This book charts Fitzgerald's use of racial stereotypes to encode the dual nature of his literary ambition: his desire to be on the one hand a popular American entertainer, and on the other to make his mark in an elite, international literary field.

Explores many of the important social, historical and cultural contexts surrounding the life and works of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

This second edition of The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald offers both new and familiar readers an authoritative guide to the full scope of Fitzgerald's literary legacy. Gathering the critical insights of leading Fitzgerald specialists, it includes newly commissioned essays on The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, Zelda Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald's judgment of his peers, and Fitzgerald's screenwriting and Hollywood years, alongside updated and revised versions of four of the best essays from the first edition on such topics as youth, maturity, and sexuality; the short stories and autobiographical essays; and Americans in Europe. It also includes an essay on Fitzgerald's critical and cultural reputation in the first decades of the 21st century, and an up-to-date bibliography of the best Fitzgerald scholarship and criticism for further reading.

The Great Gatsby is widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of American fiction. It tells of the mysterious Jay Gatsby’s grand effort to win the love of Daisy Buchanan, the rich girl who embodies for him the promise of the American dream. Deeply romantic in its concern with self making, ideal love, and the power of illusion, it draws on modernist techniques to capture the spirit of the materialistic, morally adrift, post-war era that Fitzgerald dubbed “the jazz age.” Gatsby’s aspirations remain inseparable from the rhythms and possibilities suggested by modern consumer culture, popular song, and the movies, while his obstacles remain inseparable from contemporary American anxieties about social mobility, racial mongrelization, and the fate of Western civilization. This Broadview edition sets the novel in context by providing readers with a critical introduction and crucial background material about the consumer culture in which Fitzgerald was immersed, the novel’s composition and reception, and the jazz age. The second edition has been updated throughout, with expanded writings on race and immigration in 1920s America from Anzia Yezierska, Alain Locke, and others.

The Great Gatsby is widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of American fiction. It tells of the mysterious Jay Gatsby’s grand effort to win the love of Daisy Buchanan, the rich girl who embodies for him the promise of the American dream. Deeply romantic in its concern with self-making, ideal love, and the power of illusion, it draws on modernist techniques to capture the spirit of the materialistic, morally adrift, post-war era Fitzgerald dubbed “the jazz age.” Gatsby’s aspirations remain inseparable from the rhythms and possibilities suggested by modern consumer culture, popular song, the movies; his obstacles inseparable from contemporary American anxieties about social mobility, racial mongrelization, and the fate of Western civilization. This Broadview edition sets the novel in context by providing readers with a critical introduction and crucial background material about the consumer culture in which Fitzgerald was immersed; about the spirit of the jazz age; and about racial discourse in the 1920s.

'I tender these tales of the Jazz Age into the hands of those who read as they run and run as they read.' F. Scott Fitzgerald chose the stories for his second collection when he was just twenty-five years old, and in the full flush of wild literary success. Tales of the Jazz Age is a quirky, electrifying selection reaching back into his college days and includes new stories, showing Fitzgerald's strengths not only asone of America's leading short story authors in the early 1920s, but as a playwright, farcical satirist, melodramatist, and fantastical novella-writer. He went in all these directions with equal ease and flash in 1922. Talesof the Jazz Age was a bestseller then, and remains so now.In these eleven stories, Fitzgerald establishes the style that was to make him one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth-century.

Mocking Eugenics explores the opposition to eugenic discourse mounted by twentieth-century American artists seeking to challenge and destabilize what they viewed as a dangerous body of thought. Focusing on their wielding of humor to attack the contemporaneous science of heredity and the totalitarian impulse informing it, this book confronts the conflict between eugenic theories presented as grounded in scientific and metaphysical truth and the satirical treatment of eugenics as not only absurdly illogical but also antithetical to democratic ideals and inimical to humanistic values. Through analyses of the films of Charlie Chaplin and the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Anita Loos, and Wallace Thurman, Mocking Eugenics examines their use of laughter to dismantle the rhetoric of perfectionism, white supremacy, and nativism that shaped mainstream expressions of American patriotism and normative white masculinity. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural studies, literature, cinema, sociology, humor, and American studies.

A new account of how African American literature emerged from the competitive ambition of landmark novelists, from Chesnutt to Ellison.

James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) exemplified the ideal of the American public intellectual as a writer, educator, songwriter, diplomat, key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and first African American executive of the NAACP. Originally published anonymously in 1912, Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is considered one of the foundational works of twentieth-century African American literature, and its themes and forms have been taken up by other writers, from Ralph Ellison to Teju Cole. Johnson’s novel provocatively engages with political and cultural strains still prevalent in American discourse today, and it remains in print over a century after its initial publication. New Perspectives contains fresh essays that analyze the book’s reverberations, the contexts within which it was created and received, the aesthetic and intellectual developments of its author, and its continuing influence on American literature and global culture. Contributors: Bruce Barnhart, Lori Brooks, Ben Glaser, Jeff Karem, Daphne Lamothe, Noelle Morrissette, Michael Nowlin, Lawrence J. Oliver, Diana Paulin, Amritjit Singh, Robert B. Stepto

Race and Identity in Hemingway s Fiction explores how Hemingway negotiates race as a defining element of American identity. His interest in race and racial identity emerged in his writing and his personal life, through attention to skin color, performance of racial identity, and experimentation and immersion in tribal life and rituals. This study imagines what Hemingway s fiction would look like if his non-white characters were brought out of the background and asks how Hemingway s conception of American identity transforms when it is constructed on the basis of race.