The Roaring 20s and the Harlem Renaissance

This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of three extraordinary events. The Harlem Renaissance became a national phenomenon in 1925, and it was also the year F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby and Edward Christopher Williams released his novel, When Washington Was in Vogue. In 1925, the Jazz Age was in full swing, flappers were challenging long-held gender norms, and artists, writers, and musicians were producing work that we still admire today. Join Eve Dunbar (Vassar College) and Adam McKible (John Jay College of Criminal Justice) for a discussion of the Roaring Twenties and a comparative look at two of the era’s most compelling novels.

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. First published by Scribner in 1925, this quintessential novel of the Jazz Age has been acclaimed by generations of readers. The story of the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.

When Washington Was in Vogue

Nearly lost after its anonymous publication in 1926 and only recently rediscovered, When Washington Was in Vogue is an acclaimed love story written and set during the Harlem Renaissance. When bobbed-hair flappers were in vogue and Harlem was hopping, Washington, D.C., did its share of roaring, too.

Davy Carr, a veteran of the Great War and a new arrival in the nation's capital, is welcomed into the drawing rooms of the city's Black elite. Through letters, Davy regales an old friend in Harlem with his impressions of race, politics, and the state of Black America as well as his own experiences as an old-fashioned bachelor adrift in a world of alluring modern women.

With an introduction by Adam McKible and commentary by Emily Bernard, this novel, a timeless love story wonderfully enriched with the drama and style of one of the most hopeful moments in African American history, is as "delightful as it is significant" (Essence).

Adam McKible

Adam McKible is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is the author of Circulating Jim Crow (2024) and The Space and Place of Modernism: The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York (2002). He edited and introduced Edward Christopher Williams’s When Washington Was in Vogue (2004), a previously lost novel of the Harlem Renaissance, and he co-edited the collection, Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (2005). 

Eve Dunbar

Eve Dunbar is an English professor at Rice University (TX). She is the author of Monstrous Work and Radical Satisfaction: African American Women Writing Under Slavery (U of Minnesota Press, 2024), Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers Between the Nation and the World, and co-editor of African American Literature in Transition: 1930-1940.