Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhatten in the 1920s

“Terrible Honesty” is a portrait of the soul of a generation, the story of the men and women who made New York the capital of American literature, music, and language in the 1920s. Ann Douglas’s magnificent account of “mongrel Manhattan” focuses especially on brilliant and diverse artists – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Eugene O’Neill, Walter Winchell, Ernest Hemingway and Irving Berlin among them – and on those who influenced them most strongly, the powerful figures of Sigmund Freud, William James and Gertrude Stein. Ann Douglas argues that when, after World War I, the United States began to assume the economic and political leadership of the West, American artists and thinkers determined to break with what they saw as the false and derivative cultural tradition of Europe and the past. New York became the heart of that daring and accomplished historical transformation when blacks and whites, men and women together created the new American culture.