Books: The Wilted '20s

THE PLEASURES OF THE JAZZ AGE (417 pp.)—Edited by William Hodapp—Farrar, Straus ($4).

As Frederick Lewis Allen has proved, the age of only yesterday, and the day before, is already history and ripe for retelling. .There is even gold to be found in ransacking the closets of the 19205—the era of the flapper and the grimacing mobster, the devotees of sex dives and bathtub gin, the frilly esthetes and champions of companionate marriage. William Hodapp has pasted together, with some success, an anthology reflecting the era through its fiction. The stories provide dramatic evidence of how drastically and quickly the patterns of...