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Oxford University Press, USA
The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization
The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization
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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.
Author: Keith Gandal
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 05/06/2010
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780199744572
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.
Author: Keith Gandal
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 05/06/2010
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780199744572
About the Author
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.
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