Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties

“A fast-paced portrait of the twentieth-century’s fizziest decade, replete with gangsters, flappers, speakeasies and jazz” (Kirkus Reviews).

The glitter of 1920s America was seductive, from jazz, flappers, and wild all-night parties to the birth of Hollywood and a glamorous gangster-led crime scene flourishing under Prohibition. But the period was also punctuated by momentous events-the political show trials of Sacco and Vanzetti, the huge Ku Klux Klan march down Washington DC’s Pennsylvania Avenue-and it produced a dizzying array of writers, musicians, and film stars, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Bessie Smith and Charlie Chaplin. In Anything Goes, Lucy Moore interweaves the stories of the compelling people and events that characterized the decade to produce a gripping portrait of the Jazz Age. She reveals that the Roaring Twenties were more than just “the years between wars.” It was an epoch of passion and change—an age, she observes, not unlike our own.

“A varied and dazzling portrait gallery of crooks and film stars, boxers and presidents, each brilliantly delineated and colored in by a historian with a novelist’s relish for human foibles.” —The Sunday Times (London)

“Mesmerizing . . . Like the champagne-immersed age she portrays, Moore’s book effervesces with the detail of this fascinating story.” —Juliet Nicholson, Evening Standard (UK)

“What a decade it was! What goings-on more violent, subversive and exotic than any of the parties, japes or shenanigans of our own Bright Young Things . . . Moore has knitted the various diverse strands together impressively with an overview of the large cast of characters, events, attitudes, industries and statistics.” —Anne de Courcy, Daily Mail (UK)

“Full of anecdote, detail and color. . . . Fluid and elegant.” —Marianne Brace, Independent (UK)