Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the Twenties

A noted scholar offers fresh ways of looking at two legendary American authors.

Both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway came into
their 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 of
novels and short stories by both authors within the context of the decade's
popular culture,
philosophy, and intellectual history. As Berman shows,
the thought of Fitzgerald and Hemingway went considerably past the limits
of such labels as the Jazz Age or the Lost Generation.

Both Fitzgerald and Hemingway were avid readers, alive
to the intellectual currents of their day, especially the contradictions
and clashes of ideas and ideologies. Both writers, for example, were very
much concerned with the problem of untenable belief--and also with the
need to believe. In this light, Berman offers fresh readings of such works
as Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," and "The
Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and Hemingway's "The Killers," A Farewell
to Arms, and The Sun Also Rises. Berman invokes the thinking
of a wide range of writers in his considerations of these texts, including
William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Walter Lippman, and Edmund Wilson.

Berman's essays are driven and connected by a focused
line of inquiry into Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's concerns with dogma both
religious and secular, with new and old ideas of selfhood,and, particularly
in the case of Hemingway, with the way we understand, explain, and transmit
experience.

Ronald Berman is Professor of English at the University of California at San Diego and past chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is author of six books, including ""The Great Gatsby" and Fitzgerald's World of Ideas "and" Fitzgerald-Wilson-Hemingway: Language and Experience."