than any other writer, especially in stories and articles looking back on the jazz age after it was over, who imposed on popular culture his image of America in the twenties as a society undergoing a kind of protracted adolescence and painfully plunged into maturity by the Depression of I929.

Writers in the twenties, including Fitzgerald himself, looked back on the prewar years as the period of lost youth, but in the Depression decade, the twenties themselves became an object of nostalgia. The decade of the twenties, according to Fitzgerald's valedictory account, was a time characterized by the "pathos of adolescence." It was therefore impossible to look back on the twenties without a mixture of yearning and embarrassment. As he wrote in Scribner's, in 1931,

Now once more the belt is tight, and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth. Sometimes, though, there is a ghostly rumble among the drums, an asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swings me back into the early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you didn't want to know said "Yes, we have no bananas," and it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were—and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.

This idealization of the twenties, even more than the twenties' own idealization of the prewar era as an age of innocence, marks a turning point in the history of nostalgia. For the first time, nostalgic sentiment—only recently named as such—directed itself not to generic images of childhood or to cultural symbols of childhood like the West or the small town but to a specific and carefully particularized period of historical time, a single decade at that. Those who lived during the twenties thought of themselves, at the time, as a bitterly disillusioned and cynical generation: but now, almost overnight, disillusionment and cynicism took on the

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