Hailed as an instant classic, this is Frederick Lewis Allen's vivid and definitive account of one of the twentieth century's most fascinating decades, chronicling a time of both joy and terror?when dizzying highs were quickly succeeded by heartbreaking lows.
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Background Information
Prohibition was the social experiment in the abolition of the human consumption of intoxicating alcohol between 1919 and 1933. Al Capone came to Chicago and took over the mob, organizing crime during Prohibition and becoming the nation's most notorious gangster. Warren Harding of Ohio promised a return to normalcy, which evidently meant corruption and complacency. The meteoric rise of the stock market during the 1920's came to an abrupt end during October 1929 in a sequence of declines known as the Great Crash. The decade of the 1920's introduced America to new freedoms and ways of thinking.