This project is meant to explore the development of jazz and hard-boiled fiction in the period during which both popular forms found a national audience and reached the peak of their popularity - the years from World War I to the beginning of World War II. Chapter one deals with the emergence of jazz as a popular musical style distinct from ragtime. Jazz made national headlines with the Victor release of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's "Livery Stable Blues" on March 7, 1917 - just three weeks prior to the United States decision to enter World War I as a combatant. The jazz of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band offered a distinctly American sound that promoted the patriotic zeal of the time without challenging the dominant status quo - particularly in regard to race relations. The United States entry into World War I heightened tensions between white and black Americans, as evidenced by the high number of race riots erupting across the country during this period. To a limited extent, however, the war also helped pave the way for African American jazz through the work of James Reese Europe, whose military band took France and England by storm. In chapter two, the antecedents of hard-boiled fiction are discussed, beginning with the early interest afforded crime literature. The mystery genre emerged in the United States at the hand of Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840s, but was cemented in the public imagination through the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose iconic creation - genius detective Sherlock Holmes - and atmospheric description of Victorian London set the template for mystery fiction followed in Great Britain and America for decades. However, it was from the colorful world of the dime novel detectives that mystery pulp magazines took shape, beginning in October, 1915, when long-standing dime novel hero Nick Carter was replaced by the pulp title Detective Fiction. Chapter three discusses the immediate aftermath of World War I on American culture, detailing how the social and moral tensions of the war continued to fester among pockets of Americans across the country. These tensions fueled the ongoing debate regarding jazz music, as it became the accompaniment to postwar rebellions against attempts to reinstate the pre-war status quo. Chicago became the center of the jazz world during these years, particularly among the fabled nightclubs of the South Side. Chapter four discusses the emergence of the most successful hard-boiled pulp magazine Black Mask, which began in 1920 as nothing more than a money maker meant to support the literary risk-taking of The Smart Set, edited by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. One of its greatest contributors in the 1920s was Dashiell Hammett, who epitomized the hard-boiled style in that decade. Hammett's stories helped transform the mystery novel from the erudite sophistication made popular by British writers into an edgy, tough American style. The final chapter briefly discusses the developments of jazz and hard-boiled fiction in the 1930s, as American interests turned toward the constraints of the Great Depression and, by mid-decade, war again loomed on the horizon. Together these chapters show the parallel development of jazz and hard-boiled fiction, taking into account the impact of World War I on both American society as a whole and, more specifically, on the individuals instrumental to the development of these two popular American genres.
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