Lucy Moore's ANYTHING GOES Featured in Pop Matters

Lucy Moore's wonderful social history of America in the Roaring Twenties, Anything Goes, is featured on Pop Matters, the online magazine of cultural criticism.

Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties revives all of the big names and big events of our most compelling decade – a period that, she observes, in some ways is not unlike the present. It was the Jazz Age; a time of promiscuity and plenty, political corruption and complacency, technology, excess, consumerism and celebrity. This was an epoch of passion and transformation – and with its many social and technological changes, its fetishization of material goods, and its cult of youth and instant celebrity, 1920’s America resonates with today’s culture.
By looking in detail at individual events like Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic, the scandal of Teapot Dome and the founding of the New Yorker magazine, this gripping, intimate portrait of the Jazz Age opens windows to many of this country’s most iconic moments.

Author Lucy Moore was born in the United States and moved to Britain to study history at Edinburgh University. Although an American, she was voted one of the “Top Twenty Young Writers in Britain” by the Independent on Sunday.

Lucy Moore's ANYTHING GOES Chronicles America in the Roaring Twenties

Lucy Moore's dazzling new social history of the Roaring Twenties, Anything Goes, is drawing widespread attention:

"A gorgeous historical indulgence." - In Style

"Delightfully traces the personalities and events of Jazz Age America." - The Chronicle of Higher Education.

"The energy and dynamism that came to embody much of the Roaring Twenties are palpable in Lucy Moore's portrait of American society throughout the decade. . . This is clearly a book of timely relevance." - Times Literary Supplement

"Lucy Moore's enlightening, well-researched biography of the 1920s will appeal to scholars as well as a general audience. Filled with attention-grabbing details that many historians neglect and a wide range of subjects - from celebrities like Charlie Chaplin or Bessie Smith to political corruption and social upheaval - Anything Goes will not disappoint readers, no matter their educational background...Anyone interested in discovering Al Capone, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Charles Lindbergh in the pages of the same book will find this broad-based work a worthwhile pursuit." - -ForeWord

“Quickstepping over the surface of the 1920s, a high-octane and high-speed decade that F. Scott Fitzgerald christened the Jazz Age, U.K. writer Moore emphasizes that the 1920s was a time a lot like our recent past…This survey is best suited for readers not deeply familiar with this much revisited decade.” - Publishers Weekly

Lucy Moore's ANYTHING GOES Celebrates the America in the Roaring Twenties

Coming in March 2010 is a sparkling new social history of America in the 1920s, Anything Goes, by Lucy Moore. Kirkus Reviews offers a sneak preview: "Author Lucy Moore delivers a fast-paced portrait of the 20th-century's fizziest decade, replete with gangsters, flappers, speakeasies and jazz. The author's breezy style synchs nicely with her subject matter, and her focus on the personalities behind the history keeps the narrative engaging. Rather than presenting her material as an extended survey of the period, Moore focuses on a single Jazz Age trope per chapter, resulting in easily digestible takes on prohibition and the high-spirited criminal culture it engendered; the explosion in popularity of jazz music; the evolution of the flapper; the emergence of Hollywood as creator of a national cultural consciousness; the financial scandals of the Harding presidency; the Sacco/Vanzetti and Scopes trials; the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan; the Algonquin round table and the founding of the New Yorker; Charles Lindbergh's historic trans-Atlantic flight; the spectacular boxing career of Jack Dempsey; and the financial devastation of the Wall Street crash that ended the party and ushered in the Great Depression. The author writes more like a novelist than a historian, richly delineating her characters and their milieu. Harding is revealed as a hapless, good-time Charlie hopelessly out of his element as president; Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, beautiful and damned, drink their way across Europe; blues legend Bessie Smith lives large and brooks no fools; and communist anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti emerge as principled, quietly noble figures, unrepentant in the face of a likely gross miscarriage of justice. Moore draws some fairly obvious parallels between the '20s and our contemporary moment—the Wall Street crash, Bush as Harding redux, the gap between emerging technologies and social structures, the cult of celebrity—but the point isn't labored and the fizzing pace never flags. A snappy, vivid account of America's most glittering decade."