The Roaring Twenties
by Marion Meade

Many thanks to Marion Meade, author of Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin, who kindly provided the introduction to The Roaring Twenties feature.

The 1920s was a golden age of fiction and poetry when hardly a month went by that critics did not discover some brand-new genius. “The literary business,” reported critic Malcolm Cowley, “was booming like General Motors.” Suddenly the national literature found itself rocked by creative explosions: the great novelist-god Sinclair Lewis whose Main Street became a huge commercial success selling three million copies; elegant stylists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway; the high-wire acts of experimental poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Throughout the decade, there was no shortage of literary gods.

But where were the literary goddesses?

In England, there was Virginia Woolf who would soon publish To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway. The first-rank American novelists could be counted on three fingers: Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, both of whom had won Pulitzers, and Gertrude Stein. These writers, however, were representatives of an older generation. Edith Wharton, the quintessential 19th century novelist, generally chose to present herself to the public seated decorously at her tidy desk with its heavy, gold-tooled leather top.

Hungry to get a foot inside the door of the literary business were a number of gifted younger women, all determined to become writers while they simultaneously juggled the messy issues of independence, love, money, and sex. Among them were Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Zelda Fitzgerald, smart cookies trying to figure out how to make it in the business and refusing to look for mentors in people like Wharton. It was the old women’s writing versus the new women’s writing, traditional storytelling versus real life, saints versus sinners. These young outlaws talked a great deal, sometimes talked and drank more than they wrote. Even so, they were relying mainly on their own lives for inspiration, preferring to write nakedly about intimate details that were often more fantastic than fiction. So Big and its dirt-farmer heroine is about Edna Ferber, but so are her tales of cowboys and gamblers, no matter how well disguised. Once women ripped away the veil cloaking their unique experiences, their writing began to break new ground and to sink the cornerstone for an entirely different kind of female literature.

More About the Book

In her exuberant new work, Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin, Marion Meade presents a portrait of four extraordinary writers--Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edna Ferber--whose loves, lives, and literary endeavors embodied the spirit of the 1920s.

Capturing the jazz rhythms and desperate gaiety that defined the era, Meade gives us Parker, Fitzgerald, Millay, and Ferber, traces the intersections of their lives, and describes the men (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Harold Ross, and Robert Benchley) who influenced them, loved them, and sometimes betrayed them. Here are the social and literary triumphs (Parker's Round Table witticisms appeared almost daily in the newspapers and Ferber and Millay won Pulitzer Prizes) and inevitably the penances each paid: crumbled love affairs, abortions, depression, lost beauty, nervous breakdowns, and finally, overdoses and even madness.

These literary heroines did what they wanted, said what they thought, living wholly in the moment. They kicked open the door for twentieth-century women writers and set a new model for every woman trying to juggle the serious issues of economic independence, political power, and sexual freedom. Meade recreates the excitement, romance, and promise of the 1920s, a decade celebrated for cultural innovation--the birth of jazz, the beginning of modernism--and social and sexual liberation, bringing to light, as well, the anxiety and despair that lurked beneath the nonstop partying and outrageous behavior.

A vibrant mixture of literary scholarship, social history, and scandal, Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin is a rich evocation of a period that will forever intrigue and captivate us.