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.
Contents
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Echoes of the Jazz Age" [1]
"Echoes of the Jazz Age" is a short essay by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald that was first published in Scribner's Magazine in November 1931. [2] [3] The essay analyzes the societal conditions in the United States which gave rise to the raucous historical era known as the Jazz Age and the subsequent events which led to the era's abrupt conclusion. The frequently anthologized essay represents an extended critique by Fitzgerald of 1920s hedonism and is regarded as one of Fitzgerald's finest non-fiction works. [4] [5]
The essay's contents reflect a number of Fitzgerald's opinions previously expressed in newspaper interviews. [6] Fitzgerald had publicly rejected the argument that the meaningless destruction of World War I spawned the Jazz Age. [7] Fitzgerald also did not believe the war affected the morality of younger Americans. [7] [8] He likewise rejected other popular claims that either Prohibition in the United States or the advent of motion pictures corrupted the morals of American youths. [9]
Fitzgerald's essay instead posits various technological innovations and cultural trends as fostering the societal conditions which typified the Jazz Age. [9] He attributes the era's sexual revolution to a combination of both Sigmund Freud's sexual theories gaining salience among young Americans and the invention of the automobile allowing youths to escape parental surveillance. [10] Echoing Voltaire's belief that novels influence social behavior, [11] Fitzgerald cites the literary works by E. M. Hull, D. H. Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall, and others as influencing Americans to question their sexual norms. [12] [8]
In the essay, Fitzgerald makes a critical and much overlooked distinction between contemporary generations. [13] In contrast to the older Lost Generation to which Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway belonged, [14] Fitzgerald notes the Jazz Age generation were those Americans younger than himself who had been adolescents during World War I and were largely untouched by the conflict's psychological and material horrors. [15] [16] It was this hedonistic younger generation—and not the Lost Generation—which riveted the nation's attention upon their leisure activities and sparked a societal debate over their perceived immorality. [17] [18] After Fitzgerald's death in 1940, critic Edmund Wilson collected the essay in the 1945 anthology The Crack-Up . [1]
Following the unexpected success of his debut novel This Side of Paradise (1920), a 23-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald became one of the most celebrated novelists of the Jazz Age. Living in luxury and opulence at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City, [19] many famous persons sought his personal acquaintanceship, and he became close friends with the cultural elite of the period. [20]
At the peak of his commercial success and cultural salience, Fitzgerald recalled traveling in a taxi one afternoon through the streets of New York City and weeping when he realized he that he would never be as happy again. [21] During this period, the zeitgeist of the Jazz Age "bore him up, flattered him and gave him more money than he had dreamed of, simply for telling people that he felt as they did, that something had to be done with all the nervous energy stored up and unexpended in the war." [22]
With the onset of Great Depression in 1929, Fitzgerald experienced a dramatic reversal of fortune. [23] Once favorable critics now deemed his literary output to be elitist and out-of-touch. [23] As writer Budd Schulberg later recalled, "my generation thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald as an age rather than a writer, and when the economic stroke of 1929 began to change the sheiks [lower-alpha 1] and flappers into unemployed boys or underpaid girls, we consciously and a little belligerently turned our backs on Fitzgerald". [26]
With his book royalties declining precipitously and his short stories no longer selling as easily to slick magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire amid the economic downturn, [27] Fitzgerald was keenly aware that one historical era had ended and another begun. [28] "The Jazz Age is over," Fitzgerald wrote despondently to his editor and friend Max Perkins in May 1931 while abroad in Europe. [29]
Perkins knew that Fitzgerald had popularized the phrase "Jazz Age" via the publication of his 1922 story anthology Tales of the Jazz Age , and he believed Fitzgerald's insights about the now bygone era worthy of more consideration. [29] Perkins suggested that Fitzgerald should write at least one article reflecting upon and eulogizing the era—some kind of "an elegy that would remind the public of his previous cultural influence as a writer and simultaneously fix a point in his mind from which he could begin a new phase of [literary] career". [28]
At the request of Perkins, managing editor Alfred "Fritz" Dashiell of Scribner's Magazine wrote Fitzgerald and pressed him to contribute the retrospective about the era. [2] [30] "There is no one more qualified to sound its knell," Dashiell declared. [31] Fitzgerald could not initially commit himself to the assignment, but he could not put it out of his mind. [31]
After further pressure by Perkins to jot down a short essay that would serve as a retrospective of both the preceding era and his own life as the era's most famous chronicler, [28] Fitzgerald drafted the essay while in Switzerland and while his wife Zelda Fitzgerald underwent voluntary psychiatric treatment in a nearby sanatorium. [31] [32]
As he had already spoken at length about the so-called Jazz Age in numerous newspaper interviews throughout the 1920s, Fitzgerald's final essay recycled many of these same opinions which he had expressed nearly a decade earlier. [6]
The ten-year period that, as if reluctant to die outmoded in its bed, leaped to a spectacular death in October, 1929, began about the time of the May Day riots in 1919.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Echoes of the Jazz Age" [22]
Fitzgerald opens the essay by positing that the historical era known as Jazz Age began in the spring of 1919. [22] In contrast to social conservatives and isolationist politicians who insisted that World War I spawned the Jazz Age, [6] Fitzgerald instead pinpoints the 1919 May Day Riots as the actual starting point when young Americans read newspaper accounts of how mounted police officers brutally suppressed peaceful veterans. [22] The excessive use of force by police officers against the demobilized war veterans triggered a wave of cynicism among younger Americans, and they questioned whether their country was any better than the despotic regimes in southern Europe. [22] Due to this resulting cynicism proliferating among American youth, "it was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all." [1]
Although Fitzgerald pinpoints the Jazz Age as beginning in Spring 1919, he asserts that the societal transformations which occurred had their roots as far back as 1915 before the country had formally entered World War I. [1] During this earlier period, the avant-garde sexual theories espoused by psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung became vogue among the younger generation of Americans. [33] The result was that American women wondered whether or not they had a fulfilling sex life and pursued remedies accordingly. [33] [34] Simultaneously, many parents purchased automobiles for young American men in an attempt to make them "self-reliant." [1] Amorous couples used the privacy of these new automobiles to engage in kissing and petting. [13] Soon after, the automobiles began to be used by unchaperoned couples for the express purpose of premarital sex. [13] At this point, Fitzgerald contends, "the veil finally fell—the Jazz Age was in flower." [13]
Scarcely had the staider citizens of the republic caught their breaths when the wildest of all generations, the generation which had been adolescent during the confusion of the War, brusquely shouldered my contemporaries out of the way and danced into the limelight. This was the generation whose girls dramatized themselves as flappers...
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Echoes of the Jazz Age" [13]
Due to the above confluence of technological innovations and cultural trends, Fitzgerald argues that Prohibition in the United States had no effect whatsoever on the libertinism of the Jazz Age and claims the rampant hedonism would have occurred regardless. [13] Rejecting yet another popular argument, Fitzgerald insists that 1920s cinema had very little influence on the creation of the Jazz Age. [12] Fitzgerald mentions Clara Bow's films and Colleen Moore's now lost film Flaming Youth (1923) as the only films worthy of note, [12] but he cautions that the ingravescent film censorship prevented contemporary motion pictures from accurately reflecting the libertine values of the era which had been already salient in popular novels. [35]
Echoing Voltaire's belief that books have a dominant influence on social behavior, [11] Fitzgerald ascribes the blithe spirit of the Jazz Age to the literary works of the period. [36] Novels such as E. M. Hull's The Sheik (1919), Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Samuel Hopkins Adams's Flaming Youth (1923), D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), and others reflected a gradual realization by society that neither premarital sex nor extramarital sex is harmful. [36] Fitzgerald also implies a greater acceptance of homosexual relations in literature with the publication of Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). [12]
Fitzgerald notes that the younger American generation which defined the Jazz Age was not the Lost Generation—to which he and Ernest Hemingway belonged [14] —but their precocious younger peers who had been adolescent during World War I. [13] This younger generation, whose bob-haired women would later be described by newspapers as "flappers," [lower-alpha 2] became the actual luminaries of the era, and the older Lost Generation merely imitated the wild behavior of their younger siblings. [1]
As the riotous era known as the Jazz Age progressed, the middle-aged and elderly adults of the Gilded Age generation imitated the insouciance of their younger cohorts with the result of "a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure." [13] Although the economic depression of 1920–1921 had initially hampered the giddiness of the period, the subsequent economic largesse which followed in the mid-1920s accelerated the frenzied hedonism, and "the Jazz Age now raced along under its own power, served by great filling stations full of money." [33]
With the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Fitzgerald mused that "the most expensive orgy in history was [now] over." [41] By 1931, a mere two years into the Great Depression, the carefree era known as the Jazz Age now seemed as distant to economically-impoverished Americans as the antebellum period before World War I. [41] Fitzgerald deems this outcome as inevitable since the bygone era had existed on "borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand dukes and the casualness of chorus girls." [41] After recognizing the inevitability of the era's abrupt end, Fitzgerald concludes the essay with a wistful coda about lost opportunities and lost youth: [42]
"Sometimes, though, there is a ghostly rumble among the drums, an asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swings me back into the early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you didn't want to know said "Yes, we have no bananas," and it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were—and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more."
The publication of Fitzgerald's essay in November 1931 by Scribner's Magazine sparked critical reflection about the abrupt end of the carefree 1920s. [43] Contemporary reception by critics proved mixed. The Minneapolis Star interpreted Fitzgerald's essay to mean "that the raucous blatancy of jazz has been supplanted by the dulcet strains of violin music, that hip-flanks are no longer toted by thrill-hunting youngsters, that the emphasis on long skirts and rounded silhouettes in women's styles has come a more measured and cultivated mode of living." [44]
Fitzgerald biographer Arthur Mizener wrote in 1951 that the essay amounted to an extended critique by Fitzgerald of the United States during the presidencies of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. As a social conservative, Mizener selectively highlighted passages by Fitzgerald which stated that "good instincts, honor, courtesy, and courages" as well as those "eternal necessary human values" were inadequately provided by the hedonistic Twenties. [5] Zelda's biographer Nancy Milford posited that "Echoes of the Jazz Age" and Fitzgerald's other essay "My Lost City" represented efforts by Fitzgerald "to come to terms with the heady glamour of his past. Emotions of loss, of time and feeling unrecapturable, infused his writing." [3]
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.
Zelda Fitzgerald was an American novelist, painter, playwright, and socialite. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, to a wealthy Southern family, she became locally famous for her beauty and high spirits. In 1920, she married writer F. Scott Fitzgerald after the popular success of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise. The novel catapulted the young couple into the public eye, and she became known in the national press as the first American flapper. Due to their wild antics and incessant partying, she and her husband became regarded in the newspapers as the enfants terribles of the Jazz Age. Alleged infidelity and bitter recriminations soon undermined their marriage. After traveling abroad to Europe, Zelda's mental health deteriorated, and she had suicidal and homicidal tendencies which required psychiatric care. Her doctors diagnosed Zelda with schizophrenia, although later posthumous diagnoses posit bipolar disorder.
Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald was an American writer and journalist and the only child of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. She matriculated from Vassar College and worked for The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and other publications. She became a prominent member of the Democratic Party.
Matthew Joseph Bruccoli was an American professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He was the preeminent expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also wrote about other writers, notably Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and John O'Hara, and was editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
Save Me the Waltz is a 1932 novel by American writer Zelda Fitzgerald. It is a semi-autobiographical account of her life in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era and her marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald. The novel recounts the lives of Jazz Age hedonists Alabama Beggs and her husband David Knight, thinly-disguised alter-egos of their real-life counterparts. An aging Alabama aspires to become a prima ballerina, but an infected blister from her pointe shoe leads to blood poisoning, forever ending her dreams of fame.
This Side of Paradise is the debut novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1920. It examines the lives and morality of carefree American youth at the dawn of the Jazz Age. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is an attractive middle-class student at Princeton University who dabbles in literature and engages in a series of romances with flappers. The novel explores the theme of love warped by greed and status-seeking, and takes its title from a line of Rupert Brooke's poem Tiare Tahiti.
Tender Is the Night is the fourth and final novel completed by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in French Riviera during the twilight of the Jazz Age, the 1934 novel chronicles the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist, and his wife, Nicole, who is one of his patients. The story mirrors events in the lives of the author and his wife Zelda Fitzgerald as Dick starts his descent into alcoholism and Nicole struggles with mental illness.
The Beautiful and Damned is a 1922 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in New York City, the novel's plot follows a young artist Anthony Patch and his flapper wife Gloria Gilbert who become "wrecked on the shoals of dissipation" while excessively partying at the dawn of the hedonistic Jazz Age. As Fitzgerald's second novel, the work focuses upon the swinish behavior and glittering excesses of the American social elite in the heyday of New York's café society.
"Head and Shoulders" is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was his first story to be published in the Saturday Evening Post, with the help of Fitzgerald's agent, Harold Ober. The story appeared in the February 21, 1920 issue and was illustrated by Charles D. Mitchell. It later appeared in his short story collection Flappers and Philosophers.
Jay Gatsby is the titular fictional character of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The character is an enigmatic nouveau riche millionaire who lives in a luxurious mansion on Long Island where he often hosts extravagant parties and who allegedly gained his fortune by illicit bootlegging during prohibition in the United States. Fitzgerald based many details about the fictional character on Max Gerlach, a mysterious neighbor and World War I veteran whom the author met in New York during the raucous Jazz Age. Like Gatsby, Gerlach threw lavish parties, never wore the same shirt twice, used the phrase "old sport", claimed to be educated at Oxford University, and fostered myths about himself, including that he was a relation of the German Kaiser.
"The Ice Palace" is a modernist short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published in The Saturday Evening Post on May 22, 1920. It is one of eight short stories originally published in Fitzgerald's first collection, Flappers and Philosophers, and is also included in the collection Babylon Revisited and Other Stories.
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) is a collection of eleven short stories by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Divided into three separate parts, it includes one of his better-known short stories, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button". All of the stories had first appeared, independently, in either Metropolitan Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Smart Set, Collier's, the Chicago Sunday Tribune, or Vanity Fair.
Daisy Fay Buchanan is a fictional character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The character is a wealthy socialite from Louisville, Kentucky who resides in the fashionable town of East Egg on Long Island during the Jazz Age. She is narrator Nick Carraway's second cousin, once removed, and the wife of polo player Tom Buchanan, with whom she has a daughter. Before marrying Tom, Daisy had a romantic relationship with Jay Gatsby. Her choice between Gatsby and Tom is one of the novel's central conflicts. She was described by Fitzgerald as a "golden girl".
Nick Carraway is a fictional character and narrator in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The character is a Yale University alumnus from the American Midwest, a World War I veteran, and a newly arrived resident of West Egg on Long Island, near New York City. He is a bond salesman and the neighbor of enigmatic millionaire Jay Gatsby. He facilitates a sexual affair between Gatsby and Nick's second cousin, once removed, Daisy Buchanan which becomes one of the novel's central conflicts. Carraway is easy-going and optimistic, although this latter quality fades as the novel progresses. After witnessing the callous indifference and insouciant hedonism of the idle rich during the riotous Jazz Age, he ultimately chooses to leave the eastern United States forever and returns to the Midwest.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age—a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Ginevra King Pirie was an American socialite and heiress. As one of the self-proclaimed "Big Four" debutantes of Chicago during World War I, King inspired many characters in the novels and short stories of Jazz Age writer F. Scott Fitzgerald; in particular, the character of Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. A 16-year-old King met an 18-year-old Fitzgerald at a sledding party in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and they shared a passionate romance from 1915 to 1917.
"The Offshore Pirate" is a short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1920. It is one of eight short stories included in Fitzgerald's first published collection, Flappers and Philosophers. The story was first published in the May 29, 1920 issue of The Saturday Evening Post and illustrated by Leslie L. Benson.
"The Rich Boy" is a short story by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was included in his 1926 collection All the Sad Young Men. "The Rich Boy" originally appeared in two parts, in the January and February 1926 issues of Redbook. In the January installment, the story is described on the front cover as: "A great story of today's youth by F. Scott Fitzgerald".
Max von Gerlach was an American racketeer and an acquaintance of American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. After serving as an officer in the American Expeditionary Force during World War I, Gerlach became a gentleman bootlegger who operated speakeasies on behalf of gambler Arnold Rothstein in New York City. Gerlach's bootlegging activities soon made him a millionaire.
Andrew Winchester Turnbull was an American biographer, scholar, and essayist who wrote acclaimed biographies of novelists F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Turnbull grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and first met Fitzgerald when the author lived on his family's property in the 1930s. After graduating Princeton University and serving in the United States Navy during World War II, Turnbull obtained his doctorate from Harvard University. He taught literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brown University. He committed suicide at age 48.
Alfred Sheppard Dashiell, former managing editor of Scribner's Magazine... In 1923 he joined Scribner's as an assistant editor. He served as managing editor from 11930 to 1936 and published early fiction by Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, among other new writers.
The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Volume 2 (1965)