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 vers...

Richard Wright was one of the most influential and complex African American writers of the twentieth century. Best known as the trailblazing, bestselling author of Native Son and Black Boy, he established himself as an experimental literary intellectual in France who creatively drew on some of the leading ideas of his time - Marxism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonialism - to explore the sources and meaning of racism both in the United States and worldwide. Richard Wright in ...

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 a...

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 Ra...

This book shows how African American literature emerged as a world-recognized literature: less as the product of a seamless tradition of writers signifying upon their ancestors and more the product of three generations of ambitious, competitive individuals aiming to be the first great African American writer. It charts a canon of fictional landmarks, beginning with The House Behind the Cedars and culminating in the National Book Award-Winner Invisible Man, and tells the compelling stories ...

This thought-provoking collection explores significant new facets of an American author of lasting international stature.“Edited by three eminent Fitzgerald scholars, this fine book comprises nineteen incisive and provocative essays (most written for this collection) by . . . well-known Fitzgerald critics. The content is as varied as the international origins of its authors.” —ChoiceAs the author of some of the most compelling short stories ever wr...

A compelling intellectual and literary history of midcentury AmericaIn a midcentury American cultural episode forgotten today, intellectuals of all schools shared a belief that human nature was under threat. The immediate result was a glut of dense, abstract books on the "nature of man." But the dawning "age of the crisis of man," as Mark Greif calls it, was far more than a historical curiosity. In this ambitious intellectual and literary history, Greif recovers th...

Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) is one of the most violent and revolutionary works in the American canon. Controversial and compelling, its account of crime and racism remain the source of profound disagreement both within African-American culture and throughout the world.This guide to Wright's provocative novel offers:an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of Native Sona critical history, surveying the many interp...

In the 1920s, Americans talked of their times as “modern,” which is to say, fundamentally different, in pace and texture, from what went before—a new era. With the end of World War I, an array of dizzying inventions and trends pushed American society from the Victorian era into modernity.The New Era provides a history of American thought and culture in the 1920s through the eyes of American intellectuals determined to move beyond an older role as gatekeepers of cultural respectabil...

A pillar of African American literature, Richard Wright is one of the most celebrated and controversial authors in American history. His work championed intellectual freedom amid social and political chaos. Despite the popular and critical success of books such as Uncle Tom's Children (1938), Black Boy (1945), and Native Son (1941), Wright faced staunch criticism and even censorship throughout his career for the graphic sexuality, intense violence, and communist ...

Challenging the conventional wisdom that the 1930s were dominated by literary and photographic realism, Sensational Modernism uncovers a rich vein of experimental work by politically progressive artists. Examining images by photographers such as Weegee and Aaron Siskind and fiction by writers such as William Carlos Williams, Richard Wright, Tillie Olsen, and Pietro di Donato, Joseph Entin argues that these artists drew attention to the country’s most vulnerable residents by using ...

American Literature in Transition, 1920–1930 examines the dynamic interactions between social and literary fields during the so-called Jazz Age. It situates the era's place in the incremental evolution of American literature throughout the twentieth century. Essays from preeminent critics and historians analyze many overlapping aspects of American letters in the 1920s and re-evaluate an astonishingly diverse group of authors. Expansive in scope and daring in its mixture of eclectic methods...