Roar and Crash: Romance Novels of the Jazz Age and Depression Era

While many conceptions of the twentieth-century American romance novel start after World War II, there was in fact a robust market for romances throughout the 1920s and 1930s, growing in popularity during the Roaring Twenties and reaching a peak during the Great Depression as audiences flocked to uplifting escapist stories that ended happily ever after. In contrast to some of their contemporaries that are more recognized by today’s academics, most of these romance novels were proudly and unapologetically by, for, and about women. Drawing from my extensive personal collection of approximately 300 romance novels from the 1920s and 1930s, my talk will introduce audiences to some of the many characteristics that make the era’s romance novels unique and worthy of deeper study, from their rich Art Deco cover illustrations to their serialized initial distributions to their portrayals of the social phenomena of the Roaring Twenties and Great Depression. This survey of the inter-war romance novel will also discuss the authors, themes, tropes, and audiences that defined the genre during this understudied era.