Spirits of Defiance: National Prohibition and Jazz Age Literature, 1920-1933

National Prohibition (1920-1933) ranks as one of the most divisive political controversies of the twentieth century, and its reverberations echoed through nearly every facet of American popular culture. Not surprisingly, many novelists and short story writers added their voices to this contentious public debate by incorporating into their works their interpretations of the wildly controversial federal liquor laws. In Spirits of Defiance, the first book to examine how American writers responded to the far-reaching effects of the Eighteenth Amendment, Kathleen Drowne analyzes the literary portrayals of bootleggers, moonshiners, revenuers, speakeasies, cabarets, and other specifically Prohibition-era characters and settings in a wide range of novels and short stories produced during the 1920s and early 1930s. She argues that these fictional representations carry enormous political and moral significance exposing how and why Americans defied or supported their government’s attempt to legislate the morality of its citizens. Drowne examines a wide range of American literature including works by William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Claude McKay, Sinclair Lewis, Zora Neale Hurston, and Upton Sinclair. Grounding her study in social, cultural, and literary history, she investigates how these and other authors’ politically charged accounts of life during the Dry Decade reflected the many ways Americans responded to the legal, social, and cultural changes wrought by National Prohibition

The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser. by Jerome Loving. (Berkley: University of California Press, 2005. xvi, 480 pp. $34.95, ISBN 0-520-23481-2.)

Theodore Dreiser, sometimes called the “Father of American Realism” (p. 140), has long occupied a contested position in American literary studies. Damaging accusations of plagiarism and anti-Semitism have diminished his reputation, yet as the author of Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925), two of the most highly regarded naturalistic novels in the American literary canon, Dreiser cannot be so easily dismissed. Enter The Last Titan, Jerome Loving\u27s sweeping and meticulously researched biography of the man he calls “the last major American writer of the nineteenth century” (p. 164). The Last Titan differs from previous Dreiser bi-ographies—notably W. A. Swanberg\u27s Dreiser (1965) and Richard Lingeman\u27s two-volume Theodore Dreiser (1986, 1990)—in that Loving organizes the book around his subject\u27s prodigious literary output. Countless readers are familiar with Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, but Dreiser also produced six other novels,..

Understanding Richard Russo

Understanding Richard Russo explores the significant themes and patterns in this contemporary American author’s seven novels, a memoir, and two short story collections, including the 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Empire Falls. Known for assembling large casts of eccentric characters and sweeping multi-generational storylines, Russo brings to life hard-hit rural manufacturing towns and their inhabitants even as he explores the bewildering, painful complexities of family relationships. This critical study by Kathleen Drowne first recounts Russo’s biography, then explores his novels chronologically, and ends with a chapter dedicated to his other works. Drowne invites readers to appreciate more fully Russo’s evocative portrayals of hardscrabble working-class life in failing rural towns of the Northeast by identifying major themes and patterns present in Russo’s work. In Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, Empire Falls and Bridge of Sighs, readers can see the primary recurring theme of Russo’s work: the plight of deteriorating rural communities and the dramatic impact of that decline on their blue-collar inhabitants. A second important theme in Russo’s fiction is the complicated relationship between emotionally scarred sons and their abusive, absent, or neglectful fathers; such relationships fuel the narratives of The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, Empire Falls, Bridge of Sighs, and That Old Cape Magic. Russo also utilizes large casts of realistic but highly eccentric characters—worn-out shopkeepers and odd-jobbers, alcoholics, invalids, and ne’er-do-wells—whose lives are emblematic of both the dignity and the desperation of crumbling Rust Belt towns. Russo possesses, as one New York Times reviewer commented, “that wonderfully unfashionable gift for effortless storytelling on a sweeping, multigenerational scale,” which undoubtedly cements his place among his contemporaries in modern American literature. Drowne offers readers an insightful point of entrance into Russo’s body of work to date

Postwar Flappers

In 1923, an enthusiastic journalist for the Des Moines Capital claimed, perhaps somewhat hyperbolically, When F. Scott Fitzgerald, the twenty-five year old author, wrote to The Beautiful and Damned, he did more than merely write one of the cleverest stories ever done by an American; he immortalized the flapper (Figure 23.1.). As a result, when you think of a flapper your mind travels instinctively to The Beautiful and Damned, either in its novel or screen adaptation form; and when you think of the novel or picture of this name, your thoughts revert to the much-discussed flapper. Fitzgerald himself seemed pleased to embrace the role of the flapper spokesman as the interview continued. I sometimes wonder, says Mr. Fitzgerald, whether the flapper made me or whether I made her. At any rate, we both should be grateful to one another. My story has helped her to understand herself, and it has made the world of non-flappers more appreciative and tolerant. Of course, Fitzgerald\u27s comments were disingenuous; he certainly did not make the flapper (though one might argue that she made him, or at least started him off). But by the time The Beautiful and Damned came out in 1922, Fitzgerald, riding the wave of popular flapper fiction, was already widely regarded as an expert in the area of young modern women and their various behaviors, strategies, and goals. Indeed, Fitzgerald\u27s This Side of Paradise (1920) was the first major novel to feature the rebellious and brazen flapper, and his first two collections of short stories, Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), also included memorable flapper characters, including Marjorie Harvey in Bernice Bobs Her Hair, Ardita Farnam in The Offshore Pirate, and Nancy Lamar in The Jelly-Bean. By the mid-1920s, Fitzgerald had become permanently associated in the popular imagination with the daring young flappers of post-World War I America