Fitzgerald and Hemingway

Whereas last year's scholarship on Hemingway considerably outweighed work on Fitzgerald, this year's chapter evidences more balanced critical attention. Scholars concentrate not only on The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night but also on many of F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories (especially "Babylon Revisited") as well as on Zelda's literary and visual artwork. A handful of Fitzgerald's neglected stories, such as "I'd Die for You," have been printed for the first time. Likewise, hundreds of Ernest Hemingway's letters from 1929 to 1931—of which 85 percent have never previously appeared in print—have been published this year. Scholars focus on numerous aspects of Hemingway's life and writing, including his political leanings, international travel, engagement in various wars, and mental illness. Several studies take up Across the River and into the Trees and other less frequently examined short fiction as their primary concerns.

i F. Scott Fitzgerald

a. Books

David S. Brown's biography, Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Belknap), is as lucid as it is thorough in arguing that Fitzgerald was fundamentally a moralist and maintained a "historical awareness [that] was at its core sentimental, nostalgic, and conservative." As a historian, Brown focuses on Fitzgerald's role as chronicler and commentator on the times in which he lived. Brown often draws parallels between Fitzgerald's life and fiction, including particularly adept readings of Tender is the Night, although he occasionally slips into overidentification between the author and his characters. Perhaps because of this tendency, the primary undercurrent of the biography is the question of how things went wrong for Fitzgerald. Brown traces threads of trauma through Fitzgerald's life, emphasizes when Fitzgerald's values were at odds with trends in American culture, and reaches analytical intensity when describing the deep struggles of the "crack-up" years, a period in which Fitzgerald's writing "link[s] his current artistic ennui to the coming age of collectivization" in politics and in Hollywood.

Just as Brown observes how Fitzgerald absorbs, represents, and becomes profoundly affected by American culture, Ronald Berman's slim, dense monograph, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the American Scene (Alabama), addresses the way emerging fields such as sociology and anthropology informed Fitzgerald's depictions of the national milieu. In one of the strongest chapters, "The Idea of Society" (an earlier version of which was reviewed in AmLS 2014, pp. 170–71), Berman notes that writers such as H. L. Mencken, Edith Wharton, and Edmund White were influenced by the social sciences whereas Fitzgerald, who keenly observed the benefits of scientific documentation and data collection, understood "that data need explanation." In other words, anthropology and sociology could help the writer craft a more realistic depiction of social life in the United States but could not provide explanation or meaning. Occupying the space between data and interpretation, science and art, Fitzgerald's fiction does not merely reflect "social history" but "defin[es] society itself." Berman's initial insights pave the way for the remaining chapters, which explore Fitzgerald's resistance to historical moralism, awareness of class as a fading social category, and focus on the social web of class, race, region, and gender in short stories and novels depicting the uncertain future of the nation.

More of a coffee-table book than a biography, Dave Page's F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer and His Friends at Home (Minnesota), with photographs by Jeff Krueger, provides a visual and historical tour of St. Paul. The book highlights the significant architectural features of the city, accompanied by Page's commentary on historical and family records, census details, and quotations from correspondence, as well as Fitzgerald's writing in which these St. Paul features appear. The book includes sites of such obvious significance as Fitzgerald's birthplace; the building where the Saint Paul Academy was housed when Fitzgerald attended (1908–11); Ramaley Hall, where a young Fitzgerald was an in-demand dance partner; and the White Bear Yacht Club, where Fitzgerald lived with Zelda and Scottie in 1922 and worked on "Winter Dreams." However, the bulk of the book...