Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early ‘Vanity Fair’

Billing itself as the “modern magazine” of the Jazz Age, Vanity Fair showcased writers as varied as Dorothy Parker and John Maynard Keynes in its early days. This fantastic anthology goes from 1913 to 1936 and features 72 essays, poems, and profiles, with very few duds. The topics covered include art, sports, drugs, and New York nightlife, as well as suffrage and Prohibition. The essays convey the era’s mood; the aftermath of the stock market crash registers particularly vividly. Meanwhile, the celebrity profiles, of the likes of Joan Crawford, Cole Porter, and Babe Ruth, come across as snappy time capsules of contemporary pop culture’s prehistory. The arch tone of the magazine’s humor is conveyed by Stephen Leacock’s “Are the Rich Happy?”, e.e. cummings’s “When Calvin Coolidge Laughed,” and Noël Coward’s parody “Memoirs of Court Favorites.” The chronological arrangement of selections results in some serendipitous juxtapositions—for instance, Walter Lippmann’s prescient essay on publicity is followed by columnist Walter Winchell’s “Primer on Broadway Slang.” At its best, as in Sherwood Anderson’s piece on the U.S. sesquicentennial, “Hello, Big Boy,” and Aldous Huxley’s striking “What, Exactly, Is Modern?” this volume epitomizes the idea of modernity in American cultural life before the Second World War. [em](Nov.) [/em]