Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s
While Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald et al. were finding Paris a movable feast, for hundreds of other American artists, writers and musicians who remained at home, Manhattan in the 1920s was a kind of Roman candle hurtling into hyperborean space, its glitter and energy sparking a decade of creativity. And though the expatriates were mining established European cultures, for them, too, Manhattan was their defining center, whether escaping or embracing it. This book is a cornucopia of anecdote and commentary on some 120 stars of the Jazz Age. Douglas (The Feminization of American Culture) devotes considerable attention to the city's impact on the legendary black musicians and theirs on it; to its architectural ebullience; and above all to the literary and publishing mavens who worshipped the integrity of the word-the "terrible honesty" of her title. This is a sprawling, erudite, provocative study of an expanding artistic universe that crashed with the Depression and, like it, left a powerful imprint on the American consciousness. Photos not seen by PW.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.