The Roaring Twenties. A decade completely unlike any other in history. Skirts were shortened, moral values went out the window- no doubt about it, it was a time for having fun.

With a new decade came new ideas, new conventions, and a new movement of arts, music, and literature, known as the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem, in the northern end of Manhattan, became the seat for this movement. It was the Golden Age of jazz, primarily an African-American innovation. New literature sprang up from Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and others. It was a cultural reformation, and though President Warren G. Harding promised "a return to normalcy" after World War I, America in the 1920s was anything but normal.

The Harlem Renaissance was the result of the creative expressions of African-Americans. A heightened racial tension, as well as a new black consciousness, was present during the Roaring Twenties. With the "Great Migration" of the blacks into Northern cities, new tensions were created between blacks and whites over housing, jobs, and other factors. As a result, new militant black rights groups, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), were formed. The creation of these groups elicited a mixed response from whites. On the plus side, whites had an increased interest in black literature, arts, and music, and this created a large audience for black creativity. Unfortunately, white supremacists like the Ku Klux Klan became a larger threat to the security of the African-American. Fortunately, blacks found outlets for their frustration in their creative pastimes.

Harlem was ideal for a cultural rebirth. Recently constructed, fashionable, and residential, Harlem attracted a growing middle class of black writers, artists, and musicians. The members of this movement were extremely race conscious and proud of their heritage and their community. As a tribute to their achievements and their background, African-Americans of the Harlem movement were know as the "New Negroes," which projected an image of the proud, busy, independeent black man from the northern cities. This period between 1920 and 1930 was more of a birth of culture than anything, for never had blacks produced so much art, literature, and music at one time.

F. Scott Fitzgerald lived and wrote during the height of the Harlem Renaissance. The behavior of the characters in The Great Gatsby are typical of people during the Roaring Twenties. Daisy and Tom, for example, love to party, mingle with high class society, and have a good time. However, at one point Daisy expresses a feeling of frustration at the frivolity of their lives, proving that despite all of the good times, life is not always cheerful, even for the wealthy.