Fitzgerald and Hemingway

The works and lives of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway continue to receive a significant amount of scholarly attention. As previous reviewers have done, I must emphasize the necessity for selectivity in this chapter.

i Fitzgerald

This year’s critical work on Fitzgerald is varied, as scholars explored new avenues of research while also making substantial contributions to existing lines of inquiry. Although no one approach dominates the field, interest in historical context is particularly strong. Notably, however, the emphasis is shifting away from Fitzgerald as a representative of the Jazz Age and flapper culture and toward his relationship to a broader range of intellectuals, writers, and artists, from Thorstein Veblen, James Joyce, and Albert Einstein to Frank Capra and L. Frank Baum. There also appears to be burgeoning interest in cultural studies–based approaches to Fitzgerald’s work: discussions of consumer culture emphasize issues of class, and work on ethnicity and race is both more frequent and sophisticated. Fitzgerald’s interest in film and his relationship to the industry and art of film also receive considerable attention. It is worth noting that even as critics explore new directions and probe new depths, they continue to gravitate toward The Great Gatsby as a primary site of inquiry, although the short stories also receive attention.

a. Books and Essay Collections

The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald by Kirk Curnutt (Cambridge) embraces the task of surveying Fitzgerald’s life and work for students and scholars alike as an opportunity to challenge the accepted “tragic” narrative of Fitzgerald’s career. Curnutt’s agenda is apparent in his organization of the book into four chapters: “Life,” “Cultural Context,” “Works,” and “Critical Reception.” This method of presentation allows him to keep biographical and cultural material discrete from the literature in an effort to approach Fitzgerald’s writing on its own terms. Curnutt contends that it is precisely an overemphasis on Fitzgerald’s biography and his relationship to the boom/bust cycle of the 1920s and 1930s that has fostered and perpetuated the belief that he was a “failed” writer. Most significantly, in the chapter “Works” Curnutt opts for a topical approach that addresses the author’s works through categories such as composition process, themes, characters, plot, and style, thus avoiding the “developmental model” of writing that a chronological presentation would imply. The result is an excellent study that highlights the many factors that influence critical understandings of Fitzgerald, while also offering commentary on critical tendencies and suggestions for future study.

E. Ray Canterbury and Thomas D. Birch’s F. Scott Fitzgerald: Under the Influence (Paragon) also surveys Fitzgerald’s life and career. The authors, economists by trade, are rightly interested in presenting Fitzgerald as a keen social critic deeply engaged with the economic issues of his time. Although this claim has been made many times before, Canterbury and Birch usefully track and deepen readers’ understanding of the influence that economic and social thinkers such as Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, and Henry Clay had on Fitzgerald and his work. Unfortunately, their decision to organize their material chronologically with heavy doses of biography dilutes their objectives and the clarity of their argument.

The third book devoted significantly to Fitzgerald, Jamal Assadi’s Acting, Rhetoric, and Interpretation in Selected Novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Saul Bellow (Lang), is a traditional full-length critical study. Assadi’s goal is to explore ontological, moral, and interpretative tensions around the concept of “acting” in Fitzgerald’s and Bellow’s works. Assadi anchors his unique, performance studies–inspired approach to his material in a distinction (originally made by Richard Lanham) between “homo rhetoricus,” or rhetorical man (man who constructs his reality), and “homo seriosus,” or serious man (man who understands reality as a universal given by God or nature). Weighing the merits and handicaps of both positions and tying them to the debate between structuralists and poststructuralists, and ultimately to reader response theory, Assadi examines the way motifs of rhetoric and acting figure into The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, and The Last Tycoon. The critical apparatus of the book is quite complex and the readings...