Roaring Twenties, the Boom. Wild economic prosperity, cultural flowering and a shaking up of social norms. A defining era for Fitzgerald as a writer. He saw the peak of his fame with the publication of The Great Gatsby in 1925, as his book perfectly captured the periods moods and styles. America was ready for peace and prosperity that the 20's brought. The booming stock market helped the huge growth in consumer spending, as investors saw their wealth (on paper) soar. This infusion of new money handed a new morality for the young social set. Less concerned with upholding the traditional values of past generations and more interested in individualism and modernism. Policy changes in the U.S. unwittingly encouraged this new culture. Prohibition drove America's drinking population into speakeasies, underground clubs where people could enjoy their booze and the newly popular jazz music. Sexual norms loosened. Youth-centric culture flourished. Styles changed with women's now bobbed hair, floor-length skirts were traded for the flapper dresses that live on today as Halloween costumes. women were given the right to vote through the nineteenth amendment, and (probably more important to Fitzgerald's fiction) the speakeasies were the first place in America where it became acceptable for a woman who wasn't a prostitute to drink and smoke in public. Fitzgerald lived from 1920 to 1921 with Zelda in New York City, which became the setting for the 1922 novel The Beautiful and Damned Fitzgerald moved to Paris in 1924 to join a growing community of American artists and writers drawn to France for its inexpensive cost of living, liberal sexual codes, great bars, numerous presses and magazines willing to publish them. Both Zelda and Fitzgerald drank heavily, him more than her, and fought viciously. Both flirted with other people. Zelda too, was creative, pursuing both dance and writing, but her unique personality was starting to seem more unbalanced than charming. The couple, like the rest of the nation were living on borrowed time. In October 1929 the stock market crashed, bringing around the Great Depression. Six months later, Zelda suffered her first nervous breakdown. Things would never be so good again, for Fitzgerald or for his characters. In Fitzgerald's 1931 story "Babylon Revisited," was published.

- The Jazz Age Research