The Gun and the Pen

Keith Gandal is professor of English at Northern Illinois University outside of Chicago. He is the author of The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Class Representation in Modern Fiction and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). He is also the author of a novel, Cleveland Anonymous (North Atlantic Books, 2002). He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley.

The major point...is that Gandal is the first person to see the relevance of the experience of mobilization to American fiction and that he has - with great brilliance as well as originality - demonstrated exactly the kind of difference it made to some of the central texts of the 20s and beyond. I learned a great deal from this book, and I am confident that it will, when published, make an important difference to our understanding of American modernism. I recommend publication in the strongest possible terms.

• Part I: Introduction ; Chapter 1 The Argument ; Chapter 2 Methodology and Scholarly Context ; Part II: ; Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner and the 1920s ; Chapter 3 The Great Gatsby and The Great War: ; Intelligence Testing, The Militarys New Man, and The Charity Girl ; Chapter 4 The Sun Also Rises and Mobilization Wounds: ; Joke Fronts, Military-School Wannabes, and Postwar Jewish Quotas ; Chapter 5 The Sound and the Fury and the Feebleminded ; Chapter 6 Post-Mobilization Romance: ; From Military Rejection to Modernist Tragedy and Symbolism ; Part III: ; The 1930s and After ; Chapter 7 Post-Mobilization Kinkiness: ; Barnes, West, Miller and the Militarys Frankness about Sex and Venereal Disease ; Chapter 8 The Sound and the Fury Redux and the End of the WWI Mobilization Novel ; Chapter 9 Afterword: Here We Go Again: ; WWII Mobilization Blues in William Burroughss Junky