Jazz Age

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The Jazz Age, describes the period of the 1920s, the years between the end of World War I and the start of the Great Depression, particularly in North America and (in the era's literature) specifically in New York City, largely coinciding with the Roaring Twenties; ending with the rise of the Great Depression, the traditional values of this age saw great decline while the American stock market soared. The focus of the elements of this age, in some contrast with the Roaring Twenties, in historical and cultural studies, are somewhat different, with a greater emphasis on all Modernism.

The age takes its name from F. Scott Fitzgerald and jazz music, which saw a tremendous surge in popularity among many segments of society. Among the prominent concerns and trends of the period are the public embrace of technological developments (typically seen as progress)—cars, air travel and the telephone—as well as new modernist trends in social behavior, the arts, and culture. Central developments included Art Deco design and architecture. A great theme of the age was individualism and a greater emphasis on the pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment in the wake of the misery, destruction and perceived hypocrisy and waste of WWI and pre-war values.

The Jazz Age in Literature

Perhaps one of the most representative literary work of the age is American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1920), which highlighted what some describe as the decadence and hedonism of the post-WW1 age, as well as new social and sexual attitudes, and the growth of individualism. Fitzgerald is largely credited with coining the term, which he used in such books as "Tales of the Jazz Age." The second novel that he wrote, "The Beautiful and Damned" (1922), also deals with the era and its effect on a young married couple. Fitzgerald's last completed novel, "Tender Is the Night," takes place in the same decade but is set in France and Switzerland not New York, and consequently is not widely considered a Jazz Age novel per se.

Additional works on the Jazz Age might include Thomas Wolfe's titanic 1935 book "Of Time and the River," which takes its protagonist from the depths of the Carolinas, to Harvard, and finally to New York in the 1920s, but for a truly harrowing view of the end of the Jazz Age, Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again" is recommended for its party scene on the night of the 1929 stock market crash. Additionally, The Rosy Crucifixion of Henry Miller, "Sexus (The Rosy Crucifixion)," "Plexus (The Rosy Crucifixion)," and "Nexus (The Rosy Crucifixion)," is set in New York during this period.

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