The Inter-War Years:

The time between the end of World War I (1919) and the beginning of World War II

(1939)

1920-1938

We’ll be reading material from this time period… here are

some of the major events that defined the inter-war years, both

in literature and history:

The Roaring 20’s

The Roaring 20’s, also called the Jazz Age, was a time of great change.

• Jazz music originated in New Orleans and soon became popular all through the country.

• The first “talkie” (talking picture) The Jazz Singer was released in 1928.

• Actors began to achieve royalty status, and soon dominated pop culture.

A few 1920’s actors…

Mary Pickford Greer Garson

Mary Miles Minter

Tom Mix

The 1920’s was also a time of great liberation for women.

• The 19th Amendment was passed in 1919, granting women the right to vote.

• Birth control became more widely accepted.

• By 1930, 15% of women were employed.

Flappers

• A “flapper” was a new breed of young woman who wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, listened to the “new” jazz music, and showed their disdain for “acceptable behavior.”

• The flappers were seen as brash for wearing excessive makeup, drinking, treating sex in a casual manner, smoking, and driving automobiles.

Alice Joyce ?

During the inter-war years, the automobile also became more affordable.

The Ford Turnabout went for $265 in 1920. The minimum wage for that year was $ 0.33.

Airplanes also became a significant part of American life.

Other important events of the inter-war years…

• Spanish Civil War (1931-1939)

• The League of Nations is formed: a coalition of nations that tried to prevent future wars.

• Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, which was the first major step in his rise to power.

• FDR creates New Deal policies

The Great Depression 1920-1940• The Great Depression was a worldwide economic

downturn that started in 1929. It originated in the US on October 29th, 1929, on a day called “Black Tuesday”—when the stock market crashed.

• The “Dust Bowl” was the name for a period of time (1930-1936) during the Depression. The Dust Bowl was the product of a severe drought, which caused the land to dry up, and this combined with high winds, resulting in giant dust storms that sometimes extended across state lines.

• This caused an exodus from the Midwest, and many of those migrants traveled West in search of work.

Dust Bowl

A dust storm approaching Stratford, Texas

Buried machinery in a barnyard after a dust storm

Migrant Workers

• Dorothea Lange was an influential American photographer that is best known for her Depression-era work.

• Her photos humanized the tragic consequences of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.

~Dorothea LangeMigrant Mother

Hoe Cutter

Toward Los Angeles

White Angel Breadline, San Francisco

Mississippi Cotton Patch

Feeling Low in Toppenish by Dorothea Lange

535-07-5248 and Wife

Big Brother

The Farmer’s Wife by John Vachon

Important Authors of the Inter-War years: The “Lost Generation”

• The "Lost Generation" defines a sense of moral loss or aimlessness apparent in literary figures during the 1920s. World War I seemed to have destroyed the idea that if you acted virtuously, good things would happen. Many good, young men went to war and died, or returned home either physically or mentally wounded (for most, both), and their faith in the moral guideposts that had earlier given them hope, were no longer valid...they were "Lost."

• Ezra Pound wrote a series of 100 poems called Cantos.• T.S. Eliot was a poet and playwright who is best known

for the epic poem “The Waste Land.”• Langston Hughes was an African American poet,

novelist and playwright.• Robert Frost is best known for his poetry (“The Road

Not Taken”).• F. Scott Fitzgerald: Wrote The Great Gatsby, a popular

novel about society and hypocrisy in the 1920’s.• Ernest Hemingway: Wrote The Sun Also Rises and A

Farewell to Arms, two of the most famous American novels of all time.

• Gertrude Stein, an American writer, coined the phrase “The Lost Generation,” and also said, "Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."

In conclusion…

• We’ll be reading a novel, short stories, poems and journals from this era.

• As we discuss and read literature from the inter-war years, remember all of the social, economic and political changes that took place. The literature of that time is borne from and reflects all of those changes.

• The first piece of literature that we’ll be reading for this unit is War of the Worlds, which was written in 1898, but achieved fame again in 1938 when the story was broadcast as actual breaking news.