African American writers during the Harlem Renaissance produced a rich body of literature including poetry, fiction, drama, and essays. Langston Hughes spent most of his life in Harlem writing poetry and came to be known as "the Poet Laureate of Harlem." His first volume, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926. Other writers of the Harlem Renaissance include Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Clullen, and Claude McKay. With the new bust of culture came a new generation of writers. This new generation displayed youthful energy, the ambition of excluded outsiders, and a resentment towards betrayed ideals. H.L. Mencken criticized marriage, patriotism, democracy, prohibition, and middle-class American society in American Mercury, his monthly magazine. World War I had also caused a stir against traditional values, and writers of the 1920s established new codes of morals and understanding and fresh methods for expression. F. Scott Fitgerald's This Side of Paradise became a kind of Bible for aspiring flappers and their bewildered pursuers. It was followed by The Great Gatsby in 1925, which criticized the glamour and cruelty of an achievement-oriented society. Many disillusioned Americans became expatriates in Europe, as described in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (1926 and 1929). Other prominent writers of the time include Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Eugene O' Neill. Artists of the 1920s captured images of American factories and skyscrapers in what came to be known as Precisionism. Simplified, hard-edged shapes, geometric structures, and impersonal painting characterized precision, logic, and purity. The art of this era embodied the relationships people felt existed between industry and religion and science and the machine. Black painters and sculptors strove to create a unique African American identity. Frank Lloyd Wright and other architects of the era felt as if buildings should grow upwards from their sites. The completion of the Empire State Building in 1930 marked the birth of the skyscraper. It towers 102 stories above New York City. Composer, bandleader, and pianist Duke Ellington rates as one of the most original and important figures in 20th century American music. He came of age at the dawning of jazz in the 1920s and along with Louis Armstrong, George Gershwin, and Bessie Smith, propelled the genre into its rightful place as a "national treasure. Ellington's career lasted over fifty years and played a large part in the evolution of jazz. During that time his creative output was huge and varied. He consistently straddled the line between commercial and artistic achievement and challenged listeners with an expressive and sophisticated collection of works, often drawing comparisons to classical music. Moreover, he helped define the African-American experience through his art.