Before Gatsby's parties, there were Dorothy Speare's dancers.
It is 1922. Twenty-year-old Joy Nelson arrives in a New England college town with a country stillness about her and a secret she barely trusts: she can sing. What she finds instead is a set of young people who cannot sit still - the "Excitement-Eaters," who dance until the milk wagons roll, smoke in their dressing gowns, and believe that the instant you stop moving, you lose your grip on life itself.
Swept between the reliable Jim Dalton and the intoxicating pull of the stage, Joy has to answer the question her whole restless generation is dancing to keep from asking: can a girl of the new age hold on to love and the one gift that is truly her own - or must she trade one for the other in the dark?
Published the same season as Fitzgerald's Tales of the Jazz Age, Dancers in the Dark is the flapper novel written from the inside - by a twenty-four-year-old singer who was living its central dilemma herself. Dorothy Speare would go on to Hollywood, where her story of a torn soprano became the classic film One Night of Love (1934); but it all began here, with a tired girl, a pair of silver slippers, and a dedication "To the Girls of Today."
This Carrier Press edition presents Speare's complete, unabridged 1922 novel with a new Preface placing it in its Jazz Age moment, an original Prologue that opens the doors on the dance floor where it all begins, an original Epilogue continuation written for this edition, and a suite of 1920s art-deco plates.
A candid, wistful, wickedly observed portrait of youth chasing stimulation - as recognizable a century later as it was the night the band first dropped the lights.