“Fitzgerald’s characters are more than the sum of their own experiences: they constitute America itself as it moves into the Jazz Age.”
From Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the Twenties by Ronald Berman
I Like History- A Lot.
An eclectic collection of history facts and tidbits
“The 1920s were disintegrative. It was widely recognized that beliefs no longer rested on solid foundations, religious or secular, but novelists dealt with nature of beliefs. God, church, doctrine, ritual, and observance appear in the work of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, but in such a way as to let us know that something has happened to all of these entities.”
From Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the Twenties by Ronald Berman
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Always in motion, Gatsby is intended to remind us of qualities praised not only by novelists but also by those who believed that in order to have a moral life one had first to have great energy, concentrated will, and high resolution. Against the language of this passage, we need to poise the language describing others. They are sensed through terms of indolence, inertia, withdrawal, and even paralysis.
— Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the Twenties by Ronald Berman
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Grotesque or not, vaudeville represents a throwing away of self-consciousness, of Plymouth Rock caution, devoutly to be wished for. Here we countenance the extreme, we encourage idiosyncrasy. The dancer or comedian is, sometimes literally, egged on to develop originality; he is adored, never crucified for difference.
— Mary Cass Canfield, 1922
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