Chapter 7 details the American novelist John Dos Passos’s interactions with the Soviet authors as a guide, writer of letters of introduction, and literary model. At the time of their visit, Dos Passos was at the center of an important literary debate on the recently articulated socialist realism. By the time they returned, Soviet cultural authorities had turned decisively against Dos Passos’s so-called formalism. Excised from the 1937 Russian edition of Ilf and Petrov’s travelogue, Dos Passos nonetheless profoundly influenced their account. The Dos Passos connection allows us to understand the genre-defying Odnoetazhnaia Amerika as not only a travelogue, a satire, and picaresque but also as a valedictory intervention in the debate on the possibility of socialist realism with a modernist sensibility.

The work and lives of modernist writers were extensively chronicled by the mass media, enabling Americans to develop an active interest in even the most radical literary developments in the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter examines the careers of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway and the cultural developments that enabled their success in specific decades. All were American celebrities. The lives of each were profiled in periodicals, their style was parodied, their faces graced the covers of popular magazines, and all had relationships with Hollywood and filmmaking. Other modernists were subject to this public interest as well, including Faulkner, Eliot, Woolf, and Joyce. None were immune to the broad changes in the marketing and promotion of books and authors that facilitated a lively, robust mainstream knowledge of writers as popular as Hemingway or as difficult as Gertrude Stein, blurring distinctions between low-, middle-, and highbrow writers.

This chapter surveys Ellison’s complex relationship with other key Modernist writers, as expressed both explicitly in his letters and chapters, and implicitly in his short stories, in Invisible Man, and in Three Days Before the Shooting … . Examining key moments in his intellectual formation, such as his encounters with Eliot and Joyce during his undergraduate studies at Tuskegee, it also maps out the paradox of his attested admiration for but rare intertextual dialogue with Hemingway, and his ambivalent and shifting positions on Faulkner. Lastly, it suggests that despite Ellison’s and Morrison’s mutual and clearly voiced antipathy, these two writers have far more in common, particularly in terms of their conceptions of Modernism, than either would like to admit. Throughout my overview, I will take account of the best pre-existing scholarship on this subject.

This chapter addresses one of Mailer’s most notable literary influences, Ernest Hemingway. Mailer wrestled with the looming influence of Hemingway to such an extent that the relationship merits its own focused study. When it was first published, The Naked and the Dead invited immediate comparisons to Hemingway, which had much to do with the two authors similar thematic concerns. For years, Mailer alternately fought against and embraced these comparisons, wrestling with Hemingway’s influence, writing about him on more than one occasion (in pieces such as 1956’s “Nomination of Ernest Hemingway for President” and 1963’s “Punching Papa” among others), and writing an unanswered letter to him as well.

Mailer assumed the role of a sharp literary critic throughout his career. His criticisms ranged from such pieces as 1959’s “Quick Evaluations of the Talent in the Room,” in which he offered brief appraisals of a number of his contemporaries, to his infamous review of Waiting for Godot (which he published without having seen the play), to more extended and thoughtful reviews of works by Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Franzen, and others.

Many festivals and celebrations take place worldwide on a regular basis. What is of special interest to us is not only the nature of those diverse festivities but also their origin and evolution. How did those festivals begin? How and why might they have changed over time? Several intriguing festivals in Spain provide fertile material for attempting to answer these questions. Four Spanish festivals stand out for their uniqueness and audacity: the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, made famous by Ernest Hemingway in his 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises; the tomato-throwing festival (La Tomatina) in Buñol; the construction of Human Towers in Catalonia; and, the Baby Jumping festival in Castrillo de Murcia. To one degree or another, the origins of these unforgettable celebrations involve religion, color, risk, and serendipity.

This chapter examines the notion of home-shock (as opposed to shell-shock) in five works of American fiction from the 1920s. Each work contains a veteran tortured not by war but by the circumstances of his homecoming. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby returns from his heroic overseas service to a nation that seems content to let him starve, the pivotal moment in his transformation from earnest student of self-help to criminal bootlegger. Harold Krebs, the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home,” is infantilized by his mother and ignored by his community, which neither understands nor respects his combat experience. Bayard Sartoris and Henry Winston—former wartime aviators featured in, respectively, William Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust and Elliott White Springs’s Leave Me with a Smile—each suffer from paralyzing survivor’s guilt, a malady that no one in their Southern settings is equipped to treat. For African-American protagonists, subject to racial violence and oppression, home-shock is even more intense, as illustrated by the ironic fate visited upon Frederick Taylor, the doleful hero of Claude McKay’s “The Soldier’s Return,” set in a small Georgia town. This former soldier winds up on a chain gang after ignoring an edict that prohibits black veterans from wearing their uniforms in public.

Hervey Allen abruptly ended his World War I memoir Toward the Flame in the middle of a battle because, as he later wrote, he believed that “When the fighting ends the story stops.” Yet many writers have chosen another route, following wounded soldiers through the grueling and sometimes traumatic process of medical care. Other writers approach war writing through medicine, treating medical professionals as essential to the war effort and thus subjects for a war story. Indeed, medical care often advances greatly during war, creating the irony that destruction of bodies can lead to innovations that save future lives. This essay discusses representations of injured bodies and medical care from the Civil War through the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Ritual and hospitality bind together the fiction of Ernest Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy. As their various protagonists struggle to find their way in landscapes no longer familiar, they turn to rituals, both established and newly concocted, as a way to navigate. Just as Hemingway’s heroes seek human connection as a way to heal their spiritual brokenness, so, too, do McCarthy’s protagonists, who turn to the rituals of hospitality. Their actions serve as affirmation that there is hope in spite of the evil prevalent in the world. In particular, the rituals of sacrifice and thanksgiving performed by women suggest God’s promise of the earth’s ultimate and mysterious goodness. These writers offer rich opportunities for comparison both in the college classroom and in critical conversation.

A key moment in the history of the dynamic between New Orleans and the major cultural hubs of the Northeast and Europe occurred with the emergence of a “little” magazine in 1921 called the Double Dealer, which published the literary figures who would define the aesthetic and cultural movement known as modernism. The final issues of the magazine gave significant exposure to a writer who was, until then, little known – William Faulkner. The magazine also published Sherwood Anderson, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, and Thornton Wilder. Though it faltered and finally folded after just a handful of years, it managed to link New Orleans to the most elite cultural channels of the wider world in roughly the same moment that the indigenous music of the city – jazz – came to widespread recognition.