HUGHIE: CAUGHT BETWEEN TWO DECADES
Though Hughie takes place in 1928, at the height of the Jazz Age and the
Roaring Twenties, Eugene O'Neill wrote it in 1941, during the turmoil of
World War II. Thus, the play - sandwiched, as it were, between decadence
and depression, invincibility and impossibility - illuminates a society
perched on the cusp of great change.
Gambler Erie Smith's nonchalance evokes Fitzgerald's Gatsby or Hemingway's
Jake Barnes, big drinkers and big spenders who live within the confines
of their own fiction.
But because O'Neill wrote Hughie retrospectively, the portrait the 1920s
Broadway sport is colored by the hard-won wisdom of the 1930s.
Hughie alludes to the decade's dark underbelly, fully exposed only in
its wake. As a rueful Erie comments (as does O'Neill, in hindsight), "I've
been campin' here off and on fifteen years, but I've got a good notion
to move out."
1920s
Charlie Chaplin
Sliced Bread
First radio
3 Elections
Babe Ruth Home Run Record
Trains
Prohibition
Bubble Gum
Women's Suffrage
Mrs. Dalloway
Lindberg's Transatlantic Flight
President Coolidge
President Hoover
Penicillin
Louis Armstrong
Siddhartha
Winnie the Pooh
Houdini's Death
"Jazz Singer" & First Talkies
First TIME Magazine
First Mickey Mouse
Sherlock Holmes Case Book
First Oxford English Dictionary
The Model "A" Ford
Chrysler Building
Great Gatsby
Charleston Dance
Gershwin
Mechanical TV
Flapper Dresses
The Sun Also Rises
BBC Founded
DH Lawrence
Car Radio
Academy Awards Founded
Faulkner
Dawes Plan
Market Crash |
1930s
FDR
Great Depression
Grapes of Wrath
New Deal
Income down 40% per family
New Deal
Dust Bowl
Of Mice and Men
National Labor Relations Act
AA Founded
Rationing
Orson Wells & "The War of the Worlds"
Our Town
20th Amendment
Japan & Germany withdraw from the League of Nations
Good Neighbor Policy
Federal Housing Administration
Indian Reorganization Act
Social Security Act
21st Amendment
Gone with the Wind
Fair Labor Standards Act
Germany Invades Poland
Bombing of Pearl Harbor |
