The most recommended books about the Jazz Age

Another 1925 gem, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was written, Anita Loos said, because she couldn’t get H.L. Mencken’s attention on a cross-country train trip because he was besotted by a blonde starlet-to-be.

One of the savviest, most pointed, and cosmopolitan takes on sex and gender from the period or from any period, really. It is, like the movie adaptation with Marilyn Monroe, pure fun and games at one level and trenchant commentary at another, but the book is that much smarter and more trenchant and therefore, much funnier.

Loos was one of the most successful screenwriters of her day, and she brings those skills to bear, but she has superb dexterity as a prose stylist and an almost uncanny knack for comic timing.

Probably the biggest tragedy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life was his wife Zelda’s descent into mental illness.

This magnificent biography chronicles their tumultuous relationship as well as Zelda’s upbringing, and how she became the perfect flapper, independent and even a little wild. While the story is drenched in sadness as we all know its ending, this book reveals the struggles of creative women to be respected and seen as individuals, not just appendages to their famous husbands.

It also illuminates Scott’s enduring love for Zelda. Even as he had an affair at the end of his life, he never abandoned his wife to public institutions, insisting she have the best care, no matter the expense, at private ones.

Even if there’s just a hint of something Italian in a story by the sea, I’m smiling. When you first meet Miss Posie Parker in this story, she’s wearing a scent reminiscent of Parma Violet, first distilled by the second wife of Napoleon I. For the next 300 pages, I couldn’t stop thinking about how wonderful Posie smells and how she must leave behind a whiff of her violet-scented perfume everywhere she goes a-sleuthing. Such a telling detail about a character and one that stayed with me as I tried in vain to solve the mystery.

This book was originally published in 1929 anonymously, because it was a scandal. The fact that a writer would write about a woman who has multiple affairs and is clearly promiscuous was unheard of, so the writer was protected with an anonymous publication.

I could not stop reading this incredible and seminal book for the main reason that the language is so fresh. It was unlike any other vintage or antique novel that I’ve read, and I’ve read a few, as I collect antique books. 

The main protagonist in the book is a woman, a woman writer who has recently been divorced by her husband, also a writer. The issues she writes about, as a woman, are utterly timeless. The scene where she admits she’s been unfaithful to her husband (they are both young and in their 20s) and he acts as if he doesn’t care, saying: “And I thought… show more.

Everybody loves this book because it, of course, has become an international classic of literature and one of the best works F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, which takes the reader on a time-traveling secretive world of the upper-class set in New England life in the 1920s.

In F. Scott's work, we are casually and comfortably introduced to an America where new money met old money, and the tender tightrope one had to walk in order to vie for position, marriage, and peer acceptance in a world founded on wealth and prestige.    

Technically a novel, but rooted so specifically in the details of Zelda’s life that her family members all recognized themselves and their town in her writing. A surrealist and poetic coming-of-age story written by the wife of Jazz Age writer F. Scott Fitzgerald during an eight-week period when she was living in a mental hospital. An imperfect and fascinating way to narrate a life.

This book made me fall in love with Puglia, the hot, dusty “heel of the boot” with its lemons, olives, and cactus, its boxy farmhouses. Not that the story, bouncing from Paris to New York to a long-gone Rome, doesn’t deliver—the narrator, Alina, talks about a family secret passed from woman to woman, disintegrating memories, a past she must understand before the movers arrive and the house with its mural of a naked woman painted on a patio wall is no longer theirs. Present and past, the known and the unknown combine, and all of it is tied to alluring, sensual Puglia. As a storyteller, Marciano demands your attention, painting the life story of a family whose Italy is unlike the one you think you know.

Many readers knowledgeable about the Jazz Age know about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s many novels, as well as his life.

This fictionalized account gives keen insight into his wife, Zelda. Read to discover the difficulties faced by a creative woman married to a celebrated man. In many ways, Zelda was a woman of her times, yet like so many women overshadowed by her husband.

Read about their scandalous lives—hers in some ways even more so than his.

I have so many reasons why this is one of my all-time favorite books. Berton’s descriptions of music, specifically jazz or music in general, are superb. Ralph Berton describes himself as a precocious 13-year-old (an understatement!), when in 1924 he meets Bix Beiderbecke, seven years his senior, and idolizes him. This relationship is a great part of the book’s charm. The Berton family—with its vaudeville background, two famous musical brothers (besides the child genius Ralph), and a Jewish mother—is another part of the appeal. But the heart of the book is his affectionate, penetrating portrait of Bix, derived from personal experience. He examines the myths and legends, sometimes debunking and sometimes reinforcing them. A magical, bittersweet book that often brought me to tears. Exceptional writing.

This book stands out from other historical mysteries near the sea because it is about a mystery on the high seas. On a steamship, to be exact, on its way to New York harbor. My mom was once a young Italian woman on a steamship sailing to Halifax, and while she was nothing like Fen Churche, the heroine in this story, I’ve always imagined my mom having lots of wild adventures on that Atlantic crossing. The way the author has woven this twisty, tricky tale, I could almost believe mom had an alter ego.