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Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's
Frederick Lewis Allen · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Hide books by the same authorOne Summer: America, 1927
Bill Bryson · 557 pages
Let our favourite writer of narrative non-fiction take you back to a summer when America came of age and changed the world for ever. In summer 1927, America had a booming stock market, a president who worked just four hours a day (and slept much of the rest), a devastating flood of the Mississippi, a sensational murder trial, and an unknown aviator named Charles Lindbergh who became the most fa
Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern
Joshua Zeitz · 345 pages
Blithely flinging aside the Victorian manners that kept her disapproving mother corseted, the New Woman of the 1920s puffed cigarettes, snuck gin, hiked her hemlines, danced the Charleston, and necked in roadsters. More important, she earned her own keep, controlled her own destiny, and secured liberties that modern women take for granted. Her newfound freedom heralded a radical change in American
Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940
D.J. Taylor · 353 pages
The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York
Deborah Blum · 327 pages
The untold story of how poison rocked Jazz Age New York City. A pair of forensic scientists began their trailblazing chemical detective work, fighting to end an era when untraceable poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime. Chief medical examiner Charles Norris and toxicologist Alexander Gettler investigate a family mysteriously stricken bald, factory workers with crumbling bones, a diner
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
Daniel Okrent · 468 pages
Okrent explores the origins, implementation, and failure of that great American delusion known as Prohibition. "Last Call" explains how Prohibition happened, what life under it was like, and what it did to the country.
The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers who Inspired Chicago
Douglas Perry · 585 pages
For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Chicago
Simon Baatz · 512 pages
It was a crime that shocked the nation, a brutal murder in Chicago in 1924 of a child, by two wealthy college students who killed solely for the thrill of the experience. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb had first met several years earlier, and their friendship had blossomed into a love affair. Both were intellectuals—too smart, they believed, for the police to catch them. However, the police had r
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby
Sarah Churchwell · 432 pages
" Tracing the genesis of a masterpiece, a Fitzgerald scholar follows the novelist as he begins work on The Great Gatsby. The autumn of 1922 found F. Scott Fitzgerald at the height of his fame, days from turning twenty-six years old, and returning to New York for the publication of his fourth book, Tales of the Jazz Age. A spokesman for America's carefree younger generation, Fitzgerald found a home
Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?
Marion Meade · 459 pages
Dorothy Parker was known for her outrageous one-liners, her ruthless theater criticism, her clever verses and bittersweet stories, but there was another side to Dorothy Parker--a private life, set on a course of destruction. She suffered through two divorces, a string of painful affairs, a lifelong problem with alcohol, and several suicide attempts. In this lively, absorbing biography, Marion Mea
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
David Grann · 352 pages
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was
Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City
Nelson Johnson · 284 pages
Examines the politcal rivalries and corrupt practices which led to the creation of Atlantic City, from it beginnings as a quiet beach town to its rise as thriving and lawless city during the Prohibition era to its establishment as a gambling and entertainment mecca.
Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin
Mel Gordon · 305 pages
"Weimar Berlin has been immortalized as the nastiest, wickedest, and most debauched place on earth. Novels, plays, and films have told the story of the erotic Mecca and its descent into Nazi rule. Voluptuous Panic, however, is the first book to actually document the madcap world of the sexual metropolis during the interwar years. Mel Gordon's detailed survey explores the lost paradise from the per
Empire of Deception: The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation
Dean Jobb · 336 pages
"It was a time of unregulated madness. And nowhere was it madder than in Chicago at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties. Speakeasies thrived, gang war shootings announced Al Capone's rise to underworld domination, Chicago's corrupt political leaders fraternized with gangsters, and yellow journalism only contributed to the excesses. The frenzy of stock market gambling was rampant. Enter a slick, smoot
Louise Brooks: A Biography
Barry Paris · 609 pages
No other movie actress made so strong an impact with so short a roster of films. Yet Louise Brooks spent a quarter of a century in oblivion before an unsought "resurrection" confirmed her place in cinema history and generated her brilliant second career as a writer-iconoclast. Her story begins in turn-of-the-century Kansas: at age ten, a seasoned performer; at fifteen, discovered by Ted Shawn and
Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises
Lesley M.M. Blume · 368 pages
"The making of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, the outsize personalities who inspired it, and the vast changes it wrought on the literary world. In the summer of 1925, Earnest Hemingway and a clique of raucous companions traveled to Pamplona, Spain, for the town's infamous running of the bulls. Then, over the next six weeks, he channeled that trip's maelstrom of drunken brawls, sexual rival
Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic that Remains One of Medicine's Greatest Mysteries
Molly Caldwell Crosby · 291 pages
Crosby, acclaimed author of "The American Plague," explores the frightening history of a long forgotten disease--sleeping sickness--and details the frantic effort to conquer it before it strikes again.
1959: The Year Everything Changed
Fred Kaplan · 322 pages
Acclaimed national security columnist and noted cultural critic Fred Kaplan looks past the 1960s to the year that really changed America While conventional accounts focus on the sixties as the era of pivotal change that swept the nation, Fred Kaplan argues that it was 1959 that ushered in the wave of tremendous cultural, political, and scientific shifts that would play out in the decades that fo
The Art of the English Murder: From Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock
Lucy Worsley · 336 pages
From Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes to the cosy crimes of the Golden Age, renowned historian Lucy Worsley explores the evolution of the traditional English murder―and reveals why we are so fascinated by this sinister subject.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Tom Wolfe · 416 pages
One of the most essential works on the 1960s counterculture, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Test is the seminal work on the hippie culture, a report on what it was like to follow along with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they launched out on the "Transcontinental Bus Tour" from the West Coast to New York, all the while introducing acid (then legal) to hundreds of like-minded folks, stagi