jazz Age.

Some of the most accomplished works of art produced during the Twenties focused on WWI. Several writers who served in the ambulance corps in France and Italy reflected their life-altering experiences in their short stories and novels. These books include Cummings' The Enormous Room (1922), John Dos Passos' One Man's Initiation (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921), and Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time (1925) and A Farewell to Arms (1929). With their gritty realism and insight into the horrible physical and psychological effects of twentieth-century combat, none of the writers glorified the war.

Following The Great War, a number of writers left the United States to live in the socially and artistically liberating world of Paris. The expatriate experience of what Gertrude Stein (in)famously dubbed "The Lost Generation" is captured memorably in Hemingway's classic novel The Sun Also Rises (1926). Important memoirs of literary life in Paris during the Twenties include Hemingway's posthumous A Moveable Feast (1964), Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (1934), and Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle's Being Genuises Together 1920-1930 (1938,1968).

Women and African Americans also became significant literary voices that were heard in the era. Edna St. Vincent Millay's poetry and Zelda Fitzgerald's novel Save Me the Waltz (1932), for instance, evidence the struggles of women to find their own personal and artistic identities in the decade that began with the passage of the landmark Nineteenth Amendment. The Harlem Renaissance witnessed the many artistic achievements of African American writers (see the related essay on this web site).

Some writers used the power of the pen to expose the less attractive aspects of American culture. In the pages of The American Mercury, which he edited, and in his six-volume collection Prejudices (1919-1927), journalist and critic H. L. Mencken lampooned politicians, Rotarians, prohibitionists, fundamentalists, sentimentalists (full of "the bilge of idealism"), and the gullible middle class, whom he regarded as the "booboisie." Religious charlatanism, bigotry, and hypocrisy became the subject of Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry (1927), a novel inspired in part by the tremendous popularity of evangelists such as Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, and former baseball player Billy Sunday, the latter's revival campaigns said to have converted over 1,000,000 souls.

Even darker views of the Twenties, especially its xenophobia, nativism, and bourgeois obsession with materialism, are found in Lewis's Babbitt (1922), which satirizes the "average" businessman, and Dos Passos' The Big Money (1936), the concluding novel in his epic trilogy U.S.A. Lewis clearly saw—and regretted—that the businessman was becoming America's new "hero." As President Coolidge remarked, "The business of America is business."1

Of special note in The Big Money is Dos Passos' treatment of the nearly decade-long controversial trial of the Italian immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti, a cause célèbre that for many politically and socially conscious Americans symbolized the woeful disparity between the promise and reality of American freedom and justice for all. In one of the most despairing sections of The Big Money, focusing on the execution of the two anarchists in 1927, Dos Passos wrote, "All right we are two nations."

Like their predecessors in the 1850s and 1890s, two other periods of exceptional literary creativity, American writers in the 1920s published a quantitatively and qualitatively remarkable body of literature. Their fiction, poetry, and plays truly illuminate the cultural complexities of the decade and provide many fine examples of literary modernism in the United States.2

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Notes

1. A telling link between religion and the cult of business can be seen in the phenomenal success of Bruce Barton's The Man Nobody Knows (1925), which was the nation's best-selling non-fiction book for 1925 and 1926. Barton contended that Jesus Christ, far from being meek and mild, was a rugged "outdoor man," an exemplary executive, the "founder of modern business" who "picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world." Christ's parables, Barton pointed out, were "the most powerful advertisements of all times."

2. For a quite readable history of the political, social, and cultural life of the Twenties, see Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday. Originally published in 1931, it has since been reissued and is available in paperback in the general reading section of the College Book Store.