Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner are generally recognized as the most influential American novelists of the 20th century. Their careers paralleled one another in significant ways - two of their fledgling poems coincidentally appeared in the same avant-garde little magazine, and their first important books were published in 1926; they died a year apart, almost to the day; each won the Nobel Prize. But the trajectories of these two lives and careers were also much different. This book is not only a valuable addition to literary scholarship, it is also a unique re-creation of an era in American culture and letters. By reprinting the actual words of contemporary writers in excerpts of this book marks the invention of a new form of literary appreciation and commentary. Among the writers on the writers, there is Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Conrad Alken, W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis, Allen Tate, Erskine Caldwell, Henry Miller, Thomas Wolfe, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, Lillian Ross, and many others.

Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner are generally recognized as the most influential American novelists of the 20th century. Their careers paralleled one another in significant ways - two of their fledgling poems coincidentally appeared in the same avant-garde little magazine, and their first important books were published in 1926; they died a year apart, almost to the day; each won the Nobel Prize. But the trajectories of these two lives and careers were also much different. This book is not only a valuable addition to literary scholarship, it is also a unique re-creation of an era in American culture and letters. By reprinting the actual words of contemporary writers in excerpts of this book marks the invention of a new form of literary appreciation and commentary. Among the writers on the writers, there is Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Conrad Alken, W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis, Allen Tate, Erskine Caldwell, Henry Miller, Thomas Wolfe, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, Lillian Ross, and many others.