The images of the 1920s have been indelibly imprinted on the American imagination-from jazz, bootleggers, flappers, talkies, the Model T Ford, Babe Ruth, and Charles Lindbergh to the fight for women's right to vote, racial injustice, and the birth of organized crime. Nathan Miller has penned the ultimate introduction to the era. Publishers Weekly calls it "an excellent chronicle of that turbulent, troubled, and tempestuous decade," and Jonathan Yardley's Washington Post review proclaimed this the new classic history of the 1920s, replacing Frederick Lewis Allen's celebrated account.Using the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald as a backdrop, Miller describes the world of Calvin Coolidge, H. L. Mencken, Woodrow Wilson, and the Red Scare in extraordinarily accessible (and frequently witty) writing, New World Coming is destined to become the book we all turn to to recall one of the most beloved eras in American history. "Miller's work has the power to make the reader think as few history books do...A must read." -- Curled Up with a Good Book 2/28/05 Nathan Miller is an award-winning journalist and the author of twelve works of history and biography, including Broadside: The Age of Fighting Sail, 1775-1815, FDR: An Intimate History , and War at Sea . He lives in Washington, D.C. New World Coming By Nathan Miller Da Capo Press Copyright © 2004 Nathan Miller All right reserved. ISBN: 9780306813795 Prologue Prologue Throughout the pale summer nights of 1919, a light always seemed to be burning in a third-floor front room of a brownstone at 599 Summit Avenue in St. Paul. Sometimes a slim figure paced back and forth across the open windows. Up there, amid the treetops, twenty-two-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald, subsisting mainly on cigarettes and nervous energy, was working on a novel he desperately hoped would bring him money and acclaim. Not long out of the U.S. Army following the Armistice, which ended World War I, he was being supported by his parents, his career as a writer was stymied, and his girl had broken up with him because she believed he had no prospects. To get a breath of air, Fitzgerald unlatched a screen on one of the windows and, careful not to disturb the chapter outlines pinned to the curtains, stepped out onto a small landing where he had a sweeping view up and down the boulevard. Summit Avenue crowns a bluff overlooking the Lower Town, St. Paul's business section, and is the spine of the Summit, then the city's most fashionable neighborhood. Nearby, the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Paul - Fitzgerald was christened there - crouched at the intersection of Summit and Selby Avenues "like a plump white bulldog." Wooden Queen Annes, Romanesque sandstones, red-brick faux chateaus with fairy-tale towers, and Renaissance palazzos lined the avenue - "a museum of American architectural failures," in his words. As a child, Fitzgerald mingled with children whose surnames were the same as the streets on which they played - Griggs and MacKubin and Hersey. It was a good time and a good place to grow up. Scott and his companions saw the coming of the automobile and the airplane, the spread of electric lights and the telephone, and for a nickel they could pass an enchanted hour watching the first movies. Nearby, there were still fields to race across and woods in which to gather chestnuts. These were America's "Confident Years" in which Theodore Roosevelt fought trusts and political bosses at home, made the dirt fly on the Panama Canal, and sent the U.S. Navy's white-hulled battleships around the world. Fitzgerald went to tea dances at the University Club up Summit Avenue and was invited to parties given by the daughter of James J. Hill, the railroad magnate, at her family's nearby thirty-two-room mansion. In later years Fitzgerald was contemptuous of the Summit, but there was a touch of envy in his feelings, for his family had only a tenuous hold on St. Paul society. Throughout his life, he was always haunted by the terror of slipping from the comfortable assurance of this world into poverty. Edward Fitzgerald, his father, had claim to a past that was brighter than his present. A small, dapper man with a Vandyke and courtly manners, he had come to Minnesota from Maryland, where his family had been prominent in colonial times. Francis Scott Key, the author of "The Star-Spangled Banner," for whom he named his son, was a remote cousin of his mother, but by the elder Fitzgerald's time, the bloodline had thinned. He ran a wicker furniture business and in 1890 married Mary McQuillan, the daughter of a prosperous Irish wholesale grocer. Not long after the couple married, their misfortunes began. The Fitzgeralds' first two children, both girls, died in epidemics, and shortly after Scott's birth, in 1896, the wicker business failed. Fortunes diminished, the elder Fitzgerald became a salesman for Procter & Gamble and peddled soap powder and other products to stores in various upstat