THE JAZZ AGE

The Jazz Age was a period in the 1920s, ending with the Great Depression, in which jazz music and dance styles became popular, mainly in the United States, but also in Britain, France and elsewhere. Jazz originated in New Orleans as a fusion of African and European music and played a significant part in wider cultural changes in this period, and its influence on pop culture continued long afterwards. Read here.

In the 1920s America – known as the Jazz Age, the Golden Twenties or the Roaring Twenties – everybody seemed to have money.  Read here.

F. Scott Fitzgerald coined the phrase "the Jazz Age" to describe the flamboyant (=showy, ostentatious)  era that emerged in America after World War I. 

He is credited with coining the phrase “The Jazz Age” in the title of his 1922 collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age. He also became its effervescent chronicler in his early novels This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), along with another short story collection, Flappers and Philosophers (1920).  Published in 1925, The Great Gatsby was the quintessence of this period of his work, and evoked the romanticism and surface allure of his “Jazz Age” — years that began with the end of World War I, the advent of woman’s suffrage, and Prohibition, and collapsed with the Great Crash of 1929 — years awash in bathtub gin and roars of generational rebellion. The Twenties’ beat was urban and staccato (=characterised by performance in which the notes   are abruptly disconnected): out went genteel social dancing; in came the Charleston. Everything moved: cars, planes, even moving pictures. Hair was bobbed, and cigarettes were the new diet fad.  Read here.