Flaming Youth

Flaming Youth
by Samuel Hopkins Adams

Flaming Youth is a 1923 book, controversial in its time, by Samuel Hopkins Adams. The novel was adapted into the silent movie Flaming Youth in 1923. In his retrospective essay “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” writer F. Scott Fitzgerald argued that Adams’ novel persuaded certain moralistic Americans that their young girls could be “seduced without being ruined” and thus altered the sexual mores of the nation. In the 1920s, Adams wrote two novels, Flaming Youth and Unforbidden Fruit, dealing with the sexual urges of young women in the Jazz Age. These novels had a sexual frankness that was surprising for their time, and Adams published them under the pseudonym “Warner Fabian” so that his other works would not be tainted by any scandal.