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  • Fitzgerald and Hemingway
  • Joseph Fruscione

With each year, we see the richness of Fitzgerald and Hemingway studies. The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises continue to dominate the work on these authors, regardless of theoretical focus or interpretive lens. Hemingway’s African work has gotten strong recent critical attention as well, part of the increased focus on notions of race and ethnicity in both authors’ work. The ongoing publication of Hemingway’s collected letters, Kent State’s Teaching Hemingway series, and current adaptations of both authors’ work should create further scholarly opportunities. With such robustness comes the constant need for selectivity. Some additional works are briefly summarized at the end of each section.

i F. Scott Fitzgerald

a. Monographs

As usual, James L. W. West III has deftly edited F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Short Autobiography (Scribner’s), which collects 19 nonfiction pieces spanning 1920–40: 15 were published in West’s Cambridge version of My Lost City (see AmLS 2005, p. 201); 4 are based on their first publication in periodical form (1920–31). Because this edition seeks both scholarly and popular audiences, West’s annotations take the form of clear but unobtrusive endnotes (pp. 163–93). A Short Autobiography includes such revealing pieces as “One Hundred False Starts” (1933), “Afternoon of an Author” (1936), and the unfinished “The Death of My Father” (1931); these and other texts “show another side of Fitzgerald—extroverted, witty, and very much in tune with his times.” [End Page 189] This variety of nonfiction texts shows Fitzgerald by turns “exuberant and cocky,” “serious and professional-minded,” and “reflective and elegiac.” West’s editorial work continues to enrich any biographical, literary, or textual treatment of Fitzgerald.

Robert Beuka’s American Icon: Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” in Critical and Cultural Context (Camden) is a clearly written and organized study of critical and popular views of Fitzgerald’s novel, with particular emphasis on the former. Beuka successfully captures and understands “the very wide range of opinion and reaction” the novel has engendered since its publication as well as its “seemingly perpetual cultural relevance.” Beuka has done admirable work in reviewing, contextualizing, and juxtaposing decades of Fitzgerald criticism and reinterpretation in addition to contemporaneous reviews and obituaries. American Icon traces interpretive trends—for example, New Critical, post-structuralist, feminist, and sexuality studies readings. Beuka reveals how these and other critical modes have different claims and points of emphasis based, in part, on larger scholarly concerns in given eras. His thorough and very mineable bibliography (pp. 143–56) contains Fitzgerald scholarship, Gatsby criticism, and various cultural and historical works.

In convincingly tracing the novel’s cultural-scholarly narrative, Beuka examines contemporary reviews in the first chapter, noting how some followed a “pattern” of “bold attacks on the author’s stature and even character, based only on the most superficial reading of the work.” A particularly harsh review in the Dallas Morning News noted, “The book is highly sensational, loud, blatant, ugly, pointless. There seems to be no reason for its existence.” Despite such severity, Beuka demonstrates that “reviewers … tended to take note of the artistry and formal strength of the novel”—an interpretive move that would undergird many 1940s and New Critical readings. From here, Beuka navigates decades of Fitzgerald and Gatsby criticism by Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Malcolm Cowley, Arthur Mizener, and many others—all of whom were part of Fitzgerald’s successful “second act” in American literary culture in the 1940s and 1950s. He then surveys the changed critical landscapes of the 1960s through the 1990s, which saw (among other developments) greater emphasis on the novel’s “racial, ethnic, and sexual politics,” “gender dynamics,” “spiritual subtext,” narrative structure, and flawed, sexually fluid narrator. Regardless of the era and critical lens, Beuka’s intellectual presence in American Icon is split between chronicler and evaluator. He summarizes, privileges, extends, and (when appropriate) constructively [End Page 190] disagrees with scholars whom he feels have misread or offered strained readings of the novel—such as Frances Kerr (see AmLS 1996, p. 194) and Carlyle Van Thompson (AmLS 2004, p. 321).

A secondary focus of American Icon is its cluster of adaptations, such as the 1949 and 1974 films (the...

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