Writing Celebrity

TIMOTHY W. GALOW is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Wake Forest University, USA.

"Galow has written a shrewd, often surprising, and always entertaining study of literary celebrity in the modernist era. His pairing of Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald as mirror opposites transforms our understanding of both writers even as it radically revises the notion of 'the author' as produced in various American media between the two World Wars." - John McGowan, Ruel W. Tyson Jr. Distinguished Professor of Humanities, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "In this well-researched and consistently interesting book, Galow complicates our understanding of literary modernism by exploring the rise of the culture of celebrity and its not always predictable impact on the profession of authorship in the United States. His account of how F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein struggled to position themselves within a literary field that was often too simply divided between the high and the low is surprising and deftly presented. Galow does a wonderful job of explaining how the history of their efforts at authorial self-presentation ought to affect our reading of their work." - Jan Radway, Walter Dill Scott Professor of Communication Studies, Northwestern University "Depression, Galow (visiting professor, Wake Forest Univ.) depicts these modernist writers as attempting to define themselves through mass media. The author divides the book into three sections: part 1 connects literary modernism to the rise of media; part 2 focuses on Stein's 1930s autobiographies; part 3 analyzes Fitzgerald's Depression-era Crack-Up essays. As do a number of recent studies (for example, Jonathan Goldman's Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity, CH, Oct'11, 49-0719), Galow finds that these modernist authors needed to reconcile a dichotomy between low and high culture. Laboring for more than 30 years before becoming a best-selling author in the 1930s, Stein embraced this dichotomy, defining herself as an isolated, spontaneous genius who could produce artistic objects that sell well. In the Crack-Up essays, Fitzgerald created a Kunstlerroman, a narrative that exposes his internal struggles and failings but recommits him to his craft. Fitzgerald's confessional writings were popular but controversial, later helping to revive his reputation. Galow adroitly analyzes the rhetorical function of these modernist texts, repeatedly supporting his claim that Fitzgerald and Stein employed popular autobiographical writings to shape their images."- Choice

• PART I: CONTEXTS: LITERARY MODERNISM IN THE AGE OF CELEBRITY Critical Histories: The Changing Face of Literature, 1870-1920 Critical Reassessments: Celebrity, Modernism, and the Literary Field in the 1920s and 30s PART II: FROM TOKLAS TO EVERYBODY: GERTRUDE STEIN BETWEEN AUTOBIOGRAPHIES The Celebrity Speaks: Gertrude Stein's Aesthetic Theories After The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas After the Tour: Naturalized Aesthetics and Systematized Contradictions PART III: THE CRACK-UP OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD On the Limitations of Image Management: The Long Shadow of 'F. Scott Fitzgerald' The 'Crack-Up' Essays: Masculine Identity, Modernism, and the Dissolution of Literary Values