Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [131]
CHAPTER 3 FEMME FATALE
Throughout the book I relied heavily on Middletown, the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd’s classic study of small town American life in the 1920s, but perhaps it is most relevant to the chapter on women and how their lives were changing during this period. Paula Fass’s 1977 examination of American youth in the 1920s, The Damned and the Beautiful, was also useful. Anita Loos and Tallulah Bankhead, both emancipated and ambitious women who exemplified their age almost as much as Zelda Fitzgerald did, wrote memoirs. There have been several joint biographies of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, but as far as I know only one, published by Nancy Milford in 1970, on Zelda alone—though the Fitzgeralds’ stories and novels are the best introduction to their lives.Other evocative popular novels of the period include Edith Hull’s The Sheik, Katherine Brush’s Glitter, David Garnett’s Dope Darling and Warner Fabian’s Flaming Youth.
CHAPTER 4 “FIVE AND TEN CENT LUSTS AND DREAMS”
Marion Davies, Charlie Chaplin, Cecil Demille, Gloria Swanson, Lillian Gish and Eleanor Glyn are among many Hollywood luminaries who wrote memoirs, although those of the professional writers like Anita Loos and the journalist Adela Saint John are generally more polished and accessible. Kenneth Anger’s sensationalist Hollywood Babylon dishes the dirt on Hollywood scandals and Marjorie Rosen’s 1973 Popcorn Venus explores women’s role in the movies. I used Stuart Oderman’s 1994 biography of Fatty Arbuckle for my account of his rise and fall.
CHAPTER 5 “MY GOD! HOW THE MONEY ROLLS IN!”
Journalist William Allen White provides the best public portrait of the troubled Warren Harding, while rival Washington hostesses Evalyn McLean (Father Struck it Rich, 1936) and Alice Roosevelt Longworth (Crowded Hours, 1933) give insights into his and Florence’s private lives. Two books published in 1998 were also helpful: a biography of Edward Doheny (Dark Side of Fortune by Margaret Davis) and, especially, Florence Harding by Carl Anthony.
CHAPTER 6 “THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA IS BUSINESS”
While I highly recommend Stephen Fox’s history of advertising in America (The Mirror Makers, 1984), Robert Lacey’s Ford: The Men and the Machine (1986) and Vincent Curcio’s 2000 biography of Walter Chrysler, without doubt the best book on smugly industrious middle-class America is Sinclair Lewis’s brilliant 1922 novel, Babbitt.
CHAPTER 7 FEAR OF THE FOREIGN
Sinclair Lewis, a passionate defender of Sacco and Vanzetti, also wrote a semi-fictionalized account of their ordeal, Boston (1928). Another of their defenders, the novelist John Dos Passos, collected information for their defense in Facing the Chair (1927). Sacco and Vanzetti’s letters were collected in 1927 and republished with a good summary of the trials, evidence and its later ramifications by Penguin Classics in 1997.
CHAPTER 8 THE KU KLUX KLAN REDUX
Henry Fry’s 1922 expose of the Ku Klux Klan’s resurgence is still fascinating, though fuller and clearer accounts of the Klan’s rise and fall in the 1920s can be found in Wyn Wade’s 1987 The Fiery Cross and Nancy Maclean’s 1994 Behind the Mask of Chivalry. I found Kathryn Blee’s 1991 Women in the Klan, a detailed exploration of the role of women in the Klan, particularly interesting.
CHAPTER 9 IN EXILE
Harry Crosby’s extraordinary and vivid diaries (published as Shadows of the Sun in 1977) and Caresse’s later memoirs (The Passionate Years, 1955) are their own testimony. Janet Flanner’s articles as the New Yorker’s Paris correspondent (collected in 2003 as Paris was Yesterday) give a flavor of how Americans experienced Paris in the 1920s, as does Amanda Vaill’s wonderful 1998 Everybody Was So Young, about Gerald and Sara Murphy. In fiction, Kay Boyle’s 1934 My Next Bride, though not much of a read, is interesting as a resentful roman a clef about the Crosbys to whom she had once been close, while Ernest