Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the Twenties (ePub)

A noted scholar offers fresh ways of looking at two legendary American authors.Both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway came intotheir own in the 1920s and did some of their best writing during that decade.In a series of interrelated essays, Ronald Berman considers an array ofnovels and short stories by both authors within the context of the decade'spopular culture,philosophy, and intellectual history. As Berman shows,the thought of Fitzgerald and Hemingway went considerably past the limitsof such labels as the Jazz Age or the Lost Generation.Both Fitzgerald and Hemingway were avid readers, aliveto the intellectual currents of their day, especially the contradictionsand clashes of ideas and ideologies. Both writers, for example, were verymuch concerned with the problem of untenable belief-and also with theneed to believe. In this light, Berman offers fresh readings of such worksas Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, "e;Bernice Bobs Her Hair,"e; and "e;TheDiamond as Big as the Ritz"e; and Hemingway's "e;The Killers,"e; A Farewellto Arms, and The Sun Also Rises. Berman invokes the thinkingof a wide range of writers in his considerations of these texts, includingWilliam James, Alfred North Whitehead, Walter Lippman, and Edmund Wilson.Berman's essays are driven and connected by a focusedline of inquiry into Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's concerns with dogma bothreligious and secular, with new and old ideas of selfhood,and, particularlyin the case of Hemingway, with the way we understand, explain, and transmitexperience.