Mocking Eugenics explores the opposition to eugenic discourse mounted by twentieth-century American artists seeking to challenge and destabilize what they viewed as a dangerous body of thought. Focusing on their wielding of humor to attack the contemporaneous science of heredity and the totalitarian impulse informing it, this book confronts the conflict between eugenic theories presented as grounded in scientific and metaphysical truth and the satirical treatment of eugenics as not only absurdly illogical but also antithetical to democratic ideals and inimical to humanistic values. Through analyses of the films of Charlie Chaplin and the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Anita Loos, and Wallace Thurman, Mocking Eugenics examines their use of laughter to dismantle the rhetoric of perfectionism, white supremacy, and nativism that shaped mainstream expressions of American patriotism and normative white masculinity. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural studies, literature, cinema, sociology, humor, and American studies.

“Epic indeed, this is the definitive biography of Fitzgerald, plain and simple. There’s no reason to own another.” —Library Journal The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” These works and more elevated F. Scott Fitzgerald to his place as one of the most important American authors of the twentieth century. After struggling to become a screenwriter in Hollywood, Fitzgerald was working on The Last Tycoon when he died of a heart attack in 1940. He was only forty-four years old. Fitzgerald left behind his own mythology. He was a prince charming, a drunken author, a spoiled genius, the personification of the Jazz Age, and a sacrificial victim of the Depression. Here, Matthew J. Bruccoli strips away the façade of this flawed literary hero. He focuses on Fitzgerald as a writer by tracing the development of his major works and his professional career. Beginning with his Midwest upbringing and first published works as a teenager, this biography follows Fitzgerald’s life through the successful debut of This Side of Paradise, his turbulent marriage to Zelda Sayre, his time in Europe among The Lost Generation, the disappointing release of The Great Gatsby, and his ignominious fall. As former US poet laureate James Dickey said, “the spirit of the man is in the facts, and these, as gathered and marshalled by Bruccoli over thirty years, are all we will ever need. But more important, they are what we need.”