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Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940
D.J. Taylor · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorFlapper: 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
One 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
Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's
Frederick Lewis Allen
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
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 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
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
The Girls of Murder City: Fame, Lust, and the Beautiful Killers who Inspired Chicago
Douglas Perry · 585 pages
Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone
John Kobler · 409 pages
Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties
Marion Meade · 340 pages
In her exuberant new work, BOBBED HAIR AND BATHTUB GIN, Marion Meade presents a portrait of four extraordinary writers--Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edna Ferber--whose loves, lives, and literary endeavors embodied the spirit of the 1920s. Capturing the jazz rhythms and desperate gaiety that defined the era, Meade gives us Parker, Fitzgerald, Millay, and Ferber, tr
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
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
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.
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
Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation
Judith Mackrell · 488 pages
The forefront British dance critic and award-nominated author of Bloomsbury Ballerina presents a revisionist assessment of the movement that shattered the boundaries of conventional femininity through the lives of six figures that exemplified it, including Lady Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Tallulah Bankhead, Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker and Tamara de Lempicka. Glamorised, mythologised and dem
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald · 416 pages
"Through his alcoholism and her mental illness, his career lows and her institutional confinement, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's devotion to each other endured for more than twenty-two years. Here now, for the first time, is the story of their love in the couple's own letters. Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda consists of more than 75 percent previously unpublished or out-of-print letters as well as ext
The Bolter: Idina Sackville - The Woman Who Scandalised 1920s Society And Became White Mischief's Infamous Seductress
Frances Osborne · 320 pages
She was irresistible. She inspired fiction, fantasy, legend, and art.Some say she was "the Bolter" of Nancy Mitford's novel The Pursuit of Love. She "played" Iris Storm in Michael Arlen's celebrated novel about fashionable London's lost generation, The Green Hat, and Greta Garbo played her in A Woman of Affairs, the movie made from Arlen's book. She was painted by Orpen; photographed by Beaton; sh
Paris Without End: The True Story of Hemingway's First Wife
Gioia Diliberto · 336 pages
Hadley Richardson and Ernest Hemingway were the golden couple of Paris in the twenties, the center of an expatriate community boasting the likes of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and James and Nora Joyce. In this haunting account of the young Hemingways, Gioia Diliberto explores their passionate courtship, their family life in Paris with baby Bumby, and their thril
Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay
Nancy Milford · 550 pages
Thirty years after the smashing success of Zelda, Nancy Milford returns with a stunning second act. Savage Beauty is the portrait of a passionate, fearless woman who obsessed American ever as she tormented herself.If F. Scott Fitzgerald was the hero of the Jazz Age, Edna St. Vincent Millay, as flamboyant in her love affairs as she was in her art, was its heroine. The first woman ever to win the