Now, a Literary Moment...

Fast cars, fast women, and fast times. Ironically, it's a perfect description of the 1920s Jazz Age and its privileged socialites. But money and speed didn't bring happiness or meaning to this fast set living in the aftermath of World War I.

Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald knew this -- as both a participant and a moral witness.

Scholar Matthew Bruccoli.

Matthew Bruccoli: He became one of our great social novelists. He was the first of the American writers to write seriously about money and how it works. That's probably his greatest distinction. People said he wrote the first American gangster novel in The Great Gatsby. Aahh, I'm not sure it's true and if so, so what. Fitzgerald was the first American writer to write seriously about money and the effects of money on character.

Matthew Bruccoli on F. Scott Fitzgerald.