America in the 1920’s

In this decade, America became the wealthiest country in the world with no
obvious rival. Yet by 1930 she had hit a depression that was to have world-wide
consequences. But in the good times everybody seemed to have a reasonably
well paid job and everybody seemed to have a lot of spare cash to spend.

One of the reasons for this was the introduction of hire-purchase whereby you
put a deposit on an item that you wanted and paid installments on that item,
with interest, so that you paid back more than the price for the item but did not
have to make one payment in one go. Hire-purchase was easy to get and
people got into debt without any real planning for the future. In the 1920’s it just
seemed to be the case that if you wanted something then you got it.

But simply buying something had a major economic impact. Somebody had to
make what was bought. This was the era before robot technology and most
work was labour intensive i.e. people did the work. The person who made that
product would get paid and he (as it usually was in the 1920’s) would not save
all that money. He, too, would spend some of it and someone somewhere else
would have to make that and so he would get paid. And so the cycle continued.
This was the money flow belief of John Maynard Keynes. If people were
spending, then people had to be employed to make things. They get paid, spent
their money and so the cycle continued.

A good example was the motor car industry. The 3 big producers were Ford,
Chrysler and General Motors.

A boom in the car industry came from Ford’s with the legendary Ford Model -T.

Literature in the 1920’s

Following WWI (the war to end all wars), talented young authors, some
expatriates in France, wrote about their feelings of disillusionment and
alienation. A sense of rebellion developed and the victorian idea of decency
was considered hypocritical. Writers began to write frankly about sexuality.
Three important groups during this period were:
The Algonquin Round Table, also called THE ROUND TABLE, informal group
of American literary men and women who met daily for lunch on weekdays at a
large round table in the Algonquin Hotel in New York City during the 1920s and
'30s. Many of the best-known writers, journalists, and artists in New York City
were in this group. Among them were Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott
(author of the quote "All the things I really like are immoral, illegal, or fattening",
Heywood Broun, Robert Benchley,Robert Sherwood, George S. Kaufman,
Franklin P. Adams, Marc Connelly, Harold Ross, Harpo Marx, and Russell
Crouse.

Harlem Renaissance is considered the first important movement of black artists

and writers in the US. Centered in Harlem, NY, and other urban areas during
the 1920s, black writers published more than ever before. Influential and
lasting black authors, artists, and musicians received their first serious critical
appraisal. This group included Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. DuBois, Langston
Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Alain Locke , who was considered the chief
interpreter for the Harlem movement.

The Lost Generation, the self-exiled expatriates who lived and wrote in Paris
between the wars. These writers, looking for freedom of thought and action,
changed the face of modern writing. Realistic and rebellious, they wrote what
they wanted and fought censorship for profanity and sexuality. They
incorporated Freudian ideas into their characters and styles. This group
included Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, Henry Miller, F.
Scott Fitzgerald.

Others who were important during this decade include e. e. cummings

experimented with language (and punctuation!), William Faulkner was an
important part of the Southern Renaissance, Edna St. Vincent Millay expressed
the defiance and desires of her generation from Greenwich Village, and Eugene
O'Neill drew attention to a serious American stage. AND, we can't leave out the
beginning of the Golden Age of Mysteries. and introducing America's own
contribution to the mystery novel, the hard-boiled, with writers such as
Raymond Chandler and Dashielle Hammett and paving the way for the future.