The Roaring Twenties

Elements of Modernism

• Emphasis on bold experimentation in style and form
• Rejection of traditional themes and values
• Sense of disillusionment and loss of American dream
• Rejection of the ideal of a hero as infallible
• Interest in the inner workings of the human mind

Modern Art

& Poetry

Piet Mondrian

Composition in Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930

George Braque

Violin and Candlestick, 1910

Wassily Kandinsky

On White II, 1923

The Roaring Twenties

• The American Dream ultimately failed, however, as a result of the war and the following economic depression.
• People became less optimistic and increasingly cynical.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Born Francis Scott Fitzgerald in 1896 to a relatively rich family in St. Paul, MN.
• He was a failure in school and sports but an excellent daydream and writer.
• He entered Princeton in 1913, writing for several clubs and for himself.

The Roaring Twenties: Art and Culture

• Also during this time, the literary center of American culture shifted from New England to the Mid-West, South, and West.
• Two new intellectual movement appeared: Marxism and psychoanalysis.
• Stream of consciousness literary techniques began to appear.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Shortly after this period of his life, his first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published.
• His second novel, The Great Gatsby, was published in 1926.
• The novel was a financial disappointment for the Fitzgeralds.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

• He entered WWI in 1917 but was never deployed.
• While station in Camp Sheridan in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre whom he would later marry.
• Both "hungered for new experiences." The couple lived in France briefly.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

• After 1926, the Fitzgerald's finances and health began to dwindle.
• Zelda was in and out of asylums after having a mental breakdown, which were made worse by her husband.
• F. Scott began to write scripts for Hollywood and mediocre short stories for money.
• While writing The Last Tycoon, he died of a heart attack in 1940.

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

Midnight in Paris, 2011

The Roaring Twenties

The Jazz Age

The Roaring Twenties

• Many Modern artists sought to "make it new."
• This impulse accounts for the innovations in literature during this time.

The Roaring Twenties

• "Postwar writers became skeptical of the New English Puritan tradition and the gentility that had been central to the literary ideal."
• Many Americans were not directly involved in the war -- Hemingway, for example.
• Still, they wrote what they experienced as a result of the war.

Questions?

The Roaring Twenties

• This literature reacted against the previous movement: Victorianism (1837-1901).
• Victorian literature focused on the middle-class worker, morals, and the merit of virtue.
• For the most part, Modernist literature reacts against those beliefs.

The Roaring Twenties

• Began in the early 1920's after the first Great War, WWI.
• Was affected by Modernism, a cultural and artistic movement
• "WWI was a turning point in American life, marking a loss of innocence and a strong disillusionment with tradition."

The Jazz Age

• Apart from the classic Modernist authors, America also gained many new and now famous authors.
• Poets: Robinson, Frost, Masters, etc...
• Harlem Renaissance Authors: Dunbar, Johnson, McKay, Hughes, Cullen, etc...
• Western and Southern Literature: Jeffers, Cather, Roethke, Cather, Lowell, and Faulkner

The Fitzgerald Family in 1925

F. Scott, Frances, and Zelda

The Roaring Twenties

• Literature of this time also responded to the "American Dream."
• 3 Main Points of the American Dream
• American = New Eden
• Optimism of the American people
• The self-reliant individual
• Largely attributed to Emerson and transcendental thought.

_Nude Descending a Staircase_

Marcel Duchamp, 1912

The Roaring Twenties

• "The Jazz Age at home was racy and unconventional. The same decade of the 1920's witnessed the flight of many American authors to an expatriate life abroad, especially in France."
• Americans began to think of other places as exotic.
• This wave of "expats" further signaled the failure of the American Dream.

The Roaring Twenties

• "In 1919, the Constitution was amended to prohibit the manufacture and sale of alcohol, which was singled out as a central social evil."
• This is the Prohibition era. Flappers, bootleggers, jazz music, and gangsters began to appear.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald named this period _The Jazz Age_.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

1869-1940

The Roaring Twenties

• "Disillusionment is a major [topic] in the fiction of the time."
• The Modernist authors of this time contributed heavily to the body of Western literature.
• Examples: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot, Stein, Joyce, and Millay.
• Imagist and Symbolist poetry began to develop.