Beyond Gatsby
How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture
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- £25.99
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- £25.99
Publisher Description
Many of the heralded writers of the 20th century—including Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner—first made their mark in the 1920s, while established authors like Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis produced some of their most important works during this period. Classic novels such as The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, Elmer Gantry, and The Sound and the Fury not only mark prodigious advances in American fiction, they show us the wonder, the struggle, and the promise of the American dream.
In Beyond Gatsby: How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture, Robert McParland looks at the key contributions of this fertile period in literature. Rather than provide a compendium of details about major American writers, this book explores the culture that created F. Scott Fitzgerald and his literary contemporaries. The source material ranges from the minutes of reading circles and critical commentary in periodicals to the archives of writers’ works—as well as the diaries, journals, and letters of common readers. This work reveals how the nation’s fiction stimulated conversations of shared images and stories among a growing reading public.
Signifying a cultural shift in the aftermath of World War I, the collective works by these authors represent what many consider to be a golden age of American literature. By examining how these authors influenced the reading habits of a generation, Beyond Gatsby enables readers to gain a deeper comprehension of how literature shapes culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McParland fails to deliver on the promise of his book's subtitle, opting instead to demonstrate that some of the most prominent American authors of the 1920s were in fact simply products of their time. Citing Mencken, McParland refers to Fitzgerald as a social historian" of the period, and goes on to say that these novelists, in their various ways observers of a bright and unique era." Sinclair Lewis, too, was one with his readers," the success of Main Street attributable to a receptive audience," while Faulkner shows us a different picture of the 1920s than the ones we have been looking at to this point." The writers who emerge from these pages are all the less interesting for being depicted more as chroniclers of the age than as its arbiters, more shaped by their time than shaping it. MacParland has done an impressive amount of research, but he piles on too many facts without explaining their significance. In place of insight, he offers anodyne observations worthy of SparkNotes: The Great Gatsby contains the archetypical quest of the American dream"; The Grapes of Wrath reminds us of the heroism of the common man and woman." Despite 40 pages of endnotes and bibliography, this book is likely to be of little more interest to the academic than to the lay reader.
