Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1896–1940)

Author(s):  
Erin Templeton

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American novelist, short-story writer, and cultural critic. Best-known for his 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, he coined the term "The Jazz Age" to refer to the riotous lifestyle of alcohol and excess that characterized the zeitgeist of the United States during the Roaring Twenties. Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was named after a well-known distant relative, Francis Scott Key, author of "The Star Spangled Banner." He attended but did not graduate from Princeton University, where he was a member of the Princeton Triangle club—a theater group dedicated to musical-comedy—and where he wrote for the literary magazine as well as the campus paper. During his time at Princeton Fitzgerald began work on what would eventually become his first novel, This Side of Paradise (then titled The Romantic Egoist). The energy devoted to such extracurricular activities took its toll on Fitzgerald’s coursework, and he dropped out of the university in 1917 to enlist in the United States Army. Fitzgerald was stationed in Alabama at Camp Sheridan but did not see combat in World War I. He was in New York awaiting deployment when the armistice was signed in 1918.

Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith ◽  
James K. Galbraith

This chapter examines the end of the international gold standard during World War I. The creation of the Federal Reserve System—with its idea of centralized banking carried out by twelve central banks—ended the United States's long struggle to perfect a sensible, conservative monetary system. Everywhere in the industrial countries money of whatever kind was now exchangeable, without pretense or delay, into gold. The chapter considers how the major industrial participants—Germany, France, Britain, Austria—suspended specie payments and went off the gold standard when World War I broke out; the dumping of securities on the New York market in the first nervous days of the war; the shutdown of the New York Stock Exchange; and how the United States eventually abandoned the gold standard. The increase in whole prices in the United States during all the war years is also discussed.


Author(s):  
Barbara McCloskey

George Grosz was a leading artist of Germany’s early 20th-century expressionist, Dada, and New Objectivity movements. His works from this period remain celebrated examples of the modernist avant-garde. Grosz began his career as a student at the Dresden Academy of Art in 1909. In 1912, he moved to Berlin, abandoned the academic rigor of his earlier work, and became part of the Expressionist avant-garde. His paintings and drawings soon adopted the fractured planes, vivid color, and psychologically troubled content of Expressionist art. Grosz became politically radicalized by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He helped to found Berlin Dada during the war years. His irreverent cut and paste Dada collages of this period assailed not only the concept of ‘‘art,’’ but also the vaunted notions of culture, militarism, and national pride that were part of a German social order Grosz had come to despise. At the end of World War I, Grosz joined the German Communist Party and became its leading artist. He fled to the United States in order to escape persecution after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933. Grosz settled in New York, where he pursued his art under the utterly changed circumstances of exile.


PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takayuki Tatsumi

Literary history has always mirrored discursive revolutions in world history. In the United States, the Jazz Age would not have seen the Herman Melville revival and the completion of Carl Van Doren's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–21) without the rise of post–World War I nativism. If it had not been for Pearl Harbor, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941) could not have fully aroused the democratic spirit embedded in the heritage of New Criticism. Likewise, the postcolonial and New Americanist climate around 1990, that critical transition at the end of the cold war, brought about the publication of Emory Elliott's The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988) and Sacvan Bercovitch's The Cambridge History of American Literature (1994–). I would like to question, however, the discourse that narrates American literary history in the globalist age of the twenty-first century.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel S. Chertow ◽  
Rongman Cai ◽  
Junfeng Sun ◽  
John Grantham ◽  
Jeffery K. Taubenberger ◽  
...  

Abstract Background.  Surveillance for respiratory diseases in domestic National Army and National Guard training camps began after the United States’ entry into World War I, 17 months before the “Spanish influenza” pandemic appeared. Methods.  Morbidity, mortality, and case-fatality data from 605 625 admissions and 18 258 deaths recorded for 7 diagnostic categories of respiratory diseases, including influenza and pneumonia, were examined over prepandemic and pandemic periods. Results.  High pandemic influenza mortality was primarily due to increased incidence of, but not increased severity of, secondary bacterial pneumonias. Conclusions.  Two prepandemic incidence peaks of probable influenza, in December 1917–January 1918 and in March–April 1918, differed markedly from the September–October 1918 pandemic onset peak in their clinical-epidemiologic features, and they may have been caused by seasonal or endemic viruses. Nevertheless, rising proportions of very low incidence postinfluenza bronchopneumonia (diagnosed at the time as influenza and bronchopneumonia) in early 1918 could have reflected circulation of the pandemic virus 5 months before it emerged in pandemic form. In this study, we discuss the possibility of detecting pandemic viruses before they emerge, by surveillance of special populations.


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