Fitzgerald and Hemingway

The year 2004 marked an interesting period in Fitzgerald studies, with many preeminent scholars contributing important work and exciting newer voices promising much for the future. The Great Gatsby received its usual share of attention, followed closely by Tender is the Night, with the short stories experiencing a renaissance. Focus on single works decreased, while studies considering overarching themes increased. No major theme, method, or critical approach dominated Hemingway studies. Biographical studies continued to focus more on family members and associates than on Hemingway himself. His nonfiction received increased attention, and the number of gender-based inquiries dropped dramatically. Of particular note is the quality of work produced by newer Hemingway scholars. Because of the amount of scholarship appearing annually on these two writers, we must as always emphasize the selectivity required in this essay.

i Text Letters, Archives, Annotations, and Bibliography

a. Fitzgerald

James L. W. West III's The Perfect Hour: The Romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ginevra King, His First Love (Random House) reconstructs this romance through letters, King's diary, and archival research, suggesting how profound its effects were on Fitzgerald's imagination. Of particular note throughout the volume are the subtle distinctions among the highest social classes, manifested even in casual language. The reassertion of King's rightful place in Fitzgerald's life and texts is invaluable for readers interested in biography, social history, and the creative process.

The bibliographic and mediographic work of Albert J. DeFazio III and Patrick Gregg for the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review provides the sine qua non of the scholar's library. DeFazio's "Bibliographical Essay: The Contours of Fitzgerald's Second Act," pp. 233–72 in A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a model of its kind, highly recommended for anyone working in Fitzgerald studies.

b. Hemingway

The other contribution in the letters category covers both writers and adds a third. None of the letters by the four men identified in the title of The Sons of Maxwell Perkins: Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and Their Editor (So. Car.), ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman, are new, and the result is hardly a complete portrait of any one of them. But the combination does display the multitude of strategies Perkins had to employ when working with them and gives scholars an active sense of the great editor at work.

As always, DeFazio and Gregg keep scholars up to date with their current bibliographies on Hemingway (HN 23, ii: 115–23; 24, i: 123–26).

ii Biography

a. Fitzgerald

There are two significant contributions to this category: Jackson Bryer's "F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1896–1940: A Brief Biography," which opens A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald (pp. 21–46), and Linda Wagner-Martin's Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: An American Woman's Life (Palgrave Macmillan). Bryer's account achieves the difficult task of succinctly providing the four Ws (who, what, when, and where) while simultaneously signposting readers toward works by Fitzgerald informed by biographical moments, periods, and concerns. Bryer organizes his overview into six periods. These divisions are valuable for those needing a quick, critically informed reference, though quibblers might object to Bryer's decision to privilege the Fitzgeralds' depressions over that of the U.S. economy. They also reflect conventional readings of Fitzgerald's life—"Early Success" followed rapidly by "Dissolution," ending in "The Crack-Up"—but the essay as a whole provides a powerfully balanced and nuanced outline of Fitzgerald's life and career. Wagner-Martin's biography of Zelda deserves a place on the shelf near, if not next to, Bryer and Cathy Banks's letters collection, Dear Scott—Dearest Zelda (2003). Wagner-Martin's deployment of recent work on gender, psychology, and particularly, women's emotional and social development has troubled some reviewers, but its pertinence and relevance in light of previous Zelda biography is inarguable. What distinguishes this biography is that Wagner-Martin never loses sight of Zelda's relevance to American letters as the wife of a writer—indeed, she states as much in her first sentence...