Literary scholars will tell you the Romantic Period took place in the late 1700s.

And while that’s certainly true for Europe, in the United States there’s been no more romantic creative period than the 1920s and ’30s, when men, women, and children coped with the tragedy of the Great Depression and confinement of Prohibition by wistfully rooting for gangsters and outlaws portrayed in films pitting booze-slinging Robin Hoods against FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s raid squads.