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2/22 Art/Literature/Music in the 1920's and 1930’s

The 1920s was an era of great artistic innovation. Artists and writers experimented with new techniques. Popular culture
also changed. Broadcast radio introduced Americans around the country to the latest trends in music and entertainment,
and motion pictures became a major leisure-time activity. The 1930’s continued to the trend of experimentation yet like
the 1920’s gave the artists, musicians, and writers a chance to express their views on life in the era.

Directions:
You will be using the chromebook and textbook to look at the art, literature, and music that was popular in the 1920s and
1930’s. Your job is to pull out the main ideas of each piece that you look at.
ART
Piece of Art What is actually on the What is the mood of the Do you think this piece of art
piece of art? artwork? was produced in the 1920’s
or 1930’s? Why?
Charles Sheeler

Skyscrapers

Florine
Stettheimer

The Cathedrals
of Broadway

Archibald Motley

Nightlife

Grant Wood

American Gothic

Dorothea Lange

Migrant Mother

Literature
Open up your books to page 611. Read the Excerpt from The Great Gatsby.
1. How does Fitzgerald characterize Tom and Daisy? What does their attitude say about the culture of the
1920s?
Read the excerpt below from The Grapes of Wrath
How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies
of his children? You can't scare him -- he has known a fear beyond every other.
The moving, questing people were migrants now. Those families which had lived on a little piece of land, who
had lived and died on forty acres, had eaten or starved on the produce of forty acres, had now the whole West to
rove in. And they scampered about, looking for work; and the highways were streams of people, and the ditch
banks were lines of people. Behind them more were coming. The great highways streamed with moving people.
There in the Middle and Southwest had lived a simple agrarian folk who had not changed with industry, who
had not farmed with machines or known the power and danger of machines in private hands. They had not
grown up in the paradoxes of industry. Their senses were still sharp to the ridiculousness of the industrial life.
--JOHN STEINBECK, The Grapes of Wrath
2. How does Steinbeck address the plight of farmers in the 1930’s?

Open your books to page 617. Read Langston Hughes’ poem I, Too, Sing America.
3. How does Hughes portray America in his poem?

4. How does your knowledge of the Harlem Renaissance aid in your understanding of this poem?

MUSIC
How did the Musicians of the 1920’s and 1930’s respond to the era? Listen to the links on google classroom
and take notes, listen for the lyrics.
Louis Armstrong Paul Whiteman, Bing Crosby Judy Garland
“When you’re Frank Crumit “Brother can you “Over the
smiling” “Three O’Clock in spare a dime” 1931 Rainbow” 1939
1929 the Morning” 1921
What is the
message of this
song?

How does the style


of the music affect
the message of the
song?

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