Picturing Hemingway: A Writer in His Time by Frederick Voss (review)

understand more wholly the ideas and issues that drove one ofthe most energetic periods in American history. Finally, the CD also serves as a form of Cliff's Notes, providing chapter-bychapter summaries, as well as (very) short discussions on three major themes of the book: Love and Illusion, Wealth and the American Dream, and Social Ambition . At the end ofeach chapter summary and theme essay are questions that can help the reader reflect on what he has read as well as help teachers develop assignments that can help students better engage with the text. Also included are character profiles on Nick Carraway.Tom and Daisy Buchanan, Jordan Baker, George and Myrtle Wilson, and the omnipresentTJ. Eckleburg. Another interesting feature is a discussion entitled "Who is Jay Gatsby?" All of these profiles come with questions at the end that force readers to identify what roles these characters play in the development ofthe novel, and to understand how Fitzgerald uses them to convey meaning. The Great Gatsby CD-ROM is more than a mere study aid and certainly more than a teacher's guide, and I see it as being an excellent source ofinformation on the novel, its author, and his world. Still, it should not be used as the lone guide; teacherguidance, as always, is a requisitewhen examininga novel such as The Great Gatsby in the classroom. Frederick Voss, ed. PicturingHemingway:A Writer in His Time. Washington , D.C, and New Haven: The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in association with Yale University Press, 1999. 1 1 Ip. Valerio Ferme University of Colorado at Boulder In the twentieth century, Ernest Hemingway was one ofthe few writers inside or outside the United States who succeeded in cutting a wide path both to literary and worldly fame. Noticeably, through his writing and public persona, Hemingwaycame to embody the myth ofAmerican individuality and virile courage in the wake ofthe United States' rise "from upstart nation" to greatest world power after World War I and onto our days (1). Frederick Voss' Picturing Hemingway is the latest book to pay homage to the author's biographical hagiography as the one American writer whose "personal reputation as the allaround man of action ultimately eclipsed his own widely revered fiction" (13). Published in commemoration ofHemingway's one-hundredth birthday as a companion to the exhibition that the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery ran beFALL 2000 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW + 125 tween June 18 and November 7, 1999, this volume is essentially a pictorial celebration ofthe Hemingway myth. The book focuses mainly on images and their interpretation (rather than on a critical visitation oranalysis ofHemingway's literary record) to discuss the author's life and its accomplishments in a wider cultural context. Accompanied by two introductory essays— one by Michael Reynolds who just completed a monumental five-volume biography on Hemingway, the other by the editor Frederick Voss — it describes, through pictures, paintings, and other assorted materials, Hemingway's life and career. Thus, one moves from a replica of the Kansas City Star's manual ofjournalistic style that helped Hemingway discover the virtues of crisp, concise writing (58) to a picture ofhis first love, Agnes von Kurowsky (60); from a posterannouncing the annual bullfights in Pamplona to which Hemingway participated with enthusiasm (77) to a cartoon depicting the "reporter" Hemingway at the Hotel Scribe in Paris during World War II (89). Each picture is annotated with the name ofits author or source, date, size, and current location (the two largest contributors to the exhibit being the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library in Boston, and the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University). In addition, the materials in the main section, titled "A Life in Portraits," come with captions that provide ulterior information for those readers not familiar with the Hemingway lore — as is the case with the family portrait that introduces us to young Hemingway's childhood, where the editoradds that Hemingway eventually "came to detest his mother, whom he saw as domineering, and to disdain his father, whom he regarded as a weakling" (53). The two articles that preface the portrait section, Reynolds' "Hemingway as American Icon" and Voss' "Picturing Ernest Hemingway," provide...