1920s-30s America

From flappers to Prohibition to the upheaval of the Great Depression, these books explore society and culture of 1920s-30s America.

Related event:
Gary Pomerantz discusses The Devil’s Tickets, June 24, 2009

The Devil's Tickets: A Night of Bridge, a Fatal Hand, and a New American Age
By Gary M. Pomerantz
Through larger-than-life characters and a timeless partnership game they played, The Devil's Tickets evokes the last echoes of the Roaring Twenties and the darkness of the pending Depression.

Flapper book jacket

Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern
By Joshua Zeitz
Through the madcap lives of Zelda Fitzgerald, Lois Long, Coco Chanel, Clara Bow, and other Jazz Age luminaries, Flapper tells the fascinating story of the new woman and the making of modern culture.

Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties
By Marion Meade
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.

Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1940: How Americans Lived Through the "Roaring Twenties" and the Great Depression
By David E. Kyvig
The twenties and thirties witnessed dramatic changes in American life: increasing urbanization, technological innovation, cultural upheaval, and economic disaster. In this fascinating book, the prize-winning historian David Kyvig describes everyday life in these decades, when automobiles and home electricity became commonplace, when radio and the movies became broadly popular.

New World Coming book jacket

New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America
By Nathan Miller
Chronicling what he sees as the most significant decade of the past century, Miller vividly portrays the 1920s, focusing on the men and women who shaped this extraordinary time, including three of America's most conservative presidents. New World Coming is an incisive, thoroughly readable account of an age that defined America.

1927: High Tide of the Twenties
By Gerald Leinwand
A tumultuous stock market, a media obsessed with celebrity and scandal, a time new technologies were rocking society: the 1920s bear more than a little semblance to today, and 1927 is a snapshot of the period.

The Aspirin Age, 1919-1941
Edited by Isabel Leighton
This book includes twenty-two essays describing significant events and people in American history of the post-World War I era.

By Gary Pomerantz

Wilt, 1962 book jacket

Wilt, 1962: The Night of 100 Points and the Dawn of a New Era
By Gary M. Pomerantz
On the night of March 2, 1962, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Wilt Chamberlain, a young and striking athlete celebrated as the Big Dipper, scored one hundred points in a game against the New York Knickerbockers. As historic and revolutionary as the achievement was, it remains shrouded in myth. The game was not televised; no New York sportswriters showed up; and a fourteen-year-old local boy ran onto the court when Chamberlain scored his hundredth point, shook his hand, and then ran off with the basketball. In telling the story of this remarkable night, author Gary M. Pomerantz brings to life a lost world of American sports.

Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds: The Tragedy and Triumph of ASA Flight 529
By Gary M. Pomerantz
In August 1995, twenty-six passengers and a crew of three aboard a commuter plane in Atlanta headed for Gulfport, Mississippi. Shortly after takeoff, they heard an explosion and some see a mangled engine lodged against the wing. From that moment, nine minutes and twenty seconds elapse until the crippled plane crashes in a west Georgia hayfield. Gary Pomerantz takes listeners deep into the hearts and minds of the people aboard, each of whom prepares in his or her own way for what may come. Ultimately, nineteen people survive both the crash and its devastating aftermath, all of them profoundly affected by what they have seen, and more important, what they have done to help themselves and others.

Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn: The Saga of Two Families and the Making of Atlanta
By Gary M. Pomerantz
The intersection of Peachtree Street and Sweet Auburn mirrors the often separate but mutually dependent relations between whites and blacks in Atlanta. Through hundreds of interviews and five years of painstaking research, Gary Pomerantz, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, shows how two families, one white, one black, rose to social, economical and political prominence in the capitol of the new South.

Book descriptions provided by BookLetters.