Focusing on artists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Eugene O'Neill, Walter Winchell, Irving Berlin and Ernest Hemingway, this text is the story of the men and women who made New York the capital of American literature, music and language in the 1920s. Ann Douglas argues that when, after World War I, the US began to assume the economic and political leadership of the West, American artists and thinkers determined to break with what they saw as the false and derivative cultural tradition of Europe and the past. New York became the heart of daring and accomplished historical transformation when blacks and whites, men and women together created the new American culture.