The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant first meal, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities on the edge of a war zone.
A self-portrait of a great writer 's rise and fall, intensely personal and etched with Fitzgerald's signature blend of romance and realism. The Crack-Up tells the story of Fitzgerald's sudden descent at the age of thirty-nine from glamorous success to empty despair, and his determined recovery. Compiled and edited by Edmund Wilson shortly after F. Scott Fitzgerald's death, this revealing collection of his essays—as well as letters to and from Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passos—tells of a man with charm and talent to burn, whose gaiety and genius made him a living symbol of the Jazz Age, and whose recklessness brought him grief and loss. "Fitzgerald's physical and spiritual exhaustion is described brilliantly," noted The New York Review of Books: "the essays are amazing for the candor."
Evoking the Jazz-Age world that would later appear in his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, this essential Fitzgerald collection contains some of the writer’s most famous and celebrated stories. In “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” an extraordinary child is born an old man, growing younger as the world ages around him. “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” a fable of excess and greed, shows two boarding school classmates mired in deception as they make their fortune in gemstones. And in the classic novella “May Day,” debutantes dance the night away as war veterans and socialists clash in the streets of New York. Opening the book is a playful and irreverent set of notes from the author, documenting the real-life pressures and experiences that shaped these stories, from his years at Princeton to his cravings for luxury to the May Day Riots of 1919. Taken as a whole, this collection brings to vivid life the dazzling excesses, stunning contrasts, and simmering unrest of a glittering era. Its 1922 publication furthered Fitzgerald's reputation as a master storyteller, and its legacy staked his place as the spokesman of an age.
Set in the 1920's Jazz Age on Long Island, The Great Gatsby chronicles narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, the beautiful Daisy Buchanan. First published in 1925, the book has enthralled generations of readers and is considered one of the greatest American novels.
"Thousands of nude photos of Jazz-era women were found in boxes marked "private" on the estate of former Ziegfeld Follies photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston after his death in 1971. Johnston had photographed many of the era's brightest stars and most beautiful women, but who were these unknowns sometimes posed in little more than a string of pearls or flash of lace?" "Compiled here for the first time are more than 200 publicity stills and photos of America's first "it" girls, as well as the "secret" nudes discovered on Johnston's estate after his death. The images do most of the talking, but also included are some of the stories behind these silent-film era starlets and the sometimes high prices they paid for being the first generation of women to reject the roles laid down before them." "Photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston also paid a price for the commercial applications of his art. This book offers insight into Johnston's own Jazz Age mystery, as well as into his unique and cutting-edge photography techniques. It also pays tribute to a man whose artistry extends beyond the Follies and who deserves a place among the stars himself."--BOOK JACKET.
A picture book biography that will inspire readers to dance to their own beats! Singer, dancer, actress, and independent dame, Josephine Baker felt life was a performance. She lived by her own rules and helped to shake up the status quo with wild costumes and a you-can’t-tell-me-no attitude that made her famous. She even had a pet leopard in Paris! From bestselling children’s biographer Jonah Winter and two-time Caldecott Honoree Marjorie Priceman comes a story of a woman the stage could barely contain. Rising from a poor, segregated upbringing, Josephine Baker was able to break through racial barriers with her own sense of flair and astonishing dance abilities. She was a pillar of steel with a heart of gold—all wrapped up in feathers, sequins, and an infectious rhythm.
"This volume of the Cambridge Fitzgerald Edition includes the original nine stories selected by Fitzgerald for All the Sad Young Men, together with eleven additional stories, published between 1925 and 1928, which were not collected by Fitzgerald during his lifetime." "This edition of All the Sad Young Men is the first of the short-fiction collections in the Cambridge edition to be based on extensive surviving manuscripts and typescripts. The volume contains a scholarly introduction, historical notes, a textual apparatus, illustrations, and appendixes."--BOOK JACKET.
In the generations after emancipation, hundreds of thousands of African-descended working-class men and women left their homes in the British Caribbean to seek opportunity abroad: in the goldfields of Venezuela and the cane fields of Cuba, the canal construction in Panama, and the bustling city streets of Brooklyn. But in the 1920s and 1930s, racist nativism and a brutal cascade of antiblack immigration laws swept the hemisphere. Facing borders and barriers as never before, Afro-Caribbean migrants rethought allegiances of race, class, and empire. In Radical Moves, Lara Putnam takes readers from tin-roof tropical dancehalls to the elegant black-owned ballrooms of Jazz Age Harlem to trace the roots of the black-internationalist and anticolonial movements that would remake the twentieth century. From Trinidad to 136th Street, these were years of great dreams and righteous demands. Praying or "jazzing," writing letters to the editor or letters home, Caribbean men and women tried on new ideas about the collective. The popular culture of black internationalism they created--from Marcus Garvey's UNIA to "regge" dances, Rastafarianism, and Joe Louis's worldwide fandom--still echoes in the present.
Before Ralph Ellison became one of America’s greatest writers, he was a musician and a student of jazz, writing widely on his favorite music for more than fifty years. Now, jazz authority Robert O’Meally has collected the very best of Ellison’s inspired, exuberant jazz writings in this unique anthology.