Beyond Gatsby

March 30, 2015
McParland (Mark Twain's Audience) fails to deliver on the promise of his book's subtitle, opting instead to demonstrate that some of the most prominent American authors of the 1920s were in fact simply products of their time. Citing Mencken, McParland refers to Fitzgerald as a âsocial historian" of the period, and goes on to say that âthese novelists, in their various ways observers of a bright and unique era." Sinclair Lewis, too, âwas one with his readers," the success of Main Street attributable to âa receptive audience," while Faulkner âshows us a different picture of the 1920s than the ones we have been looking at to this point." The writers who emerge from these pages are all the less interesting for being depicted more as chroniclers of the age than as its arbiters, more shaped by their time than shaping it. MacParland has done an impressive amount of research, but he piles on too many facts without explaining their significance. In place of insight, he offers anodyne observations worthy of SparkNotes: The Great Gatsby contains âthe archetypical quest of the American dream"; The Grapes of Wrath âreminds us of the heroism of the common man and woman." Despite 40 pages of endnotes and bibliography, this book is likely to be of little more interest to the academic than to the lay reader.

April 1, 2015

The 1920s, one of the more colorful decades of the 20th century, inspired a generation of writers who captured the changes in America following World War I. First called the Jazz Age by F. Scott Fitzgerald, it was a time of new optimism and breaking the old Victorian taboos. In this carefully researched cultural history, McParland (English, Felician Coll.; Mark Twain's Audience) takes a new look at classics such as Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, showing how the works represented the era and reflected universal human concerns. He points out how Ernest Hemingway and others helped forge an American literature independent from older English writing. The impressive, unusual list of sources includes critical commentaries of the time and articles by readers, revealing how they reacted to the narratives and characters. VERDICT This thorough and penetrating analysis succeeds in showing the 1920s to be a golden age of American literature that still influences readers and scholars. The unusual blend of criticism and social history will appeal primarily to literature students and specialists in the field of cultural studies.--Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo

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