Literature Historical Overview-People-(2025-2026)

People in the Historical Overview of the 2025-2026 Literature Study Guide.

Francis Cugat

The illustrator of the cover of the Great Gatsby.

Baz Luhrmann

The director of the blockbuster 2013 adaption of the Great Gatsby. (Stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan.

Greil Marcus

Cultural Critic. The Great Gatsby has become part of America’s “iconographic lingua franca”.

Al Capone and John Dillinger

Gangsters of the 1920s

Warren G. Harding (presidency: 1920-23) and Calvin Coolidge (presidency: 1923-29)

Two consistent presidency’s of the 1920s.

Claude McKay

Author of Home to Harlem. Details complex and violent lives of African Americans and immigrants in New York City.

John Dos Passos

Author of Manhattan Transfer. Details complex and violent lives of African Americans and immigrants in New York City. Bootlegging is an important plot point. Wrote with nonlinear, cinematic, and journalistic storytelling techniques.

Nella Larsen

Author of Passing. Details complex and violent lives of African Americans and immigrants in New York City.

Edith Wharton

Author of Age of Innocence. Details the lives of the city’s wealthy upper class.

Peter Gregg Slater

Points out the 1920s were also “the time of the reborn Ku Klux Klan, immigration restriction legislation, and the pseudo-scientific racism of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard [as well as] one of the periods when concern about ethnicity was most evident on the surface of national life.”

Dashiell Hammett

Author of The Thin Man. Bootlegging is an important plot point.

J. Edgar Hoover

Part of the FBI. Pressured Hollywood to portray bootleggers as villains.

James Cagney

Stars as Tom Powers, a gangster in The Public Enemy.

Carrie Chapman Catt

Leads the League of Women Voters.

Joshua Zeits

Argues that understanding the flapper will help us understand the period itself. “Her story is the story of America in the 1920s—the first ‘modern decade,’ when everyday life came under the full sway of mass media, celebrity, and consumerism.” While “the flapper faithfully represented millions of young women in the Jazz Age, she was also a character type, fully contrived by the nation’s first ‘merchants of cool.’”

Paula S. Fass

Argues that flapper fashion choices were about freedom and choice. She was excessive but on her own terms.

Lois Long

Wrote as “Lipstick” for the New York Times. Wrote about the lives of flappers who knew dances such as the Charleston, the Black Bottom, and the Foxtrot.

Dorothy Parker

Critic, poet, most famous humorist. Wrote the poem “The Flapper”.

Emma Goldman

Fought for greater protections of working class women.

Margaret Sanger

Fought for the right to birth control. Controversial for her open discussions of women’s bodies and their medical needs.

Angelina Weld Grimké

Wrote the play Rachel with a protagonist who openly decides to not have children.

Samuel A. Floyd

Wrote “The Renaissance was an effort to secure economic, social, and cultural equality with white citizens, and the arts were to be used as a means of achieving that goal.”

Michael Broyles

Describes jazz as a mixture of genres. “Musically, early jazz was a stylistic synthesis of many elements—blues, ragtime, brass bands and their marches, gospel, and a little Tin Pan Alley.”

Mamie Smith and “Mississippi” John Hurt

Sang in nontraditional, expressive ways about growing up impoverished.

Richard A. Long

Music historian. The blues were a musical form with a recognizable shape and sound but also a “musical ethos” or a way of thinking about the purpose of art.

Gertrude Stein

Poet who wrote with “pure” language and didn’t use traditional narrative and representational strategies.

Ernest Hemingway

Rejected overly descriptive writing of Victorian and naturalistic writers.

T. S. Eliot

Author of The Waste Land, the most influential piece of modernist writing. Used “collage and disjunction, free verse, an unsentimental impersonality, and a dense web of references to both high and low culture”.