Fitzgerald and Hemingway

This year occasions a variety of scholarship on F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, despite the usual overemphasis on The Great Gatsby. There are fresh insights on the authors’ literary, cultural, and historical contexts. Selectivity, as always, is the order of the day. We have chosen the strongest available works on these authors to discuss here.

i F. Scott Fitzgerald

a. Monographs

Bryant Mangum’s F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context (Cambridge) is a rich collection of 40 essays, a helpful chronology of Fitzgerald’s works and milieu, a bibliography of relevant criticism and biography, and strong work by established and emerging critical voices. It reads smoothly and effectively like a literary-cultural biography; its focused essays cover many aspects of Fitzgerald’s life, work, and times. Mangum’s anthology contains essays from key names in Fitzgerald studies—Linda Wagner-Martin, Michael Nowlin, Ruth Prigozy, Kirk Curnutt, James L. W. West, Linda Patterson Miller, and many others—as well as from scholarly voices offering new approaches. This collection allows for various kinds of textual and interdisciplinary study of Fitzgerald’s fiction, correspondence, and nonfiction. The essays work very well together, and any student or teacher-scholar looking to do serious work on Fitzgerald should read Mangum’s critical anthology.

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context contains essays on a host of expected (e.g., Prohibition, war, flappers, American expatriates) and newer themes (e.g., ethnic stereotyping, transportation, naturalism and high modernism, and the South) germane to Fitzgerald studies. We particularly appreciated how the essays are not ends but useful springboards to further discussion and debate. Mangum aptly sees a rich “foundation … for considering from the outside inward many of the social, historical, and cultural contexts of Fitzgerald’s world, both those alluded to in his writings and those most notable in their omission.” The variety of voices, experience levels, and perspectives in F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context make it a gateway into 21st-century American literary studies.

Particularly instructive is the bundle of three essays on Fitzgerald’s early life and places that opens part 2, “An Author’s Formation”: Joel Kabot’s “Buffalo and Syracuse, New York” (pp. 89–104), Deborah Davis Schlacks’s “St. Paul, Minnesota, St. Paul Academy, and the St. Paul Academy Now and Then” (pp. 105–14), and Pearl James’s “A Catholic Boyhood: The Newman School, the Newman News, and Monsignor Cyril Sigourney Webster Fay” (pp. 115–25). For Kabot, Fitzgerald “was … indelibly, an upstate New Yorker,” given the rich impact of his early years in Buffalo and Syracuse on his later fiction, such as Tender is the Night, “Winter Dreams,” “That Kind of Party,” and the Tarleton trilogy. In many respects, as Kabot observes, the Fitzgeralds’ “semi-transient existence in upstate New York,” as well as his mother’s “social climbing,” engendered a certain conflict toward the ideas of society in the author’s work. That Fitzgerald had access to members of “the truly rich and elite in Buffalo” but ultimately never belonged to it partly accounts for some of his characters’ social anxieties. Schlacks’s study of St. Paul complements Kabot’s of upstate New York, since in Minnesota Fitzgerald also occupied “a liminal space—among the rich, but not one of them.” Despite some moments of insufficient focus on Fitzgerald’s work and literary-social sensibility, Schlacks’s treatment of his hometown advances the rich contextual study of Mangum’s collection. So too does James’s treatment of Fitzgerald’s New Jersey connections—namely the Newman School and Monsignor Sigourney Fay. “His writings from this time period,” James asserts, “reveal his repeated attempts to identify, portray, and master the means to success for young men.” Understanding the places of Fitzgerald’s early life through these essays helps students and teacher-scholars better understand the places of his later life and writings.

In the “Popular and Material Culture in the Jazz Age” section, Bonnie Shannon McMullen’s “Architecture and Design” (pp. 353–61) anchors its analysis of various public and domestic spaces in “My Lost City,” This Side of Paradise, The Love of the Last Tycoon, and other works...