Bright Young Things discussion

If anything defines the era it's the image of the flapper...tell us your favourite books about the flapper.

Flappers and Philosophers: The Collected Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Encompassing the very best of F. Scott Fitzgerald's short fiction, this collection spans his career, from the early stories of the glittering Jazz Age, through the lost hopes of the thirties, to the last, twilight decade of his life. It brings together his most famous stories, including 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz', a fairy tale of unlimited wealth; the sad and hilarious stories of Hollywood hack Pat Hobby; and 'The Lost Decade', written in Fitzgerald's last years.

Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern by Joshua Zeitz

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.

Whisking us from the Alabama country club where Zelda Sayre first caught the eye of F. Scott Fitzgerald to Muncie, Indiana, where would-be flappers begged their mothers for silk stockings, to the Manhattan speakeasies where patrons partied till daybreak, historian Joshua Zeitz brings the era to exhilarating life. This is the story of America’s first sexual revolution, its first merchants of cool, its first celebrities, and its most sparkling advertisement for the right to pursue happiness.

The men and women who made the flapper were a diverse lot.

There was Coco Chanel, the French orphan who redefined the feminine form and silhouette, helping to free women from the torturous corsets and crinolines that had served as tools of social control.

Three thousand miles away, Lois Long, the daughter of a Connecticut clergyman, christened herself “Lipstick” and gave New Yorker readers a thrilling entrée into Manhattan’s extravagant Jazz Age nightlife.

In California, where orange groves gave way to studio lots and fairytale mansions, three of America’s first celebrities—Clara Bow, Colleen Moore, and Louise Brooks, Hollywood’s great flapper triumvirate—fired the imaginations of millions of filmgoers.

Dallas-born fashion artist Gordon Conway and Utah-born cartoonist John Held crafted magazine covers that captured the electricity of the social revolution sweeping the United States.

Bruce Barton and Edward Bernays, pioneers of advertising and public relations, taught big business how to harness the dreams and anxieties of a newly industrial America—and a nation of consumers was born.

Towering above all were Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, whose swift ascent and spectacular fall embodied the glamour and excess of the era that would come to an abrupt end on Black Tuesday, when the stock market collapsed and rendered the age of abundance and frivolity instantly obsolete.

With its heady cocktail of storytelling and big ideas, Flapper is a dazzling look at the women who launched the first truly modern decade.

Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin Writers Running Wild in the Twenties by Marion Meade

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.

Midnight Rose: a life of Maud Allan by Wendy Buonaventura

MIDNIGHT ROSE is based on the life of Edwardian dancer Maud Allan, of whom art critic Sir Herbert Reade wrote: "She was the Marilyn Monroe of my youth." Celebrated for her Salome, in 1918 a newspaper article hinted that Allan was a lesbian and she sued for libel. The trial threw a searchlight on the social hypocricies and sexual ignorance of the age, as self-appointed guardians of public morality lined up to attack one of the most infamous women of her day.

Clara Bow: Runnin' Wild by David Stenn

Hollywood's first sex symbol, the ' It ' girl, Clara Bow was born in the slums of Brooklyn in a family plagued with alcoholism and insanity. She catapulted to fame after winning Motion Picture magazine's 1921 ' Fame and Fortune' contest. The greatest box-office draw of her day_she once received 45,000 fan letters in a single month, Clara Bow's on screen vitality and allure that beguiled thousands, however, would be her undoing off-camera. David Stenn captures her legendary rise to stardom and fall from grace, her success marred by studio exploitation and sexual scandals.

Lulu in Hollywood by Louise Brooks

The collected writings of this icon of the silent era, in a new, more complete edition.

Louise Brooks (1906-1985) is one of the most famous actresses of the silent era, renowned as much for her rebellion against the Hollywood system as for her performances in such influential films as Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. Eight autobiographical essays by Brooks, on topics ranging from her childhood in Kansas and her early days as a Denishawn and Ziegfeld Follies dancer to her friendships with Martha Graham, Charles Chaplin, W. C. Fields, Humphrey Bogart, William Paley, G. W. Pabst, and others are collected here. New to this edition is the revelatory "Why I Will Never Write My Memoirs" by Brooks and "The Girl in the Black Helmet" by Kenneth Tynan, which brought about the revival of interest in her work and was the best discussion of Brooks's film work to appear in her lifetime.

Ally wrote: " Lulu in Hollywood by Louise Brooks

The collected writings of this icon of the silent era, in a new, more complete edition.

Louise Brooks (1906-1985) is one of the m..."


Oooh, I loved that book, Ally. Brooks was a very interesting woman and is shown at her best in the German classic film Die Busche der Pandora. I think she was one of the most beautiful of the silent stars and should have gone on to better things in later life. But she was a real rebel and that didn't sit well with the powers that be in Hollywood.

Save Me the Waltz

What better book about flappers than one written by the self-christened 'first flapper'? Zelda writes about her life with Scott, the Murphys and, most importantly, captures life in the '20s. It's absolutely fascinating: you can tell which lines are Scott's due to their light touch, but Zelda's writing is so brutally honest and raw that it leaves you wishing she wrote more.

Absolutely beautiful.