One hundred years ago, after the end of WWI, during the advent of modernist literature, two young Americans writers started their professional careers. Most well known for their novels, Fitzgerald published his first novel This Side of Paradise in 1920, Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises in 1926.
Hemingway and Fitzgerald knew each other since 1925, and while they respected each other’s writing capabilities, they sniped at each other over their novels (it is thought because of jealously) and the two didn’t get along.
As well as their novels, both Hemingway and Fitzgerald wrote wonderful short stories, as we will appreciate in this SDG. Fitzgerald wrote short stories throughout his writing days, starting in 1920 with the flapper story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” and ending with the Pat Hobby stories written for Esquire in which he wrote about Hollywood; the last of those stories were published posthumously after 1940 (he died an alcoholic). Hemingway’s first story was published in 1921, his second “On the Quai at Smyrna” in 1922. Towards the end of his life (he died a suicide in 1961), after winning the Nobel Prize for literature, Hemingway concentrated on writing novels and publishing (some posthumously) what we now call memoires.
In our SDG we will read, alternating each week, Ernest’s and Scott’s short stories, starting week 1 with Hemingway, then week 2 with Fitzgerald, and so on. We will discuss two or three stories each week, the number of stories discussed depends on the number of pages—see the weekly schedule below. We alternate between Hemingway’s “The Light of the World” on the first week, Fitzgerald’s “The Ice Palace” on week 2, then Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” Fitzgerald’s "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”... Many of these short stories, like the novels of Scott and Ernest, were famously made into films.
Come and be a member of our SDG. Enjoy reading remarkable stories by these gifted writers.
o Week 1, Hemingway Short Stories The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, The End of Something, The Light of the World
o Week 2, Fitzgerald Short Stories, The Freshest Boy, Magnetism, Absolution
o Weeks 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13. The six groupings of Hemingway stories will be assigned specific weeks at the pre-meeting
The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Battler, Cat in the Rain, On the Quay at Smyrna
The Undefeated, Old Man at the Bridge, Hills Like White Elephants, Banal Story
The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio, Fathers and Sons, The Three-Day Blow, The Revolutionist
Soldier’s Home, My Old Man, Out of Season, A Canary for One
Big Two-Hearted River: Part 1, Big Two-Hearted River: Part 2, In Another Country, After the Storm
Fifty Grand, The Capital of the World, A Clean Well-Lighted Place
o Weeks 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14. The six groupings of Fitzgerald stories will be assigned specific weeks at the pre-meeting.
Bernice Bobs Her Hair, The Ice Palace
May Day, Pat Hobby Himself
The Rich Boy, The Bridal Party
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, The Last of the Belles
Babylon Revisited, The Scandal Detectives, Family in the Wind
Crazy Sunday, Two Wrongs, An Alcoholic Case
Core texts:
The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, New York, Scribner’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, Malcolm Cowley (1951), New York, Scribner's
The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald selected, with an introduction and notes by Malcolm Cowley, New York, Scribner's