The “Jazz Age”

Some of America’s finest novelists began to write in the 1920s, or the “Jazz Age”, as this decade is sometimes termed. Older authors such as Theodore Dreiser and Ellen Glasgow were still writing, but new authors wrote with new attitudes and styles. Most of the serious novelists critically analyzed American society and ways of life and tried to depict Americans as they really were. F. Scott Fitzgerald caught the restless spirit of the 1920s in his The Great Gatsby. Ernest Hemingway depicted war and disillusionment in his The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. With his direct, unadorned style and forceful dialogue, Hemingway set a pattern for much future American literature. Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, satirized the American businessman and small town in his Main Street and Babbitt. His style was mediocre, but his work vividly dissected a large section of American life