What to read after The Great Gatsby:
Adult Fiction
Author
Auchincloss, Louis
Title
East Side Story
Bohjalian, Chris
The Double Bind
Ellison, Ralph
Invisible Man
Ephron, Amy
One Sunday Morning
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Tales of the Jazz Age
Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre
Save Me the Waltz
Fowler, Therese Anne
Z: A novel of Zelda Fitzgerald
Notes
This novel takes place in the 1800s in New York and weaves
stories of the Carnochan family from their early arrival in
America from Scotland to their rise in prominence and wealth
in the upper class society. Many of them end up making
ruinous decisions based on self-interest.
Formerly outgoing, Laurel withdraws into her photography,
spending all her free time at a homeless shelter. There she
meets Bobbie Crocker, a man with a history of mental illness
and a box of photographs that he won’t let anyone see. When
Bobbie dies, Laurel discovers a deeply hidden secret–a story
that leads her far from her old life, and into a cat-and-mouse
game with pursuers who claim they want to save her. In a tale
that travels between the Roaring Twenties and the twentyfirst century, between Jay Gatsby’s Long Island and rural New
England, bestselling author Chris Bohjalian has written his
most extraordinary novel yet.
Ellison's masterpiece was deeply informed by the cultural
atmosphere of the 1920s and 1930s in New York. In many
ways, it's the anti-Gatsby: the story of a culture that worships
wealth, excess, and social climbing, told not from the outside
looking in. The narrator isn't literally invisible, but he's black in
the United States during the Jazz Age, so he may as well be.
After attending a bridge party in Jazz Age New York, four
women witness an acquaintance leaving the Waldorf hotel
with another girl’s fiancé. The gossip spreads fast around all
of the speakeasy's in New York and the woman is snubbed by
everyone in town.
If none of the previous takes the edge off your Gatsby
enthusiasm, you might just need another strong hit of
Fitzgerald. We prescribe his book of short stories Tales from
the Jazz Age, which is essentially an emotional time bomb
parading around as a book. You'll get your fill of Fitzgerald
standbys, such as deluded flappers, rampant materialism, and
how aging is the second biggest bummer of all time (death
takes the lead, duh).
Zelda is all over the place this year, but rather than suggesting
one of the many new novelizations of her story, we’ll direct
you to one of her actual stories, her semi-autobiographical
novel of ballet, hysteria, and being married to F. Scott
Fitzgerald.
What comes, here at the dawn of the Jazz Age, is unimagined
attention and success and celebrity that will make Scott and
Zelda legends in their own time. Everyone wants to meet the
dashing young author of the scandalous novel—and his witty,
perhaps even more scandalous wife. Zelda bobs her hair,
adopts daring new fashions, and revels in this wild new world.
Hansen, Ron
A Wild Surge of Guilty
Passion
Hemingway, Ernest
A Movable Feast
Horan, Nancy
Loving Frank
Lustbader, Victoria
Hidden
McLain, Paula
The Paris Wife
Moriarty, Laura
The Chaperone
Morrison, Toni
Jazz
Morton, Kate
House at Riverton
Based on a real case whose lurid details scandalized
Americans in 1927 and sold millions of newspapers, acclaimed
novelist Ron Hansen’s latest work is a tour de force of erotic
tension and looming violence. Trapped in a loveless marriage,
Ruth Snyder is a voluptuous, reckless, and altogether
irresistible woman who wishes not only to escape her
husband but that he die—and the sooner the better.
A Moveable Feast includes Hemingway's conversations with
luminaries such as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce,
and F. Scott Fitzgerald himself. It's also about how awesome it
is to spend your days eating French food, drinking wine, and
shooting the breeze with geniuses. We think we could
probably get the hang of that too.
A fictionalization of the life of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, best
known as the woman who wrecked Frank Lloyd Wright's first
marriage. Despite the title, this is not a romance, but a
portrayal of an independent, educated woman at odds with
the restrictions of the early 20th century. Frank and Mamah,
both married and with children, met when Mamah's husband,
Edwin, commissioned Frank to design a house
Wealthy scion Jed Gates and poverty stricken David Warshinky
form a strong bond after serving together in World War I.
They embark upon a business partnership and Jed realizes he
has stronger feelings for David than that of just friendship.
Meanwhile David falls for Jed’s free spirited sister but has
trouble committed emotionally because of his heritage and
social status.
Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-yearold who has all but given up on love and happiness—until she
meets Ernest Hemingway. Following a whirlwind courtship
and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become
the golden couple in a lively and volatile group—the fabled
“Lost Generation”—that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound,
and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The Chaperone is a captivating novel about the woman who
chaperoned an irreverent Louise Brooks to New York City in
the 1920s and the summer that would change them both.
We suspect that Morrison has a time machine that she’s
hiding from the world. How could she possibly make the
Harlem Renaissance come so alive on the page in Jazz without
actually paying the 1920s a visit?
Kate Morton immerses readers in the dramas of the Ashbury
family at their crumbling English country estate in the years
surrounding World War I, an age when Edwardian civility,
shaken by war, unravels into the roaring Twenties. Grace
came to serve in the house as a girl. She left as a young
woman, after the presumed suicide of a famous young poet at
the property's lake.
O’Connor, Flannery
A Good Man is Hard to Find
In many ways, O’Connor and Fitzgerald are opposites.
O’Connor liked to dig deep into the regional accents of her
characters to add a gritty flavor, while Fitzgerald’s work is
always coated in a slick, lyrical sheen to offset the underlying
discontent with which he was so obsessed. But though
Fitzgerald focused on the noveau riche and O’Connor focused
on the eternally poor, they both shared a fascination with the
perils of chasing the past. Nowhere is that more evident than
in O’Connor’s deeply disturbing short story, “A Good Man is
Hard to Find.”
This is a biographical novel about Ginevra King, F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s first love. She is born into a wealthy family, unlike
Fitzgerald who she eventually leaves for a young man in her
social set. After reading about Fitzgerald in a paper, she
scours his work and finds herself in many of his cold, shallow
debutantes, most notably, Daisy Buchanan from The Great
Gatsby.
Rose Baker seals men’s fates. With a few strokes of the keys
that sit before her, she can send a person away for life in
prison. A typist in a New York City Police Department precinct,
Rose is like a high priestess. Confessions are her job. It is 1923,
and while she may hear every detail about shootings, knifings,
and murders, as soon as she leaves the interrogation room
she is once again the weaker sex, best suited for filing and
making coffee.
On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent
is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar when Tinker
Grey, a handsome banker, happens to sit down at the
neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling
consequences propel Katey on a year-long journey into the
upper echelons of New York society.
Preston, Caroline
Gatsby’s Girl
Rindell, Suzanne
The Other Typist
Towles, Amor
Rules of Civility
West, Nathaniel
The Day of the Locust
West and Fitzgerald were close friends — in fact, West was so
distraught by news of Fitzgerald’s death that he crashed his
car a day later, tragically killing himself and his wife. His work
survives as a much grittier version of Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age
lyricism, and nowhere is that more clear than in his stunning
breakout novel The Day of the Locust. In this no-holds-barred
takedown of 1930s Hollywood, West perfects his trademark at
finding humor in incredibly dark situations.
Wharton, Edith
The Age of Innocence
This woman couldn’t write a bad sentence if her life depended
on it. All of her books are worth a read, but Gatsby lovers
might get a particular kick out of The Age of Innocence: both
books satirize the strict class structure of Jazz Age New York
while also telling the heartrending story of lovers hoping to respark an old flame.
Wharton, Edith
The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton tells the story of Lily Barton who is torn
between living a lavish and plush lifestyle and a relationship
based on love and admiration.
Lily is a smart, beautiful and poor young woman, but high
society is her weakness. In the beginning, Lily is in good social
standing and rejects many offers of marriage. But as Lily nears
30, she realizes that she must marry someone in high society
to fulfill her needs.
Woolf, Virginia
Mrs. Dalloway
Woolf’s classic novel shares many of Gatsby’s themes, such as
the hollowness of excessive partying, the Jazz Age’s cultural
amnesia about World War I, and the regret over choosing a
stable lover as a partner, instead of the ever-mysterious “one
who got away.”
Adult Non-Fiction
Author
Perry, Douglas
Title
The Girls of Murder City: fame,
lust and the beautiful killers who
inspired Chicago
Belletti, Valeria
Adventures of a Hollywood
Secretary: her private letters
from inside the studios of the
1920s.
Blackman, Cally
The 20s & 30s: flappers & vamps
Vaill, Amanda
Everybody was so Young: Gerald
& Sara Murphy, a lost
generation love story
Notes
The Girls of Murder City recounts two
scandalous, sex-fueled murder cases and how an
intrepid "girl reporter" named Maurine Watkins
turned the beautiful, media-savvy suspects"Stylish Belva" and "Beautiful Beulah"-into the
talk of the town.
Those who, like Valeria Belletti, worked entrylevel jobs in early Hollywood had ringside seats at
one of the country's most happening scenes.
Belletti, the daughter of Italian immigrants,
worked as a secretary for Samuel Goldwyn and
Cecil B. DeMille from 1925 to 1929 and this
volume presents her naïve letters to a friend back
home in New Jersey.
These titles allow readers to put fashion and
designers into the context of history and the
social mores of their times. Exceptional graphic
design and the use of authentic primary
documents such as magazine covers and layouts,
photos of famous people, and original design
sketches enhance the presentations. All three
books are written in a lively style that clearly
explains the relationship between function,
media, and fashion.
Gerald and Sara Murphy were the golden couple
of the Lost Generation. Born to wealth and
privilege, they fled the stuffy confines of upperclass America to reinvent themselves in France as
legendary party givers and enthusiastic
participants in the modernist revolution of the
1920s. Their friends F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest
Hemingway, and John Dos Passos all based
fictional characters on the Murphys…
Posthumus, Cyril
Meade, Marion
Vintage Cars: motoring in the
20’s
Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin:
writers running wild in the
twenties
Cline, Sally
Zelda Fitzgerald: her voice in
paradise
Diliberto, Gioia
Hadley
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The
love letters of F. Scott and Zelda
Fitzgerald
Mellow, James
Invented Lives: F. Scott and
Zelda Fitzgerald
Milford, Nancy
Zelda: a biography
Meade chronologically explores the private and
public lives of Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent
Millay, Dorothy Parker and Edna Ferber as they
drink, love, laugh, attempt suicide, feud, flee the
country, pose for nude pictures, and oh yes,
actually write their way through the decade. Of
course underneath the façade of talent and wit
lay alcoholism, mental illness, and unrequited
love, which lends this highly entertaining and
lively book a certain poignancy.
The Zelda that Sally Cline reveals was a serious
artist: a painter of extraordinary and disturbing
vision, a talented dancer and a witty and original
writer whose work Scott often used in his own
novels but never acknowledged. Hitherto
untapped sources, including medical evidence
and interviews with Zelda's last psychiatrist,
suggest that her insanity may have been less a
specific clinical condition than the product of her
treatment for schizophrenia and her husband's
behaviour towards her.
Hadley Richardson (1891-1979), Ernest
Hemingway's first wife, was born into upper-class
St. Louis society, the daughter of an alcoholic
father who committed suicide and a mother who
despised men. The book attributes the strength
of Hemingway's early fiction to his love for
Hadley, who supported him emotionally and
financially, and theorizes that his subsequent
personal problems stemmed from their breakup.
A bittersweet story of young love steeped in the
atmosphere of 1920's Paris
Through his alcoholism and her mental illness, his
career highs (and lows) and her institutional
confinement, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's
devotion to each other endured for more than
twenty-two years. Now, for the first time, the
story of the love of these two glamorous and
hugely talented writers can be given in their own
letters.
Reconstructs the events in the marriage of Zelda
and F. Scott Fitzgerald and analyzes the legend of
the Fitzgeralds in terms of the era and society in
which they lived
Zelda Sayre started out as a Southern beauty,
became an international wonder, and died by fire
in a madhouse. With her husband, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, she moved in a golden aura of
excitement, romance, and promise. The epitome
of the Jazz Age, they rode the crest of the era to
its collapse and their own.
Taylor, Kendall
Sometimes Madness is Wisdom:
Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald: A
marriage
Irresistibly charming, recklessly brilliant, Zelda
and Scott Fitzgerald epitomized everything that
was beautiful and damned about the Jazz Age.
But behind the legend, there was a highly
complex and competitive marriage–a union not
of opposites but almost of twins who both
inspired and tormented each other, and who
were ultimately destroyed by their shared
fantasies. Now in this frank, stylish, superbly
written new book, Kendall Taylor tells the story of
the Fitzgerald marriage as it has never been told
before.
Maloney, Allison
Bright Young Things: real lives in
the roaring twenties
Feinstein, Stephen
The 1920s: from Prohibition to
Charles Lindbergh
With chapters such as Making Whoopee, The
Cocktail Hour and Upstairs, Downstairs, Bright
Young Things takes a sweeping look at the
changing society of the Jazz Age, as life below
stairs vanished forever, women went to
Oxbridge, loose morals ran riot, and new
inventions made it seem anything was possible.
Fashion trends, music, Prohibition, recreational
activities, talkie movies, the Harlem Renaissance,
the Lost Generation, and sports are touched on,
as are the political atmosphere in the United
States and abroad and the beginnings of the
Great Depression.
Kyvig, David E.
Daily Life in the United States
1920-1939: decades of promise
and pain
Anything Goes: a biography of
the roaring twenties
Moore, Lucy
Miller, Nathan
Zeitz, Joshua
New World Coming: The 1920’s
and the making of modern
America
Flapper: the madcap story of
sex, style, celebrity and the
women who made America
modern
An exhilarating portrait of the era of jazz,
glamour, and gangsters from a bright young star
of mainstream history writing. The glitter of
1920s America was seductive, from jazz, flappers,
and wild all- night parties to the birth of
Hollywood and a glamorous gangster-led crime
scene flourishing under Prohibition. But the
period was also punctuated by momentous
events-the political show trials of Sacco and
Vanzetti, the huge Ku Klux Klan march down
Washington DC's Pennsylvania Avenue-and it
produced a dizzying array of writers, musicians,
and film stars, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Bessie
Smith and Charlie Chaplin.
Blithely flinging aside the Victorian manners that
kept her disapproving mother corseted, the New
Woman of the 1920s puffed cigarettes, snuck gin,
hiked her hemlines, danced the Charleston, and
necked in roadsters. More important, she earned
her own keep, controlled her own destiny, and
secured liberties that modern women take for
granted. Her newfound freedom heralded a
radical change in American culture.
Corrigan, Jim
The 1920s: Decade in Photos:
the roaring twenties
Goldberg, Ronald
Allen
America in the Twenties
Heavily illustrated with photos, this book shows
how in the 1920s America celebrated like never
before. World War I was finally over and
Americans eagerly looked ahead. Cities grew as
the economy boomed. It was the era of
Prohibition, when alcohol was illegal, but people
drank liquor and listened to jazz music in secret
nightclubs.
This is the first book to offer a comprehensive
look at American life in the 1920s as framed by
the aspirations, scandals, and attitudes of the
Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover
presidencies. In fascinating detail, Goldberg
examines how Victorian values were transformed
into the freewheeling lifestyle of the Jazz Age and
explores the effects of such far-reaching issues as
isolationism vs. internationalism, massive
immigration, labor-management relations, and
the prevalence of big business.
Young Adult Titles
Author
Bray, Libba
Godberson, Anna
Larkin, Jillian
Myers, Walter Dean
Title
The Diviners
Bright Young Things
Beautiful Days
Vixen
Ingenue
Diva
Harlem Summer
Notes
Paranormal tale set in 1926
Historical series
Historical novel – mean girls in the 1920s
African –American boy in Harlem
Movies
Title
The Grand
The Roaring Twenties
Miss Fisher’s Murder
Mysteries
The Painted Veil
The Great Gatsby
Splendor in the Grass
Elmer Gantry
The Artist
Porco Rosso
Notes
BBC Television series set in Manchester Hotel during 1920s
1939 B&W – Starring James Cagney & Humphrey Bogart
Australian Television series based on Phyrnne Fisher mysteries by
Kerry Greenwood
2007 Golden Globe winner starring Naomi Watts and Edward
Norton
1974 version – Robert Redford and Mia Farrow
1961 – starring Natalie Wood and Pat Hingle
1960- starring Burt Lancaster and Jean Simmons
Classic Japanese Animation
Singin’ in the Rain
Citizen Kane
Spirit of St. Louis
Some Like It Hot
The Great Waldo
Pepper
Cocoanuts
The Great Gatsby:
Midnight in Manhattan
Take flight with a valiant World War I flying ace! From tropical
Adriatic settings to dazzling aerial maneuvers, this action-adventure
from world-renowned animator Hayao Miyazaki is full of humor,
courage, and chivalry.
Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds
Orson Welles directed, Joseph Cotten
James Stewart
Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis
Robert Redford, Bo Svenson, Susan Sarandon
1929 – Marx Brothers (features all 4 – Groucho, Chico, Harpo &
Zeppo) Groucho is a hotel owner, Chico and Harpo play con men.
Documentary commemorating the 75th anniversary of the
publication of The Great Gatsby.