Beyond Gatsby: How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture (Contemporary American Literature) - Softcover

Robert McParland is associate professor of English and chair of the Department of English at Felician College. He is the editor of Music and Literary Modernism (2009) and Film and Literary Modernism (2013) and the author of Charles Dickens’s American Audience (2010), How to Write about Joseph Conrad (2011), and Mark Twain’s Audience (2014).

The 1920s, one of the more colorful decades of the 20th century, inspired a generation of writers who captured the changes in America following World War I. First called the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald, it was a time of new optimism and breaking the old Victorian taboos. In this carefully researched cultural history, McParland takes a new look at classics such as Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, showing how the works represented the era and reflected universal human concerns. He points out how Ernest Hemingway and others helped forge an American literature independent from older English writing. The impressive, unusual list of sources includes critical commentaries of the time and articles by readers, revealing how they reacted to the narratives and characters. VERDICT This thorough and penetrating analysis succeeds in showing the 1920s to be a golden age of American literature that still influences readers and scholars. The unusual blend of criticism and social history will appeal primarily to literature students and specialists in the field of cultural studies. (Library Journal)

MacParland has done an impressive amount of research[.] (Publishers Weekly)

This reviewer would argue that the most formative period in American literature and culture was that of Poe, Whitman, Twain, and Emerson—and, given a predilection for naturalism, London, Crane, and Norris. This impossible list covers an unwieldy collection of decades. In choosing the 1920s, McParland captures in one decade the qualities of the unworkable inventory just mentioned. He provides an original study of the writing of the 1920s, a veritable revelation to which readers respond ‘Of course!’ Of course, Fitzgerald and Hemingway excoriate and interrogate materialism with its attractions and its discontents. Of course, Dreiser's naturalism and Faulkner's hypnotic experimentalism form a critique of American society both congruent with and divergent from those found in Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms. In sum, McParland considers, intelligently and profitably, in one volume the influence of writers such as John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Langston Hughes, and Carl Van Vechten, among many others. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. (CHOICE)

McParland's Beyond Gatsby [is] impressively researched and smartly organized. (The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review)