There is no formal, acknowledged genre known as “flapper fiction.” There is no collection of contemporary short stories from the 1920s dedicated entirely to The Flapper – which is surprising given how central a figure she is to our conception of the 1920s. There are of course Jazz Age collections, and collections of New Woman stories, and edited collections of F. Scott Fitzgerald wherein flappers play a large part — including his own Flappers and Philosophers (1920) but there is no collection of stories dealing exclusively with flappers... until now.
The cover of Where All Good Flappers Go, Pushkin Press, 2023
I’m happy to break this blog’s long, long, too long hiatus with the announcement of my edited collection of flapper fiction: “Where All Good Flappers Go”: Essential Stories of the Jazz Age, coming out June 2023 from Pushkin Press. The collection will of course include Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as Anita Loos, a dazzling short-short from Dorothy Parker, and an early story by Dawn Powell but the bulk of the collection will feature authors who are long forgotten and ripe for recovery/discovery: Viña Delmar, Katharine Brush, Dana Ames, John Watts, and Guy Gilpatric, as well as stories by African American writers Rudolph Fisher, Gertrude Schalk, and Zora Neale Hurston. All of the stories are sourced from their original appearance in magazines or literary supplements of the day.
Chorus girls were one of the many flapper “types” often featured in flapper fiction. They were perhaps the most extreme example of how flapperdom was performative and how flappers traded upon their spectacle and sexuality for economic empowerment at a time when education and job opportunities for women were growing but still limited (especially by class and race). This also explains the popular 1920s trope of the Gold Digger.
But what exactly is flapper fiction? Rather than offer a singular reductive and confining definition, I would prefer to offer a list of attributes, for trying to pigeon hole thousands of stories and hundreds of novels into a neat generic definition is disingenuous if not downright impossible. Flapper fiction is popular fiction, written during the long 1920s (1917-1934) that concerns the dynamics of modernity embodied in or around a flapper female protagonist (or the relationship between female and male protagonist). These “dynamics of modernity” can include the clash between new and old-fashioned morality or younger and older generations, urban vs rural space and women learning how to navigate the urban space, changing gender roles and expectations, the female urban workforce (and all the dangers/benefits it promises), coming of age or sexual/economic empowerment, high/low class and cultural aspirations/tensions, and the promises / dangers of the female as spectacle (usually due to navigating some of these tensions). Settings range from country clubs to night clubs, but most invariably take place in New York City – a place of both opportunity and hostility. Protagonists fall into a number of types: debutantes; women of the emergent work force such as phone operators, stenographers, or shop girls; models; chorus girls; or gold diggers. Stories can be celebratory of youth culture and its new-found freedoms or conservatively bemoan the decline of the younger generations. Most of the stories sizzle with cocktails, jazz, snappy dialogue, and the energy of the jazz age 1920s.
We can look to Where All Good Flappers Go for illustrations of the kinds of stories that make up the genre:
Zelda Fitzgerald’s “What Became of the Flappers?” (McCall’s Magazine, October 1925) starts the collection and acts as a kind of introduction and definition of flapperdom. Her definition though is somewhat restrictive since it is based upon her own experience: for Zelda, flappers were debutantes rebelling against the class restrictions of proper behavior. Later, flapperdom became much more populist as America modernized and (largely urban) women began enjoying the cultural and social freedom of the 1920s.
Dana Ames’ “The Clever Little Fool” (Snappy Stories, June 1926): a lost flapper story by a forgotten author. Originally published in Snappy Stories magazine (a lost magazine of the Jazz Age – a “flapper pulp,” if you will), it concerns a flapper’s shock at finding a grey hair and the ensuing social pressures to marry. There is no biographical info on Ames; she is one of the hundreds of unknown writers of the pulps. She wrote a few dozen stories, mostly for Snappy Stories. My research has turned up a Dana Ames in Chicago – a coed, debutante, and nurse – who could be the author since a few of the published stories have Chicago settings and she stops publishing at just about the same time the real Ames married (Snappy Stories and the pulps’ reputation was such that it may not have been seen as a proper hobby), but there is no guarantee they are the same person so I stop short of making this claim (but will continue to pursue this for a future blog post).
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs her Hair” (Saturday Evening Post, May 1920) – the classic flapper story about a girl who learns to be modern and attractive, but at a cost. There were a few other, lesser known FSF stories I was considering but really, this one is essential.
Rudolph Fisher’s “Common Meter” (Pittsburgh Courier, Feb., 1930) is a real jazz story of the Harlem Renaissance about a band leader’s battle for the love of the new hostess. It features an epic battle of the bands like those that helped make the Savoy Ballroom famous. The story has been reprinted before, but in two of the three instances, its original ending was left off. It has been replaced here.
The original illustration for “Something for Nothing” From Snappy Stories, June 1925.
John Watts’ “Something for Nothing” (Snappy Stories, June 1925) is a story about a poor Southern girl looking for work as a model in NYC in order to find a millionaire husband – and get all the things she had seen and dreamt about in magazines. Its plot twist revolves around alcohol in true Prohibition fashion. Watts was a reporter from the Florida Keys who worked for a time in New York and Washington D.C. He published over 30 stories in the pulps between 1921 and 1944, usually in magazines such as Snappy Stories and Breezy Stories.
Dorothy Parker’s “The Mantle of Whistler” (New Yorker, Aug. 1928) is an acerbic send-up of the snappy “patter” or “line” that marks so much dialogue in flapper fiction (for example, it is what the heroine of “Berenice Bobs Her Hair” needs to learn in order to be socially attractive).
Katharine Brush’s “Night Club” (Harper’s Magazine, September, 1927) is a tour de force by an unfairly forgotten author. In it, an older dressing room matron of a busy night club caters to a parade of young flappers, sneering at them while dreaming of her own escape. Brush would go on to become a bestselling author with Young Man of Manhattan (1930) and was a big name in popular slick magazines, though she got her start in the pulps.
Gertrude Schalk’s “The Chicago Kid” (National News, March 1932) is about a chorus girl in a Harlem nightclub who aspires for a white millionaire. It is one of a seven-part serial of stories that take place at the Green Parrot nightclub, each highlighting a different girl. Schalk was a prolific writer for the pulp magazines, writing for the love pulps but also for The Shadow. She reserved her African American fiction for Black newspapers like George Schuyler’s National News. Also known as Toki, she became the social editor for the Pittsburgh Courier, a major African American newspaper.
“And Let this be a lesson to you—”
The original illustration for Gertrude Schalk’s “The Chicago Kid,” from the National News, 1932.
Dawn Powell’s “Not the Marrying Kind” (Snappy Stories, March 1927) features a successful flapper real estate agent whose modern behavior drives her beau into the arms of a women intent upon marriage. This is one of many stories Powell wrote for the pulps (I’ve written about them in an earlier blog post here), which are a revelation for those more familiar with her later novels. This is the first of her 1920s stories to have been republished.
The illustration and leader for “Thou Shalt Not Killjoy,” Snappy Stories, December 1923.
Viña Delmar’s “Thou Shalt Not Killjoy” (Snappy Stories, December 1923) is about a young flapper’s quest to reform her uptight, too moral reformer fiancé – the head of a watch and ward society. A magazine much like Snappy Stories helps her out. Delmar, who rocketed to fame with her novel Bad Girl in 1928, was one of Snappy Stories favorite authors, writing over 75 stories and having a column of her own. See my blog post about Delmar and Snappy Stories here at the New York 1920s website.
Guy Gilpatric’s “The Bride of Ballyhoo” (College Humor, January 1929) features a wing walking flapper, a queen of self-promotion. This story really highlights the spectacular tendencies of flapperdom – how flappers reveled in their performative nature. Gilpatric is best know as an author of aviation stories and the Colin Glencannon stories in the Saturday Evening Post. College Humor is an often-overlooked magazine of 1920s youth culture which published some of the major authors of the time, including Zelda Fitzgerald.
The illustration for Guy Gilpatric’s story about a fearless flapper wing walker, “The Bride of Ballyhoo,” from College Story, January 1929.
Anita Loos’s “Why Girls Go South” (Harper’s Bazaar, January 1926) is a little-known non-Lorelei Lee story that simultaneously makes fun of a degenerate New York old money family at war with their flapper daughter and fashion magazines, even while originally appearing in one. Whereas this is the first part of a three-part novella, it stands alone.
Zora Neale Hurston’s “Monkey Junk” (Pittsburgh Courier, March 1927) is a hilarious riff the 1920s trope of the well-publicized divorce case. Like many of these stories, it features a gold-digging protagonist, which brings into relief the limited opportunities available to women (especially those of color) and the way the flapper parlayed sex appeal into economic power.
In future blog posts I’ll go into greater detail as to the stories, authors, and source material for Where All Good Flappers Go. But I thought I’d end up this post with a bit of English Professor soap-boxing, and discuss the overall idea of “Flapper Fiction.”
We don’t often think of “flapper fiction” as a genre, and this is due, I think, to a few factors, the first of which is because literary history is for the most part lazy; it always falls back on the same few texts and authors that have been canonized. This is why flapper fiction is for the most part restricted to F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Hemingway’s Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises or Faulkner’s Temple Drake in Sanctuary. More recently (and happily), Nella Larson’s Passing has joined the ranks. But these instances are just a small percentage of a much, much larger body of flapper fiction that filled the newsstands and best-seller lists between, roughly, the late 1910s and early 1930s. In fact, it can be argued that Fitzgerald, who was an astute reader of the magazine market (as were Hemingway and Faulkner), was tapping in to a much larger existing genre of popular literature; that Parker’s stories and vignettes are often reacting to and commenting upon flapper tropes that stemmed from popular literature (“The Mantle of Whistler,” for example); that Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was itself a satire of popular confessionals of the day. In other words, much of the literature that has become synonymous with the flapper is actually part of and a reaction to a larger existing genre, largely ignored.
The second reason that this genre has been ignored is that it was, by and large, popular fiction and as such doesn’t conform to the literary standards that were established by an academy that relied upon the dynamics of modernism as (among other things) a substantiation of their own literary tastes and professional position. I am of course being reductive here in describing the dynamics of canonization, but the fact remains that the reading material for millions and the work of hundreds of authors, many of whom enjoyed popularity in their time, goes unstudied because it doesn’t conform to the dynamics for close reading established (largely for political reasons) by New Criticism in the mid-20th century (i.e. symbolism, historical tradition, mythic qualities, etc.). Much flapper fiction was published in magazines which were, by and large, concerned with specific formulae, or was written by women authors who were, by and large, ignored until the culture wars of the 1970s. Add to this that much flapper fiction was also working class, whether by subject matter or readership, and you have a combination that ensured the genre’s exclusion from literary history.
It is this exclusion that I hope Where All Good Flappers Go will repair.