1. F Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby and The Roaring Twenties

2. The Roaring Twenties
The decade of the twenties is often referred to as the “ Jazz Age’. However, the term has much as much to do with the jazzy atmosphere of the time as with the music.

3. Jazz
Prohibition brought many jazz musicians north from New Orleans to Chicago and New York.
Jazz became the soundtrack of rebellion for a younger generation

4. Jazz Style & Fashion
Flappers were typical young girls of the twenties, usually with bobbed hair, short skirts, rolled stockings, and powdered knees.
They danced the night away doing the Charleston and the Black Bottom.

5. Jazzy Talk -Twenties Slang
All Wet - wrong
Bee’s Knees - a superb person
Big Cheese -an important person
Bump Off - to murder
Dumb Dora - a stupid girl
Flat Tire - a dull, boring person
Gam - a girls leg
Hooch - bootleg liquor
Hoofer - chorus girl
Torpedo - a hired gunman

6. Symphonic Jazz and Gatsby
George Gershwin wrote both classical and popular music
He was the first composer to combine jazz and classical music with Rhapsody in Blue in1924
Was this Vladimir Tostoff’s “Jazz History of the World”?

7. Lifestyles and fashions of the 1920s
No more Victorian Values
Flappers
Collegiate Students
Independent women
Gaiety
Increasing wealth
Social mobility
Alcohol consumption

8. Prohibition The Volstead Act 18th Amendment (1919) Bootleggers
Sold, bought, consumed alcohol.
Gangsters and organized crime

9. Media and Technology The Automobile Mass Media
the car is available to many
Mass Media
Magazines and literacy
Reader’s Digest
Time
Radios and advertising
New forms of narrative
Movie - “talkies” e.g. The Jazz Singer

10. F Scott Fitzgerald From prominent American stock
Attended Princeton but left without graduating
Missed WWI
Met Zelda but couldn’t afford to marry her
Published This Side of Paradise in 1920 at the age of 24: instant stardom
Wrote “money-making” popular fiction for most of his life, mainly for the New York Post: $4000 a story (which equates to about $50,000 today)
He and Zelda were associated with high living of the Jazz Age

11. Fitzgerald cont’d
Wrote what is considered his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, in Europe in
Zelda becomes mentally unstable
Moved to Hollywood as a screen writer
Dies almost forgotten aged 45
Zelda perished in a mental hospital fire in 1948
Only became a “literary great” in the 1960s

12. Literature of the 1920s
Authors wrote about their personal lives as something “knowable”.
Gatsby contains a great deal of autobiographical material and references to the 1920s.
Fitzgerald was also influenced by Modernist theories about art.