by Louise Hilton.
With this summer’s release of director Baz Luhrmann’s movie adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age classic The Great Gatsby, there’s been a resurgence of interest in the Roaring Twenties, and I’m all for it. Flappers, dancehalls, jazz, champagne – what’s not to love? Here are some great titles to put you in a ’20s mood.
A flurry of books about Zelda Fitzgerald, Scott’s beautiful but doomed wife, hit shelves this year. Notable titles are Z: A Novel by Therese Anne Fowler, Call Me Zelda by Erika Robuck, and Beautiful Fools: The Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald by R. Clifton Spargo. Of all the books in the growing Zelda canon, though, Nancy Milford’s 1970 biography Zelda remains the must-read.
Of course, you can’t immerse yourself in the Jazz Age without trying a few of the books written by the so-called Lost Generation, writers such as the Fitzgeralds, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce, and other expatriates who found their voice in Paris. My top pick is Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, in which he recounts his formative years in the City of Lights.
And why not revisit the novel that started it all, The Great Gatsby, about eccentric millionaire Jay Gatsby and the intoxicating Daisy Buchanan? It’s the bee’s knees.
