Art and Literature and Lifestyle in the 1920s
Contemporary art and literature reflected the social, economic, and political climate of the time period. Writers including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, H.L. Mencken, and Sinclair Lewis wrote contemporary fiction. Mencken and Lewis discredited politics in their work and ridiculed the modern middle class. Fitzgerald wrote about the lives of the wealthy and materialistic and Hemingway told stories of lost love and war-torn times.
American painters explored the same topics as writers. They painted the “realness” of the cities and towns and their work was part of the realism genre. John Sloan’s work portrayed urban slums and Edward Hopper’s work portrayed the distinctiveness of the modern city and modern city dweller.
The modern high school also transformed between 1900 and 1930. Youths spent more time with their peers. The modern youth culture became more rebellious and tested traditional norms in dress, speech, and leisure activity. A popular culture emerged as movies, newspapers, and radio allowed young people exposure to cultural trends that imitated the social and political climate.
Hearst advertisement
Mass media outlets including movies, radio, newspapers, and magazines evolved during the latter years of the Progressive Era and the 1920s. Information and entertainment could be broadcast to large amounts of people quickly. Nickelodeons (early movie theaters that showed movies at a cheap price) had grown and movie theaters began to show silent films.
By 1927, the first movie with sound, “The Jazz Singer,” was released. By 1930, close to 90 million people were attending movies each week, allowing movies made in Los Angeles, California to have a national audience. Newspaper circulation also increased. Publishers, including William Randolph Hearst, would purchase newspapers in cities across the country. Newspapers provided newsworthy information and entertainment, and chains distributed papers to larger shares of the market.
Few homes had radios before 1920. Between 1920 and 1930, however, almost 14 million homes had purchased radios for their households. Radios became commercial in 1920 when manufacturer Westinghouse broadcast music and sports scores to see what would happen. By 1922 more than 500 individual stations began broadcasting across the United States. Networks such as the National Broadcasting System began offering their programming on groups of stations across the country to gain access to a larger share of the market.