
The Gun and the Pen
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization
Keith Gandal(Author)
Oxford University Press Inc
Published on 29. July 2010
Book
Paperback/Softback
288 pages
978-0-19-974457-2 (ISBN)
Description
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-a-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.
Reviews / Votes
deserve[s] high marks for its archival research, historical understanding, and reassessment of established views * The Journal of American Studies *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
465 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-974457-2 (9780199744572)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
05/2010
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€14.49
Available for download

Book
08/2008
Oxford University Press Inc
€109.70
Shipment within 15-20 days

E-Book
07/2008
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€19.99
Available for download
Person
Keith Gandal is Professor of English at Northern Illinois University. 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.
Content
PART I INTRODUCTION; PART II FITZGERALD, HEMINGWAY, FAULKNER, AND THE 1920S; PART III THE 1930S AND AFTER; AFTERWORD: HERE WE GO AGAIN: WORLD WAR II MOBILIZATION BLUES IN WILLIAM BURROUGHS'S JUNKY; NOTES; INDEX