The 1920s have always held a glittery fascination to me, an era of great social change in the wake of the society-shattering events of the First World War and an almost literal tossing out the window of the values of the previous century. It was a turning point era when people started to think differently, almost the Twentieth Century’s rebellious teen phase if you will—women cut their hair and refused to look upon corsets again, the classes began to merge and mingle, jazz music caused a sensation, and of course the backdrop to all this was the Prohibition, America’s bright idea to rid themselves of the corruptive devil’s blood that was alcohol by banning it.
It was a time of shifting morals and changing attitudes, iconic for much of the western world, and thus it needed a writer to document and decode it.
And here enters F. Scott Fitzgerald, a typewriter before him, dry wit social commentary in one hand and rolling prose in the other, ready to fuse them together and create an elegant electrical storm that would be immortalised as the voice of the era. Continue reading
The Afictionado 