Constellation of Genius

Constellation of Genius

1922: Modernism and All That Jazz

Summary

1922. The spectacular year that F. Scott Fitzgerald chose as a backdrop for his most famous novel The Great Gatsby. It was also the year where James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land were published, Alfred Hitchcock directed his first feature, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Louis Armstrong took the train from New Orleans to Chicago and made Jazz the defining music of the age, and Hollywood transformed the nature of fame.

Constellation of Genius is the gloriously entertaining journey through the diaries of the actors, anthropologists, artists, dancers, designers, film-makers, philosophers, playwrights, politicians and scientists whose lives and works collided over twelve months, creating a frenzy of innovation and the beginning of a new era.

Reviews

  • Constellation of Genius is an insanely readable book about modernism. Indeed, I think it no disservice to Jackson to say that this is the primer the subject has been looking for: a way into its symbolic labyrinth for even the most literal-minded
    Will Self, Guardian

About the author

Kevin Jackson

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