Echoes of the Jazz Age
"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 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.
It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Echoes of the Jazz Age"
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. Fitzgerald also did not believe the war affected the morality of younger Americans. 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. 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 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 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. 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. After Fitzgerald's death in 1940, the essay was collected by critic Edmund Wilson in The Crack-Up in 1945.