Bookended by the easy living of the Jazz Age, when the booze and money flowed seemingly without end, and the crash of '29 that led to breadlines and a level of human suffering not seen since World War I, New World Coming is a chronological account of an age that defined America. Chronicling what he views as the most consequential decade of the past century, Nathan Miller - an award-winning journalist and five-time Pulitzer nominee - paints a vivid portrait of the 1920s, focusing on the men and women who shaped that extraordinary time, including, ironically, three of America's most conservative presidents: Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.

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. In Anything Goes, Lucy Moore interweaves the stories of the compelling people and events that characterized the decade to produce a gripping portrait of the Jazz Age. She reveals that the Roaring Twenties were more than just "the years between wars." It was an epoch of passion and change-an age, she observes, not unlike our own.

The American 1920s had many names: the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the Dry Decade, and the Flapper generation. Whatever the moniker, these years saw the birth of modern America. This volume shows the many colorful ways the decade altered America, its people, and its future. American Popular Culture Through History volumes include a timeline, cost comparisons, chapter bibliographies, and a subject index.

A generously illustrated story of the decade that brought prohibition, the Scopes Trial, a major stock market crash, as well as the first radios, the first transatlantic flights, and the first talking movies. Lindop also discusses the effects of World War I on the decade, as he offers insights into the economic, social, and political aspects of the time. This text outlines the important social, political, economic, cultural, and technological events that happened in the United States from 1920 to 1929.

The 1920s emerge in this study as a period with its own distinctive historical awareness and creative agenda, one in which Modernist, non-Modernist and semi-Modernist writers met on shared ground with common memories and preoccupations. Spanning genres high and low, including war memoirs, critical essays and detective stories as well as drama, poetry and the novel, Chris Baldick's approachable study of the decade sets out a 'map' of the new post-Great-War literary landscape with its unique configuration of genres, settings and character-types. Successive chapters investigate the place of ideas (biological, Freudian, esoteric, and more) in literature; the uses of anachronism and the time-sense of the Twenties; re-shapings of war-memory and war myth into varieties of Twenties 'disillusionment'; and curious connections between crime-writing and comedy in the period.

In the 1920s, Americans talked of their times as "modern," which is to say, fundamentally different, in pace and texture, from what went before-a new era. With the end of World War I, an array of dizzying inventions and trends pushed American society from the Victorian era into modernity. The New Era provides a history of American thought and culture in the 1920s through the eyes of American intellectuals determined to move beyond an older role as gatekeepers of cultural respectability and become tribunes of openness, experimentation, and tolerance instead. The book tracks the emergence of a new generation of intellectuals who made culture the essential terrain of social and political action and who framed a new set of arguments and debates-over women's roles, sex, mass culture, the national character, ethnic identity, race, democracy, religion, and values-that would define American public life for fifty years.

From the beginning of his literary career, James Joyce was the most distinctive figure in the renaissance that occurred in Irish cultural life after the death of Charles Stewart Parnell. From the first, he set himself to liberate Ireland, not by returning to Celtic myths or the Gaelic language and folklore, but by Europeanizing its cultural institutions. His early stories are an exorcism of the spirit of paralysis he felt about himself in the Dublin of his youth.

James Joyce is one of the most revered and influential writers of the 20th century. This Irishman transformed novelistic conventions through experimentation in language and narrative structure. Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the stories that make up his collection Dubliners are among the major works discussed in this collection of full-length critical essays. This latest addition to the Bloom’s Modern Critical Views series also features a chronology, notes on the contributor, a bibliography, and an introductory essay by master scholar Harold Bloom.

Veteran Joyce scholar and author A. Nicholas Fargnoli traces both the odyssey of Joyce's roaming life and the creative evolution of his work in this copiously illustrated, information-packed biographic reference. James Joyce was born in 1882 in Dublin, Ireland, a country that still only begrudgingly recognizes his artistic brilliance. Although for more than half his life he lived in Europe in self-exile, his canon-breaking works never ceased to revolve around the city of his birth—no matter how uncensored his portraits, how ambitious his literary experiments, or outre his linguistic games. As a writer, Joyce had mastered the English language in his early books, Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, celebrated it in the notoriously banned Ulysses, and, some claim, finally tried to explode it in Finnegans Wake. Despite a rootless life spent sometimes in near-poverty, Joyce retained his inherent Irishness and absorbed everything from the foreign environments around him. An in-depth portrait of this truly amazing artist is covered here in an engaging array of excerpts from letters, reminiscences, book reviews, court papers, and manuscripts.

Eugene O'Neill, one of America's finest dramatists, is best known for his plays The Iceman Cometh, Desire Under the Elms, and Long Day s Journey into Night. O'Neill's brilliant work won him four Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as a place among the most important writers in American history. Enhanced by a detailed chronology and bibliography, this newly updated volume in the Bloom's Modern Critical Views series is an in-depth exploration into the life and works of a playwright whose searing dramas continue to be a powerful presence on the American stage.

Eugene O'Neill wrote his plays for a theatre in which the playwright would take a central position. He presented himself as a controlling personality both in the texts--in the form of ample stage directions--and in performances based on these texts. His plays address several audiences--reader, spectator, and production team--and scripts were often different from the published versions. This study examines O'Neill's multiple roles as a writer for many audiences.After a description of O'Neill's working conditions and the multiple audiences of the plays, this study examines the various formal aspects of the plays: titles, settings in time and place, names and addresses, language, and connections and allusions to other works. An examination of the plays follows, with particular emphasis on Bound East for Cardiff, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and A Touch of the Poet.

In the face of seemingly relentless American optimism, Eugene O’Neill's plays reveal an America many would like to ignore, a place of seething resentments, aching desires, and family tragedy, where failure and disappointment are the norm and the American dream a chimera. Though derided by critics during his lifetime, his works resonated with audiences, won him the Nobel Prize and four Pulitzer, and continue to grip theatergoers today. Now noted historian John Patrick Diggins offers a masterly biography that both traces O’Neill’s tumultuous life and explains the forceful ideas that form the heart of his unflinching works. Diggins paints a richly detailed portrait of the playwright’s life, from his Irish roots and his early years at sea to his relationships with his troubled mother and brother. Here we see O’Neill as a young Greenwich Village radical, a ravenous autodidact who attempted to understand the disjunction between the sunny public face of American life and the rage that he knew was simmering beneath.

Long at the center of the modernist project, from editing Eliot's The Waste Land to publishing Joyce, Pound has also been a provocateur and instigator of new movements, while initiating a new poetics. This is the first volume to summarize and analyze the multiple contexts of Pound's work, underlining the magnitude of his contribution and drawing on new archival, textual and theoretical studies. Pound's political and economic ideas also receive attention. With its concentration on the contexts of history, sociology, aesthetics and politics, the volume will provide a portrait of Pound's unusually international reach: an American-born, modern poet absorbing the cultures of England, France, Italy and China. These essays situate Pound in the social and material realities of his time and will be invaluable for students and scholars of Pound and modernism.

Ezra Pound has forever changed the course of poetry. The author of a vast body of literature, his enormous range of references and use of multiple languages make him one of the most obscure authors and--because of his Fascism, anti-Semitism, and questionable sanity--one of the most controversial. This encyclopedia is a concise yet comprehensive guide to his life and writings. Included are more than 250 alphabetically arranged entries on such topics as Arabic history, Chinese translation, dance, Hilda Doolittle, Egyptian literature, Robert Frost, and Pound's publications. The entries are written by roughly 100 expert contributors and cite works for further reading.

Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle, who used the pseudonym H.D., are among the most important American modernist poets. In this comparative study, Jacob Korg examines their intertwined lives, from an early romantic relationship when both writers were in their early twenties, through the ongoing friendship and artistic dialogue that helped shape their work. Drawing on unpublished letters and manuscripts as well as published works, Korg offers a fresh view of two American artists and a wholly unexpected portrait of Pound--examined here, for the first time, through the context of a female modernist.