Overview

In 1929, a news story too crazy for most times, but just perfect for the exuberant Jazz Age, spread through America's newspapers, and even overseas. During that year, readers were titillated with a tale of Twenties extravagance to out-Roar them all. They bought it hook, line, and sinker, and fondly recalled it for decades thereafter. But the elaborate tale was fictitious. A fabulously daring and artful hoax. The perpetrators, three ambitious writers, each bearing the royal title they brought to the task, got away with it. Incorporating extensive research and newly-discovered sources, John Locke, an expert on the writing world of the 1920s, tears away the veils of secrecy for the first time, spinning a fast-moving journey of discovery through fabled times. Unfolding like a great mystery, we discover the rich lives of the hoaxers, how they united in strange purpose, how their globetrotting lives inexorably converged on the hoax, how they engineered its spread, and how their intimate understanding of the Jazz Age made them masters of their scheme. Not even jazz was spared. It's a a story spanning East and West colored with unbridled ambition, struggle and success, hoaxes and deceptions, war and peace, the romance of adventure, and the flattening of nineteenth century traditions beneath the steamroller of modernity. Above all hovers the tantalizing mystery of motives-why did they do it?

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9781935031260

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John Locke is an expert on the American pulp magazine era ( 1900-50): fiction, publishing, and authors.

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