The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization

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Keith Gandal (Professor of English, Professor of English, Northern Illinois University)

The Gun and the Pen

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization

Keith Gandal (Professor of English, Professor of English, Northern Illinois University)

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English

Oxford University Press Inc
14 August 2008

Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner stand as the American voice of the Great War.

But was it warfare that drove them to write?

Not according to Keith Gandal, who argues that the authors' famous postwar novels were motivated not by their experiences of the horrors of war but rather by their failure to have those experiences. These 'quintessential' male American novelists of the 1920s were all, for different reasons, deemed unsuitable as candidates for full military service or command. As a result, Gandal contends, they felt themselves emasculated--not, as the usual story goes, due to their encounters with trench warfare, but because they got nowhere near the real action. Bringing to light previously unexamined Army records, including new information about the intelligence tests, The Gun and the Pen demonstrates that the authors' frustrated military ambitions took place in the forgotten context of the unprecedented U.S. mobilization for the Great War, a radical effort to transform the Army into a meritocratic institution, indifferent to ethnic and class difference (though not to racial difference). For these Lost Generation writers, the humiliating failure vis-à-vis the Army meant an embarrassment before women and an inability to compete successfully in a rising social order, against a new set of people. The Gun and the Pen restores these seminal novels to their proper historical context and offers a major revision of our understanding of America's postwar literature.

By: Keith Gandal (Professor of English Professor of English Northern Illinois University)
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 242mm, Width: 162mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 535g
ISBN: 9780195338911
ISBN 10: 019533891X
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 14 August 2008
Audience: College/higher education , A / AS level , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Keith Gandal is Professor of English at City College of New York. He is the author of The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum and Class Representation in Modern Fiction and Film.

Reviews for The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization

An innovative study. --Choice To our significant if doomed scholarly efforts to unknot the complex tangle of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and war, we have new help in the form of Keith Gandal's The Gun and the Pen. --The Hemingway Review Gandal provides a radically new and convincing critique . . . I highly recommend The Gun and the Pen to students of history and literature alike as a superb example of what a multidisciplinary study can accomplish. -The Journal of Military History Gandal is the first person to see the relevance of the experience of mobilization to American fiction and he has--with great brilliance as well as originality--demonstrated exactly the kind of difference it made to some of the central texts of the 20s and beyond. The Gun and the Pen will make an important difference to our understanding of American modernism. --Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois at Chicago With highly original and insightful readings