F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway might have been contemporaries, but our understanding of their work often rests on simple differences. Hemingway wrestled with war, fraternity, and the violence of nature. Fitzgerald satirized money and class and the never-ending pursuit of a material tomorrow. Through the provocative arguments of Scott Donaldson, however, the affinities between these two authors become brilliantly clear. The result is a reorientation of how we read twentieth-century American literature. Known for his penetrating studies of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Donaldson traces the creative genius of these authors and the surprising overlaps among their works. Fitzgerald and Hemingway both wrote fiction out of their experiences rather than about them. Therefore Donaldson pursues both biography and criticism in these essays, with a deep commitment to close reading. He traces the influence of celebrity culture on the legacies of both writers, matches an analysis of Hemingway's Spanish Civil War writings to a treatment of Fitzgerald's left-leaning tendencies, and contrasts the averted gaze in Hemingway's fiction with the role of possessions in The Great Gatsby. He devotes several essays to four novels, Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms, and others to lesser-known short stories. Based on years of research in the Fitzgerald and Hemingway archives and brimming with Donaldson's trademark wit and insight, this irresistible anthology moves the study of American literature in bold new directions.

A collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s remarks on his craft, taken from his works and letters to friends and colleagues—an essential trove of advice for aspiring writers. As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously decreed, “An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever after.” Fitzgerald's own work has gone on to be reviewed and discussed for over one hundred years. His masterpiece The Great Gatsby brims with the passion and opulence that characterized the Jazz Age—a term Fitzgerald himself coined. These themes also characterized his life: Fitzgerald enlisted in the US army during World War I, leading him to meet his future wife, Zelda, while stationed in Alabama. Later, along with Ernest Hemingway and other American artist expats, he became part of the “Lost Generation” in Europe. Fitzgerald wrote books “to satisfy [his] own craving for a certain type of novel,” leading to modern American classics including Tender Is the Night, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned. In this collection of excerpts from his books, articles, and personal letters to friends and peers, Fitzgerald illustrates the life of the writer in a timeless way.

Matched only by Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Paris France is a "fresh and sagacious" (The New Yorker) classic of prewar France and its unforgettable literary eminences. Celebrated for her innovative literary bravura, Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) settled into a bustling Paris at the turn of the twentieth century, never again to return to her native America. While in Paris, she not only surrounded herself with—and tirelessly championed the careers of—a remarkable group of young expatriate artists but also solidified herself as "one of the most controversial figures of American letters" (New York Times). In Paris France (1940)—published here with a new introduction from Adam Gopnik—Stein unites her childhood memories of Paris with her observations about everything from art and war to love and cooking. The result is an unforgettable glimpse into a bygone era, one on the brink of revolutionary change.

A manifesto reclaiming the wives and mistresses of literary modernism that inspired a generation of writers and scholars, reissued after more than a decade. I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order—pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature. On the last day of December 2009, Kate Zambreno, then an unpublished writer, began a blog called "Frances Farmer Is My Sister," arising from her obsession with literary modernism and her recent transplantation to Akron, Ohio, where her partner held a university job. Widely reposted, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants and melancholy portraits of the fates of the modernist “wives and mistresses," reclaiming the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create a community of writers and devised a new feminist discourse of writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon. In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it—she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles feminine experience to the realm of the “minor,” and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. “ANXIETY: When she experiences it, it's pathological,” writes Zambreno. “When he does, it's existential.” With Heroines, Zambreno provided a model for a newly subjectivized criticism, prefiguring many group biographies and forms of autotheory and hybrid memoirs that were to come in the years to follow. A book that has become its own canon, Heroines was named one of the "50 Books that define the past 5 Years in Literature" by Flavorwire, an "Essential Feminist Manifesto" by Dazed, and one of the "50 Greatest Books by Women" in Buzzfeed.

"America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it." -F. Scott Fitzgerald That was 100 years ago. So here we are again. At the beginning of the Twenties. Will this be a similar decade? There's one way to tell: To look back at certain points and document what was happening a century before. Based in part on her Ph.D. research at Dublin City University, in "Such Friends" The Literary 1920s, Vol. 1-1920, Kathleen Dixon Donnelly chronicles the events of the first year of the decade that included and affected the creative people in the four main writers' salons in the English-speaking Western world: William Butler Yeats and the Irish Literary Renaissance, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, Gertrude Stein and the Americans in Paris, and Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, as well as writers and supporters of the arts who were important to the time such as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound and others. They ate, they drank, they neglected their families. They praised and berated each other privately and publicly; they bickered endlessly. They complained about money and few had day jobs. And they talked. And talked. You can dip in and out of the vignettes in "Such Friends," search to see if your birthday is included, look for mentions of your favorite writers, or read it all straight through from January 1st to December 31st.