Books About the 1920s for Gatsby Lovers
If you’ve ever wished you could transport yourself to one of Gatsby’s parties, you’re not alone. (We’re guilty of it, too.) But while we can’t hop in a time machine, the next best thing is reading a book that makes you feel like you’re there — drinking gin and dancing the Charleston. This collection brings you into the glittering world of 1920s Paris, Chicago, Harlem, London, and more. Known as the Jazz Age, the Harlem Renaissance, the roaring twenties, and the prohibition era, the 1920s were full of mystique, glamor, and, well, lots of stories about love and murder. It was quite the time to be alive, and now is the time to read about it.
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Add to BookshelfThe Ghosts of Eden Park
by Karen Abbott
If you love The Great Gatsby and true crime, you surely won’t be able to put this book down. The Ghosts Of Eden Park is an epic true crime story of the most successful bootlegger in American history and the murder that shocked the nation. Abbott, a New York Times bestselling author, invites you into the early days of prohibition in what Erik Larson calls “Gatsby-era noir at its best.” Full of drama and mystery that illustrates the excesses and absurdities of the Jazz Age, this is an unforgettable, stranger-than-fiction story based on 1920s history. You won’t regret picking up this prohibition-age page-turner.
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Trust
by Hernan Diaz
Trust brings the drama and leaves you captivated by its deception. This is the tale of how a legendary Wall Street tycoon and the daughter of eccentric aristocrats rose to the top of the wealthy elite — and how that ultimately brought their life of excess to a close. Vanity Fair said it best, calling their story “a genre-bending, time-skipping story about New York City’s elite in the roaring ’20s and Great Depression.” Yes, please. Diaz does wonders with this book, and it’s no wonder that it has gone on to win multiple awards, including being named one of the best books of 2022.
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The Paris Wife
by Paula McLain
Jump into the dazzling world of 1920s Paris as you uncover the love story between Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair leaves Chicago for Paris and becomes the golden couple in a lively (and volatile) group. While deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill-prepared for the hard-drinking, fast-living, and free-loving life of Jazz Age Paris. It’s no wonder this heartbreaking portrayal of love and torn loyalty became a New York Times bestseller. Read this to discover why Hemingway wrote that we would have rather died than fall in love with anyone but Hadley.
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Shrines of Gaiety
by Kate Atkinson
In Shrines of Gaiety, Kate Atkinson offers us a window into the vanished world of Jazz Age London. You will be immediately transported into a restless London in the wake of the Great War — a city bursting with money, glamor, and corruption. In this spellbinding tale of seduction and betrayal, you’ll be led by Nellie Coker, the notorious queen of this glittering world whose ambition is to advance her six children. Along the way, you meet gangsters, starlets, and foreign dignitaries and discover both the sparkle of Soho’s gaiety and its dark underbelly. Named Book Of The Year three times, Time calls it “a deliciously fun, absorbing read.”
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Gods of Jade and Shadow
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The Jazz Age is in full swing in Gods of Jade and Shadow, but for our heroine, the music is about to come to a stop. Moreno-Garcia writes a story about the Mayan god of death who sends a young woman on a harrowing, life-changing journey in a dark, one-of-a-kind fairy tale inspired by Mexican folklore. You’ll follow Casiopea on her odyssey from the jungles of Yucatán to the bright lights of Mexico City — and to the depths of the Mayan underworld. According to Bustle’s review, it’s a fairy tale, “like nothing you’ve read before.” After all, who said fairy tales aren’t for adults?
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The Beautiful and Damned
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Beautiful and Damned is a 1920s classic, and it’s also Fitzgerald’s second book (written just before The Great Gatsby). Here, Fitzgerald introduces you to would-be Jazz Age aristocrats Anthony and Gloria Patch, who embody the corrupt high society of 1920s New York City. The pair is beautiful, shallow, pleasure-seeking, and vain, and their story is one of endless drinking, dancing, luxury, and play … until an expected inheritance is withheld. Read this book to transport yourself into a city steeped in vice, a society without any direction, and get to know the rootless and decadent generation that inhabited it.
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The Jazz Palace
by Mary Morris
You’re cordially invited to enter Boomtown Chicago — a world of gangsters, musicians, and clubs in the 1920s. In The Jazz Palace, you follow Young Benny Lehrman, who is expected to take over his father’s hat-making business, but his true passion is piano — especially jazz. On one of the nights he sneaks out to the South Side to hear bands play, he meets a trumpeter, a black man named Napoleon, who quickly becomes Benny’s friend and musical collaborator. The duo navigates the highs and the lows of the Jazz Age, mob bosses and all, in what the Chicago Tribune called an “eyes-wide-open look at Chicago before and during Prohibition.”
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Flapper
by Joshua Zeitz
Who were the flappers? Think: puffing cigarettes, sneaking gin, hiking hemlines, dancing the Charleston, and necking in roadsters, and you’ve got Flapper. In this book, you go from an Alabama country club (where Zelda Sayre first caught the eye of F. Scott Fitzgerald) to the Manhattan speakeasies, where patrons partied until dawn. You’ll also hear the story of America’s first sexual revolution, its first merchants of cool, its first celebrities, and its most sparkling advertisement for the right to pursue happiness. Written by historian Joshua Zeitz, Flapper is a historical look into the marvelous world of the 1920s — and the women who launched the first truly modern decade.
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Jazz
by Toni Morrison
Jazz is a passionate, profound story of love and obsession that brings you back and forth in time, as the story’s narrative takes its cue from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of Black urban life. Full of Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison’s rich and poetic language, Glamour magazine remarks on how Morrison “conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem’s jazz generation” and noted that “the more you listen, the more you crave to hear.” So, what exactly happens when a middle-aged door-to-door salesperson shoots his teenage lover to death? You’ll have to read Jazz to find out.
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The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
You can’t have a list of books about the 1920s without Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Set in the early 1920s in Paris, you meet Jake, a wounded World War I veteran working as a journalist who’s in love with charismatic British socialite Lady Brett Ashley. And yet, Brett settles for no one, and all she wants out of life is a good time. Full of passion, flirtation, jealousy, tension, and even bullfights, this story has it all. It’s also Hemingway’s first novel and lauded as a tale of the decadent youth who gave up trying to make sense of a senseless world in the disaffected postwar era.
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Blues Poems
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Add poetry to your 1920s journey with Blues Poems, the first anthology devoted exclusively to blues poems. The blues itself traveled the country from the Mississippi delta to “Sweet Home Chicago” and formed the backbone of American music. From Langston Hughes to W. H. Auden to Marilyn Chin to June Jordan, in Blues Poems, you’ll uncover the blues-influenced and blues-inflected poems that have made an indelible mark on history. Bless your bookshelf with this classic that pays tribute to both blues and poetry and offers a testimony to their lasting power.
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Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin
by Marion Meade
Go inside the glittering lives of four extraordinary writers — Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edna Ferber — whose experiences and love stories embodied the spirit of the 1920s. With a mix of social history and scandal, you’ll get a peek into how these literary heroines made their own rules, and meet the men who influenced them, loved them, and, alas, betrayed them. One reviewer notes how “if Dorothy Parker had written an episode of Sex and the City, the result would be Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin.” And just like that, it’s worth a read.
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Dead Dead Girls
by Nekesa Afia
Dead Dead Girls is the first novel in a historical mystery series set during the Harlem Renaissance. Louise Lloyd is determined to do everything she can to maintain a normal life (even after a harrowing kidnapping ordeal when she was in her teens), and with her group of friends and her job at a popular speakeasy, she’s succeeding. But when a girl turns up dead in front of the bar and an altercation with a police officer gets her arrested, Louise is given an ultimatum: help solve the case or wind up in jail. You’ll fly through these pages (and then you can read the next book in the series).
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A Drinkable Feast
by Philip Greene
Pair all of the titles above with A Drinkable Feast. Winner of the 13th Annual Spirited Award, this book reveals the history of more than 50 cocktails: who was imbibing them, where they were made famous, and how to make them yourself. Think of it as a history of the Lost Generation in the 1920s told through the lens of the cocktails they loved. Filled with anecdotes and photos of the major players, you’ll feel as if you were there — drinking cocktails with the greats in Parisian cafes and bars.
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