The Charleston, a lively ballroom dance, emerged in 1923 as one of the flashy elements of the period in American history that writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) dubbed the Jazz Age. Other hallmarks of the Jazz Age, also called the Roaring Twenties, were speakeasies (since the country was in the midst of Prohibition), flappers, roadsters, raccoon coats, hedonism, and iconoclasm. The optimism of the Jazz Age came to a screeching halt on October 29, 1929, when the U.S. stock market crashed.