The Roaring Twenties

The Roaring Twenties brought with them new radical changes in American lifestyle. The women were given the right to vote, and used the new opportunities that opened for them in employment. Life of a working woman demanded a change of clothing and hairstyle; the uncomfortable corset disappeared, skirts became shorter to allow a quicker pace, and hair was bobbed (cut very short) to spend less time on it in the morning of a working day.

Business boomed, hedonism flourished. Politicians tried to return the general public to traditional values, but seldom succeeded. The infamous Prohibition Law formally forbade alcohol trade and usage, but in fact it only gave rise to a huge network of speak-easies (illegal bars), that featured both alcohol and new music, jazz and blues. It was also a beginning to organized crime, which controlled bootlegging (illegal trade in alcohol).

Just as some novelists are associated with the regions of which they write, others are associated with the times of which they seem to be the spokesmen. Among them is Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) whose works, including the masterpiece, The Great Gatsby (1925), helped create the image of the Roaring Twenties, the age of the flapper, and the jazz age.

Fitzgerald was the leading writer of America's Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, and one of its glittering heroes. He was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and, despite financial shortage, attended Princeton University. There Fitzgerald wrote amateur musical comedies, met the gilded elite, and acquired the taste for the refined and fashionable. Fitzgerald had to leave Princeton in 1917 without a degree and put on the fashionable uniform of an army lieutenant, though he was never sent to fight in Europe. After the end of the First World War, he stayed in Paris and became one of the whole Lost Generation of writers, named so by Gertrude Steine, referring to the fact that many young people who went to the 1^st World War lost their American ideals there and at the same time America lost many talented young writers who did not wish to come to their small-town provincial home.

The chief quality of Fitzgerald's talent was his ability to be both a leading participant in the high life he described, and a detached observer of it. Few readers saw the serious side of Fitzgerald, and he was not generally recognized as a gifted writer during his lifetime. While he lived, most readers considered his stories a chronicle and even a celebration of moral decline. But later readers realized that Fitzgerald's works have a deeper moral theme. Years later, Fitzgerald remarked that he would have continued writing musicals, but, " I am too much a moralist at heart, and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than entertain them. "

Fitzgerald won fame and fortune at 24, for his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920). It is an immature work but was the first novel to anticipate the pleasure-seeking 'lost' generation of the Roaring Twenties. He describes them as men who had ' grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken. ' Two concerns filled their lives: ' the fear of poverty and the worship of success. ' A similar novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1921), and two collections of short stories, Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), increased his popularity.

The famous Great Gatsby (1925) was less popular than Fitzgerald's early works, but it was his masterpiece and the first of three successive novels that give him lasting literary importance. The lively yet deeply moral novel centers around Jay Gatsby, a wealthy bootlegger. Gatsby symbolizes American belief that money can buy love and happiness. He tries to change the hard material world into the world of his fantasy, but fails. The novel presents a penetrating criticism of the moral emptiness Fitzgerald saw in wealthy American society of the 1920s and at the same time it is really beautiful.

During the 1920s Fitzgerald wrote an enormous amount of fiction that provided money for his all-night parties and wild trips to Europe. He used the experience in his next novel, Tender Is the Night (1934), a beautifully written but disjointed account of the general decline of a few glamorous Americans in Europe. The book failed, because it was written long after the Jazz Age had finished and the readers were no longer interested in Jazz Age parties. Fitzgerald spent his last years as a scriptwriter in Hollywood and died before completing The Last Tycoon (1941), a novel about Hollywood life.

Critics generally agree that Fitzgerald's early success damaged his personal life and marred his literary production. This success led to extravagant living and a need for a large income. It probably contributed to Fitzgerald's alcoholism and the mental breakdown of his wife, Zelda. The success also probably led to his physical and spiritual collapse, which he described frankly in the long essay The Crack-Up (1936). A few years after his death, his books won him the recognition he had desired while alive.

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