The Aspirin Age
Name/Title
The Aspirin AgeEntry/Object ID
2025.2.26Description
This is a story of America between two wars, told in terms of the most significant, or typical, or utterly fantastic news events of the gaudy and chaotic years that separated Versailles and Pearl Harbor. From the troubled vantage point of 1949, the United States of the twenties and thirties appears, in retrospect, as a strange, uncharted, and enchanted land; so many of the personalities and events that challenged our imaginations during that time now seem almost to have been part of a spell... hectic, frenzied, not always beneficent... cast over the entire country. We seem to have fluctuated between headaches: sometimes induced by prohibition, more frequently by the fevered pace of the times. During these throbbing years we searched in vain for a cure-all, coming no closer to it than the aspirin bottle. Hence: The Aspirin Age. Twenty-two prominent authors, all closely connected with the period, have written expressly for this book the chapters that follow. Some of the events are described by active participants; others are retold by reporters who were on the scene or by specially qualified observers. Who was more integral a part of the struggle against the Kingfish, Huey Long, than Hodding Carter? Who could have been closer to the Dempsey-Tunney fight that Gene Tunney himself? This is, I hope, no more chronicling of arresting events, but rather a re-creation of a strange and almost somnambulistic time when America was much younger in spirit than it ever can be again. A time too close, still, for historical appraisal, yet too distant to be accurately assessed by most of us. They were years of high tragedy and low comedy, of truth and delusion, of complacency and hysteria. Sacco and Vanzetti died in this period, and so did prohibition. Much else came to life. Some of it, I hope, is here.Collection
Heather's Museum Acquisitions, BookCategory
Book