Saturday, June 8, 2013

The Roaring Twenties

"Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.”

So said F. Scott Fitzgerald, the American writer most commonly associated with The Jazz Age, whose Great Gatsby is often considered the first great American novel. It’s been almost a hundred years since The Roaring Twenties, and yet Americans still have a certain fascination with the time period.  Whether it’s flappers, bootleggers, the Charleston, the overall excess, or the sense of reckless abandon, we love to imagine what it was like to live in this time period.  Perhaps we wonder how it felt to believe that the possibilities in life were endless, without the knowledge of the inevitable crash looming just down the road.
This summer, Baz Luhrmann’s film adaptation of The Great Gatsby is giving modern audiences another glimpse into this fleeting, glittering era. Whether you’re a film buff or a book lover, the library has a whole slew of materials to slake your interest in this decade.

BOOKS

The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties ed. Teresa A. Carbone

Storybook Style: America's Whimsical Homes of the Twenties by Arrol Gellner

The American Twenties: A Literary Panorama ed. John K. Hutchens.  

Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties by Marion Meade.  

Readings on the Great Gatsby ed. Katie de Koster

Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex,Style, Celebrity and the Women who Made America Modern by Joshua Zeitz.   

The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period ed. Edmund Wilson   

The Twenties: Fords, Flappers, & Fanatics by George Mowry  

Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties by Lucy Moore

America and the Jazz Age: A History of the 1920s by Fon W. Boardman, Jr.
 

 FILMS

The Artist, Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 2011 Fiction Artist
Chicago Miramax Films, 2002 Fiction Chicago
The Great Gatsby, Paramount Pictures, 1974 Fiction Great
Midnight in Paris, Sony Pictures Classics, 2011, Fiction Midnight
Singin' in the Rain, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1952, Fiction Singin’

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