Chicago and the Making of American Modernism - Cather, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald in Conflict

At a Glance

Metadata	Details
Publication Date	2019-12-01
Journal	The F Scott Fitzgerald Review
Authors	Sharon Hamilton
Citations	1

Abstract

When I attended the 2019 Modern Language Association meeting in Chicago, I had the privilege of hearing Michelle E. Moore give a talk as part of a panel on “Hemingway’s Chicago Style.” Her presentation, arising from this book under review, was exemplary. Based on meticulous archival research—including physical analysis of books Ernest Hemingway had actually handled—she demonstrated the extent to which Hemingway had been influenced as a youth by a relative who was a successful Chicago businessman. I was very impressed by what I heard, so when I received the offer to review this book, I was excited about seeing what else she had to say.Chicago and the Making of American Modernism provides chapter-length studies of Chicago-based authors Henry Blake Fuller, Harriet Monroe, Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters, and Chicago suburb resident Ernest Hemingway. Along with these, the book also includes chapters on three writers who did not live in the city but who, Moore argues, still reflect the city’s influence in their work: Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.In her chapter on Fitzgerald, Moore points out that Chicago served for him, as for everybody else, as the “main train hub to the Midwest” (165). With impressive detail, Moore establishes—in the absence of similarly focused Fitzgerald scholarship—that Chicago was a city with which Fitzgerald was very familiar, especially with some of its wealthier inhabitants.She demonstrates that characters with Chicago connections heavily populate Fitzgerald’s fiction—including Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, who is from Chicago; Amory Blaine’s father in This Side of Paradise, whose brothers had been “successful Chicago brokers” (TSOP 11); and Nicole Diver’s grandmother in Tender Is the Night, who had been “brought up in Chicago” (TITN 79). Moore also offers extensive direct and indirect evidence, enriching to Fitzgerald studies, to support the idea that allusions to this city and its inhabitants reoccur in many of Fitzgerald’s short stories as well, including “The Cut-Glass Bowl” (1920; F&P 87-107), “The Four Fists” (1920; F&P 169-88), “The Camel’s Back” (1920; TJA 33-60), “May Day” (1920; TJA 61-114), and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922; TJA 127-68).Through impressive primary source research, Moore convinces the reader that Fitzgerald was fascinated by what he saw as “the Chicago type,” who he viewed as the sort of people who “live, work, and vacation together in a closed and clannish society” (167). She argues that while the “Chicago type” in Fitzgerald’s work most often appears as a fictional pastiche, this usually links back to real Chicago residents who Fitzgerald had actually known. These include his early crush Ginevra King, who was the “daughter and granddaughter of two wealthy Chicago families: the Kings and the Fullers” (167), and Fitzgerald’s Princeton friend Gordon McCormick, who would have been Fitzgerald’s “first introduction” to the wealthy Chicago-based McCormick family, which married into the Rockefeller family (184).Throughout, Moore’s precise attention to historical detail allows her to construct well-rounded portraits of the people behind the fictional Chicago types that populate Fitzgerald’s stories, and she convincingly demonstrates how knowing more about the real backgrounds of these people enriches our understanding of Fitzgerald’s thematic concerns, especially with respect to labor relations and workers’ rights. All in all, in the Fitzgerald chapter, just as with the rest of this remarkable book, Moore offers important contributions to scholarship by highlighting the significance of Chicago-related linkages that without her careful explications readers might otherwise miss.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.17.1.0272