"Echoes of the Jazz Age" is a short essay by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald that was first published in Scribner's Magazine in November 1931. The essay analyzes the societal conditions in the United States which gave rise to the flowering of youth culture in the raucous historical era known as the Jazz Age and the subsequent events which led to the era's abrupt conclusion. The frequently anthologized essay represents an extended critique by Fitzgerald of 1920s hedonism and is regarded as one of Fitzgerald's finest non-fiction works.: Bruccoli notes the essay succeeds with "the evocation of unrecapturable emotions—one of the defining qualities of Fitzgerald's best work".
The essay's contents reflect a number of Fitzgerald's opinions previously expressed in newspaper interviews. Fitzgerald had publicly rejected the argument that the meaningless destruction of World War I spawned the Jazz Age.: "I am tired, too, of hearing that the world war broke down the moral barriers of the younger generation. Indeed, except for leaving its touch of destruction here and there, I do not think the war left any real lasting effect." Fitzgerald also did not believe the war affected the morality of younger Americans.: "The younger generation has been changing all through the last twenty years. The war had little or nothing to do with it. I put the change up to literature." He likewise rejected other popular claims that either Prohibition in the United States or the advent of motion pictures corrupted the morals of American youths.
Fitzgerald's essay instead posits various technological innovations and cultural trends as fostering the societal conditions which typified the Jazz Age. He attributes the era's sexual revolution to a combination of both Sigmund Freud's sexual theories gaining salience among young Americans and the invention of the automobile allowing youths to escape parental surveillance in order to engage in premarital sex. Echoing Voltaire's belief that novels influence social behavior, Fitzgerald cites the literary works by E. M. Hull, D. H. Lawrence, Radclyffe Hall, and others as influencing young Americans to question their sexual norms.
In the essay, Fitzgerald makes a critical and much-overlooked distinction between contemporary generations. In contrast to the older Lost Generation to which Gertrude Stein posited Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway belonged, Fitzgerald notes the Jazz Age generation were those Americans younger than himself who had been adolescents during World War I and were largely untouched by the conflict's psychological and material horrors.: "The generation which been adolescent during the confusion of the War, brusquely shouldered my contemporaries out of the way and danced into the limelight. This was the generation whose girls dramatized themselves as flappers, the generation that corrupted its elders and eventually overreached itself less through lack of morals than through lack of taste." It was this hedonistic younger generation—and not the Lost Generation—which riveted the nation's attention upon their leisure activities and sparked a societal debate over their perceived immorality.: "As a picture of contemporary life and as an indication of codes of conduct obtaining among the American young, the novel is revelatory and valuable. It is a comment upon the times. It shows definitely that whatever the teachings of our elders, the Victorian checks, taboos, and reticences are no longer in force among the flappers, the debutantes, and the collegians of the present [Jazz Age] generation." After Fitzgerald's death in 1940, critic Edmund Wilson collected the essay in the 1945 anthology The Crack-Up.
The essay will enter the American public domain on January 1, 2027.
Background
Following the unexpected success of his debut novel This Side of Paradise (1920), a 23-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald became one of the most celebrated novelists of the Jazz Age. Living in luxury at the opulent Biltmore Hotel in New York City, many famous persons sought his personal acquaintanceship, and he became close friends with the cultural elites of the period.
At the peak of his commercial success and cultural salience, Fitzgerald recalled traveling in a taxi one afternoon through the streets of New York City and weeping when he realized that he would never be as happy again. During this period, the zeitgeist of the Jazz Age "bore him up, flattered him and gave him more money than he had dreamed of, simply for telling people that he felt as they did, that something had to be done with all the nervous energy stored up and unexpended in the war."
With the onset of Great Depression in 1929, Fitzgerald experienced a dramatic reversal of fortune. Once favorable critics now deemed his literary output to be elitist and out-of-touch. As writer Budd Schulberg recalled, "my generation thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald as an age rather than a writer, and when the economic stroke of 1929 began to change the sheiks and flappers into unemployed boys or underpaid girls, we consciously and a little belligerently turned our backs on Fitzgerald".
With his book royalties declining precipitously and his short stories no longer selling as easily to slick magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire amid the economic downturn, Fitzgerald became keenly aware that one historical era had ended and another begun. "The Jazz Age is over," Fitzgerald wrote to his editor and friend Max Perkins in May 1931 while abroad in Europe.
Perkins knew that Fitzgerald had popularized the phrase "Jazz Age" via the publication of his 1922 story anthology Tales of the Jazz Age, and he believed Fitzgerald's insights about the now bygone era worthy of more consideration. Perkins suggested that Fitzgerald should write at least one article reflecting upon and eulogizing the era—some kind of "an elegy that would remind the public of his previous cultural influence as a writer and simultaneously fix a point in his mind from which he could begin a new phase of [literary] career".
At the request of Perkins, managing editor Alfred "Fritz" Dashiell of Scribner's Magazine wrote Fitzgerald and pressed him to contribute the retrospective about the bygone era.: "When Fitzgerald claimed credit for naming the Jazz Age, Perkins responded in May 1931 with an invitation from Alfred Dashiell, managing editor of Scribner's Magazine, to write an article about it. 'Echoes of the Jazz Age' appeared in the November issue." "There is no one more qualified to sound its knell," Dashiell declared. Fitzgerald could not initially commit himself to the assignment, but he could not put it out of his mind.
After further pressure by Perkins to jot down a short essay that would serve as a retrospective of both the preceding era and his own life as the era's most famous chronicler, Fitzgerald drafted the essay while in Switzerland and while his wife Zelda Fitzgerald underwent voluntary psychiatric treatment in a nearby sanatorium.
As he had already spoken at length about the so-called Jazz Age in numerous newspaper interviews throughout the 1920s, Fitzgerald's final essay recycled many of these same opinions which he had expressed nearly a decade earlier.
Content and themes
Fitzgerald opens the essay by positing that the historical era known as Jazz Age began in the spring of 1919. In contrast to social conservatives and isolationist politicians who insisted that World War I spawned the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald instead pinpoints the 1919 May Day Riots as the actual starting point when young Americans read newspaper accounts of how mounted police officers brutally suppressed peaceful veterans. The excessive use of force by police officers against the demobilized war veterans triggered a wave of cynicism among younger Americans, and they questioned whether their country was any better than the despotic regimes in southern Europe. Due to this resulting cynicism proliferating among American youth, "it was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all."
Although Fitzgerald pinpoints the Jazz Age as beginning in Spring 1919, he asserts that the societal transformations which occurred had their roots as far back as 1915 before the country had formally entered World War I. During this earlier period, the avant-garde sexual theories espoused by psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung became vogue among the younger generation of Americans. The result was that American women wondered whether or not they had a fulfilling sex life and pursued remedies accordingly.: "Girls, for instance, have found the accent shifted from chemical purity to breadth of viewpoint, intellectual charm, and piquant cleverness.... Thus it is that we find the young woman of 1920 flirting, kissing, and viewing life lightly, saying damn without a blush, playing along the danger line in an immature way". Simultaneously, many parents purchased automobiles for young American men in an attempt to make them "self-reliant." Amorous couples used the privacy of these new automobiles to engage in kissing and petting. Soon after, the automobiles began to be used by unchaperoned couples for the express purpose of premarital sex. At this point, Fitzgerald contends, "the veil finally fell—the Jazz Age was in flower."
Due to the above confluence of technological innovations and cultural trends, Fitzgerald argues that Prohibition in the United States had no effect whatsoever on the libertinism of the Jazz Age and claims the rampant hedonism would have occurred regardless. Rejecting yet another popular argument, Fitzgerald insists that 1920s cinema had little influence on the creation of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald mentions Clara Bow's films and Colleen Moore's now lost film Flaming Youth (1923) as the only films worthy of note, but he cautions that the ingravescent film censorship prevented contemporary motion pictures from accurately reflecting the libertine values of the era which had been already salient in popular novels.
Echoing Voltaire's belief that books have a dominant influence on social behavior,: "Voltaire believed that books had a dominant influence on social behavior". Fitzgerald ascribes the blithe spirit of the Jazz Age to the literary works of the period. Novels such as E. M. Hull's The Sheik (1919), Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Samuel Hopkins Adams's Flaming Youth (1923), D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), and others reflected a gradual realization by society that neither premarital sex nor extramarital sex is harmful. Fitzgerald also implies a greater acceptance of homosexual relations in literature with the publication of Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness (1928).
Fitzgerald notes that the younger American generation which defined the Jazz Age was not the Lost Generation—to which Gertrude Stein posited that he and Ernest Hemingway belonged: "They were the most conspicuous representatives of that 'lost generation,' fragments of which Gertrude Stein was forever stumbling upon in the byways of Paris.": "...Fitzgerald's rebuttal to Gertrude Stein's 'lost generation' catch phrase that had achieved currency through Hemingway's use of it as an epigraph for The Sun Also Rises. Whereas Stein had identified the lost generation with the war veterans, Fitzgerald insisted that the lost generation was the prewar group and expressed confidence in 'the men of the war.'"—but their precocious younger peers who had been adolescent during World War I. This younger generation, whose bob-haired women would later be described by newspapers as "flappers," became the actual luminaries of the era, and the older Lost Generation merely imitated the wild behavior of their younger siblings.