User:HCooper/sandbox

Nabokov, Vladimir (1970). Alfred Appel, ed. "The Annotated Lolita". Vintage.
Baker, Carlos (1972). Hemingway:The Writer as Artist. Princeton UP.
Barke, Megan; et al. (2000). "Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture". Journal of Social History. 33 (3): 565–584.
Batchelor, Bob (2013). "Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea". The Mailer Review. 7 (1): 74–89.
Benson, Jackson (1989). "Ernest Hemingway:The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life". American Literature. 61 (3): 345–358.
Braudey, Leo (1981). "Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel". ELH. 43 (3): 619–637.
Burwell, Rose Marie (1996). Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels. Cambridge UP.
Castronovo, David (Fall 2003). "Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement". New England Review. 4 (24): 179–186.
Conrad, Joseph (2002). Cedric Watts, ed. Heart of Darkness and other Tales. Oxford UP.
Cowley, Malcolm (1976). Malcom Cowley, ed. "Introduction:Leaves of Grass". Penguin. 1 (1): 7–37.
Donaldson, Scott (Summer 1980). "The Crisis of Fitzgerald's 'Crack-up'". Twentieth Century Literature. 26 (2): 171–188.
Ruth Prigozy, ed. (2002). "Fitzgerald's Nonfiction". The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge UP. pp. 164–188.
Eliot, T.S. (1933). The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. Faber and Faber.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott (2005). An Introduction to Bryant Mangum, ed. The Best Early Stories of Scotts Fitzgerald. Modern Library.
Edmund Wilson, ed. (1993). "The Crack Up". New Directions.
Bruccoli, Matthew J. (1955). The Great Gatsby. Scribner.
Scriber III, Charles (2003). Tender is the Night. Scribner.
Foster, Richard (Spring 1968). "Mailer and Fitzgerald Tradition". Novel: A Forum on Fiction. 3 (1): 219–230.
Glenday, Michael K. (2012). "The Blade and the Gambler:F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer". The Mailer Review. 6 (1): 117–128.
Hampl, Patricia (2012). "F. Scott Fitzgerald:Essays from the Edge". American Scholar. 81 (2): 104–111.
Harding, Jennifer Riddle (2011). "'He had Never Written a Word of That':Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway's 'The Snow of Kilimanjaro'". The Hemingway Review. 30 (2): 21–35.
Hemingway, Ernest (2003). "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber". The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories. New Scribner: 121–154.
"The Snows of Kilimanjaro". The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories. Scribner: 3–28. 2003.
Hicks, Alexander. "Advertisements for Myself:Mailer's Künstlerroman". Unpublished Manuscript.
Johnston, Kenneth G. (1984). "'The Snows of Kilimanjaro':An African Purge". Studies in Short Fiction. 21 (3): 223–227.
Justice, Hilary K. (2010). "Authorship and Alienation in Death in the Afternon and Advertisements for myself". The Mailer Review. 3 (1): 259–272.
Kennedy, Gerald J. (1999). "Doing Country:Hemingay's Geographical Imagination". Southern Review. 35 (2): 325–329.
Lethem, Jonathon (2013). "Introduction". In Phillip Sipiora. Mind of an Outlaw. Random House. pp. xi–xvi.
Mangum, Bryant (2005). "Introduction". In Bryant Mangum. The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Modern Library. pp. xvii=xxvii.
Peterson, Marvin V. (1981). "More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber". Studies in Short Fiction. 18 (1): 82–85.
Mailer, Norman (1959). "Advertisements for Myself". Putnam's.
Phillip Sipiora, ed. (2013). "Punching Papa". Mind of an Outlaw. Scribner. pp. 168–170.
Reynolds, Michael (1997). "Hemingway:The 1930s". Norton.
Robinson, Roxana (2005). Bryant Mangum, ed. "Foreword". The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Modern Library: xi–xvi.
Stoltzfus, Ben (2005). "Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories". Comparative Literature. 42 (3): 205–228.
Whitman, Walt (1976). Malcolm Cowley, ed. "Leaves of Grass". Penguin.
Wilson, Edmund (1933). "Autobiographical Pieces". In Edmund Wilson. The Crack-Up. New Directions.

It is not easy being a great writer.Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of angst. In using the term angst, I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation” () experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.1

Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship. ()

Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation” (Justice ) would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (–), Ernest Hemingway (–), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (–)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art. To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work Advertisements for Myself () with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” () and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between  and  years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments— amid the Great Depression and  a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.2

HEMINGWAY AND “THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO” (1936)

In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist” (), a search that occupied him to the end of his life.3 The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written,

He had seen the world change; not just the events; although

he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but
he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how
people were at different times. He had
been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but

now he never would (“Snows,”).

“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.4 So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of what might have been. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about counterfactuals.

The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”— which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment. (Harding –)

Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .” (). He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in Esquire. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom” (Reynolds ). True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.5 Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,

In April of , shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in Esquire, Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories (Reynolds –).

Written by
Raymond M. Vince