What phrase did F. Scott Fitzgerald popularize to describe the 1920s?

F. Scott Fitzgerald popularized the phrase “The Jazz Age” to describe the 1920s. The expression captured the decade’s fascination with jazz, nightlife, youth culture, dancing, consumer spending, and changing social rules.

The phrase was already in use before Fitzgerald adopted it, so he did not literally invent it. He helped make it widely recognizable through Tales of the Jazz Age, his 1922 collection of short stories. Fitzgerald later described the period in his 1931 essay “Echoes of the Jazz Age.”

The Jazz Age is closely associated with Prohibition, flappers, speakeasies, the Charleston, and the growing influence of Black American musicians from New Orleans and elsewhere. The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, became one of its defining literary portraits.

A common mix-up is “the Roaring Twenties,” which is another accepted name for the decade’s energetic mood. “The Gilded Age,” however, refers mainly to the late nineteenth century, while “the Lost Generation” describes a group of writers and their postwar disillusionment.