Fitzgerald and Hemingway

The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises received the most critical attention this year, with interest in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the personae and celebrity of the two authors also substantial. To enhance the study of these authors individually, jointly, and contextually, we might take up the suggestions offered at a panel on teaching Fitzgerald at the May 2011 American Literature Association conference that work remains to be done on Fitzgerald's experimentation, sub-versiveness, transgression, and broader influence(s), particularly in his stories and nonfiction. This call for additional scholarship addressing Fitzgerald's broader oeuvre should also extend to Hemingway. Further, examining both authors in the contexts of media studies, adaptation studies, and evolving pedagogy represents a valuable and constructive challenge.

i F. Scott Fitzgerald

a. Books and Essay Collections

The lack of monographs notwithstanding, this year welcomes the publication of much Fitzgerald scholarship. The recent Critical Insights: "The Great Gatsby," ed. Morris Dickstein (Salem Press), collects previously published commentary by Ruth Prigozy, Leland S. Person Jr., Kenneth E. Eble, and other established scholarly voices. It also offers four previously unpublished essays: Jennifer Banach Palladino's "Gatsby in Context" (pp. 25-38), Amy M. Green's "The Critical Reception of The Great Gatsby" (pp. 39-45), Neil Heims's "Paradox, Ambiguity, and the Challenge to Judgment in The Great Gatsby and Daisy Miller" (pp. 58-71), and Matthew J. Bolton's "'A Fragment of Lost Words': Narrative Ellipses in The Great Gatsby" (pp. 190-204).

Spires and Gargoyles: Early Writings, 1909-1919 is the newest title in the Cambridge Edition of Fitzgerald's works, as always masterfully edited by James L. W. West III. This volume collects 71 brief pieces from Fitzgerald's days at St. Paul Academy, the Newman School, and Princeton, including "The Spire and the Gargoyle," the lyrics for Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi!, and his earliest known published story, "The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage" (The St. Paul Academy Now and Then, October 1909). West's introduction notes that Fitzgerald had "a busy and productive literary apprenticeship," writing in "a great variety of genres": "fiction, poetry, satire, parodies, song lyrics, drama scripts, and book reviews." The section of explanatory notes clarifies many of Fitzgerald's historical and contemporaneous references, such as the Civil War allusions in "The Room with the Green Blinds" (1911), the New York cultural geography of "The Trail of the Duke" (1913), and the many historical and literary layers of "Tarquin of Cheapside" (1917). Spires and Gargoyles also establishes the publication genealogy of writing Fitzgerald revised and adapted multiple times, such as "The Debutante," first printed in Nassau Lit (1917), revised for The Smart Set (1919), and then woven into This Side of Paradise (1920). West's policy here is to present "the earliest extant texts of these writings, the versions that saw print before Fitzgerald became a professional." This collection is crucial for critics, biographers, and editors seeking to understand the early Fitzgerald, his apprentice texts, and the challenges of editing his early work.

Tom Cerasulo's Authors Out Here: Fitzgerald, West, Parker, and Schulberg in Hollywood (So. Car.) "trac[es] the careers of an interrelated group of authors with literary aspirations—those who sought lasting elite cultural status, endeavored to create works possessing intellectual prestige, and conducted commercially risky experiments in content and/ or form—who wrote for and about the movies during the studio era." Cerasulo takes a largely constructive, though still pragmatic, view of the work done in and about Hollywood by Fitzgerald and some of his contemporaries, all of whom embody a "shift in the vocation of authorship, from a late modernist pose of the disaffected genius who stands outside of society to a later role as an engaged laborer in industrial America." Fitzgerald is "the tragic hero of what might be called the Hollywood vampire story," a "myth of Hollywood as a malevolent entity" that Cerasulo claims persists among literary critics. But for Cerasulo "Hollywood was not . . . [part of] Fitzgerald's failed second act; it was part...