F. Scott Fitzgerald looked back at and reflected on the Jazz Age in his 1931 essay “Echoes of the Jazz Age”. He seemed to question the whole experience:
Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth. Sometime, though, there is a ghostly rumble among the drums, an asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swings me back into the early Twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day and in every way, we grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts…. And people you did not want to know said ‘Yes, we have no bananas,’ and it seemed only a question of years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were – and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.
(Moore, p. 331-32)