Fitzgerald and Hemingway

For Hemingway, this year's distinguishing feature is the willingness of critics to treat a broader range of his canon than is their custom: while The Sun Also Rises and the short stories continue to attract the most interest, relatively neglected stories and novels garner thoughtful consideration as well. For Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night attract the most critical attention, though his perpetually delightful second act is marked this year by a host of significant editions, discussions of correspondence, bibliographies, and biographies.

i Texts, Letters, Archives, and Bibliography

Before Gatsby: The First Twenty-six Stories, ed. Mathew J. Bruccoli with Judith S. Baughman (So. Car.), arranges the tales according to their date of composition rather than publication so that readers might better perceive Fitzgerald's extraordinary development. For stories that the author reworked, Bruccoli publishes the revised work; otherwise he reprints the magazine version, silently altering accidentals and stipulating substantive emendations. More than 50 illustrations, many of them reproductions from pages of the Saturday Evening Post, complement the text, and each story is followed by helpful explanatory notes. Bruccoli's introduction documents Fitzgerald's evolution as a short-story writer and addresses the author's attitude toward this facet of his literary career. The Modern Library's This Side of Paradise includes a chatty introduction by Susan Orlean and brief critical excerpts by H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, Glenway Wescott, John Peale Bishop, and Arthur Mizener. Unfortunately, the introductory material contains not a jot about the text, which begins "Well This side of Paradise! . . . / There's little comfort on the wise" rather than ". . . Well, This side of paradise / There's little comfort in the wise," as does the Cambridge edition. James L. W. West III contributes "Two Things You Should Know about the Cambridge Fitzgerald Edition" (FSN 11: 9–11), reminding readers that the series offers "provisional," not "definitive" editions and that those editions are "public" documents which require the editor to resolve inconsistencies, not "private" ones which might preserve idiosyncrasies.

Patrick Hemingway provides an engaging, anecdotal foreword to Hemingway on Hunting (Lyons), ed. with an introduction by Seán Hemingway (son of Gregory who passed away this year). This 300-page anthology includes short stories, selections from books (the largest share from Green Hills of Africa), essays, and a few excerpts from letters. Newly anthologized are excerpts from Garden of Eden and True at First Light. Of the two dozen glossy photographs, several will be new to most readers. A. E. Hotchner's televised adaptation of Hemingway's short story, published as "After the Storm": The Story, Plus the Screenplay & a Commentary (Carroll), earned well-deserved unfavorable reviews.

Overlooked last year was an important article on the Fitzgeralds' correspondence. Jackson R. Bryer's " 'Torches of Fury': The Correspondence of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald," pp. 65–80 in American Literary Dimensions: Poems and Essays in Honor of Melvin J. Friedman, ed. Ben Siegel and Jay L. Halio (Delaware, 1999), draws on mostly unpublished letters between Scott and Zelda, allowing them to account for the ebbs and flows of the complex relationship in their own words. Bryer also illustrates "Zelda's gifts as a letter writer, as well as . . . the complex and often contradictory forces that were at war in the personality of this Southern belle/pre–Woman's Liberation independent woman."

Led by general editor Sandra Spanier of Penn State, preparations for a multivolume set of Hemingway's letters are under way. Bruccoli publishes letters from Maxwell Perkins and Maurice Speiser about Hemingway in keepsakes celebrating the opening of the Speiser & Easterling Hallman Foundation Collection of Ernest Hemingway at the University of South Carolina (Columbia: Thomas Cooper Library). Drawing on the published correspondence and the Ross-Hemingway archive at the New York Public Library, Francis J. Bosha's "Hemingway and The New Yorker: The Harold Ross Files" (HN 21, i: 93–99) explains how Ross was unable to land the author for the magazine but was successful in securing Hemingway's friendship.

Collectors will appreciate Bruccoli's "Hemingway's Salesman's Dummies" (DLB Yearbook 2000: 319–20), which includes photographs and...