Fitzgerald and Hemingway

Fitzgerald scholarship in 2003 exhibited renewed interest in the two early novels and the later short fiction—a move away from the ever-present The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. Scholars employed a rich variety of critical approaches, the dominant being stylistic analysis. Hemingway scholarship continued in the usual areas of psychosexuality and biography, with vital new work in publishing, pedagogy, and cultural studies. No single literary text dominated Hemingway studies; works from the 1920s and 1950s continued to attract the most attention.

i Text Letters, Archives, Annotations, and Bibliography

a. Fitzgerald

Matthew J. Bruccoli follows his F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: A Documentary Volume (published in paperback last year as The Great Gatsby: A Literary Reference) with F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night: A Documentary Volume (DLB 273). Coedited with George Parker Anderson, the volume explores the sources, composition, reception, and lasting impact of Fitzgerald's most ambitious novel. Lavishly illustrated with photographs and facsimiles of manuscript material, the work can most accurately be described as a biography of the novel. Its appearance in an affordable paperback format is eagerly awaited.

Continuing to do yeoman's work, Albert J. DeFazio III and Patrick Gregg contribute their "Current Bibliography" to the second volume of FR (pp. 236–43).

b. Hemingway

Readers interested in Hemingway's relationship with his first American publisher will find much useful information in Charles Egleston's The House of Boni and Liveright, 1917– 1933: A Documentary Volume (DLB 288). The section on Hemingway (pp. 328–50) contains many facsimiles and transcripts of letters from, to, and about Hemingway and members of the firm, as well as information on the marketing and publishing history of In Our Time. Hugh Hosch reproduces two letters from Hemingway to employees of Charles Scribner's Sons in "The Hemingway/Conrad 'One-Way Feud' " (Pleiades 23, ii: 90–100), an essay on Hemingway's criticism of bullfighter and writer Barnaby Conrad.

John Leonard bases his argument in "The Garden of Eden: A Question of Dates" (HN 22, ii: 53–81) on his manuscript research and the margin dates located in some of the folders containing the Garden of Eden drafts at the Kennedy Library in Boston. Leonard provides a valuable review and assessment of available evidence for dating the sectional composition of "The Big Book," providing not only his own conclusions (he proposes and argues convincingly that 1957 is the likely date for chapters 13–35) but also the likely dates for all sections as established by scholars to date. He also provides a fine summary of the evidentiary sources for dating used by Hemingway's major biographers (Carlos Baker, Michael Reynolds, Kenneth Lynn) and critics of the posthumous novels (Rose Mary Burwell). Leonard concludes that The Garden of Eden "is a fully achieved narrative," thus adding an important voice to the growing chorus of those familiar with this late novel in its archival form, as the instantiation of a writerly text, if not an authorially finished one. This essay has already proven invaluable as a reference; it will provide a strong foundation for future textual, archival, and critical work on this extremely complicated manuscript/typescript and on the equally complicated questions it raises.

Catherine Turner's chapter "Changing American Literary Taste: Scribner's and Ernest Hemingway" in Marketing Modernism Between the Two World Wars (Mass.) constitutes a solid contribution to the conjunction of book history and cultural studies of Hemingway discourse. Turner's study differentiates itself from recent work by privileging Scribner's as a corporate entity with cultural and monetary goals. Her assessment of Scribner's institutional exploitation of a willing Hemingway in its goal to permanently alter middlebrow literary taste is quite sensible and is built upon convincing evidence, and thus her work provides a necessary counterbalance to the individual-focused work done previously in this field. However, the scope of her overall book project renders this particular chapter useful to Hemingway studies primarily as an evocative entrée to the complexities of institutionally implicated professional authorship and corporate publishing, an area on which emerging scholars have been focusing...