the JAZZ age

Tomorrow we will look more closely into the world of the Jazz Age, the era of America's greatest affluence; the parties, the decadence, the hoi polloi (look it up) masquerading as the aristocracy; this was Gatsby's time. Speakeasies, the bob, the Charleston and bathtub gin were terms everyone would know. The world of Gatsby, as you will see, is one not dissimilar to that in The Age of Innocence. That novel, although published in the twenties, was written of an era passed (New York in the 1870s), but the affluence is there, the kings and queens of America reign in both novels. In contrast, on Black Tuesday, October 1929, the stock market crash would send America into the Great Depression. Although there are a plethora of intriguing Depression Era stories and novels, particularly those of John Steinbeck, for shear imagery and an emotional sense of the times, check out Sydney Pollack's film They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, a sordid masterpiece that shows, but ten years later, the shambles that was to become of the Jazz Age.