Beyond Gatsby: How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture by Robert McParland (review)

Jay Gatsby, the protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 The Great Gatsby, still leaves a shadow over American literature and the romantic imagination. It is hard for actual suitors to compete with the fictional Gatsby, who threw lavish drinking parties on Long Island in the hopes that Daisy, his infatuation, would cross the water and attend. He sought to couple with her, but she was already married. He tried anyway. Gatsby, a liquor runner who got calls from Chicago—crime literature readers and film noir fans would know that this usually meant from the Mob—is not able to cross the tracks, however, and this thwarted romance ends in tragedy. In this scenario readers see a debunking of the great Jazz Age that Fitzgerald, a Realist, is famous for chronicling. For those interested in stories of the West, maybe Tom Joad is able now to overshadow Gatsby in the literary public's imagination—and maybe also Doc. Steinbeck's great love story, Sweet Thursday, though, was also "only a comedy." Many, however, are still so drawn to the slim The Great Gatsby that the Modern Library listed it as the best American novel of the twentieth century, with The Grapes of Wrath as number ten on the list.

Robert McParland's 2015 Beyond Gatsby is an instructive book in helping readers understand John Steinbeck's contemporaries and his early times. McParland points out that there were many famous and groundbreaking literary works written during the 1920s, including master works by Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms), William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street and Babbitt, Willa Cather's My Antonia, and major works by writers such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, Edith Wharton, and others. This book, however, is not a study of the Realists, which would include John Steinbeck alongside Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner, but rather the Modernists, who experimented with form, style, and subject. Steinbeck is not widely known for experimentation. McParland provides a study of the writers of this time, maintaining that they have not been forgotten. While this book takes readers up to the present, for the most part, it covers those classics from environs of the 1920s that are still read. There are beginnings and endings in this chronicle.

The story McParland presents concerns not only the books themselves, but also the changes occurring during those times. He discusses the music of the day, then-current politics, new forms of entertainment, and the changing media rapidly evolving. This book also provides readers with general knowledge about these writers of the past who have contributed to the literary landscape of the present. McParland covers a great deal of ground in this endeavor, beginning with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Paris, the Midwest, Harlem—all these places are there in this tale about notable works produced mostly by Anglophone writers. Still, the book has a feel of contemporaneity, even though it is not about contemporary authors for whom the test of time is not complete. And the book reveals the debt we owe to these authors who are still widely read and have left their readers with a sense of what the world was like in those times. There will be many one-hundred-year anniversaries for these books in the coming decade, but for Steinbeck the centennials will occur another time. In the meanwhile, the Steinbeck community will continue to celebrate his classics.

Though dense and intricate, Beyond Gatsby is only about two hundred pages of text, and knowledgeable readers will enjoy this refresher discussion of American literature, likely learning new things about authors they may not have read in a long time while being introduced to books they have wanted and intended to read. Those readers less familiar with American literature will acquire...