Writing Celebrity: Stein, Fitzgerald, and the Modern(ist) Art of Self-Fashioning [Hardcover]

Writing Celebrity is divided into three major sections. The first part traces the rise of a national celebrity culture in the United States and examines the impact that this culture had on literary writing in the decades before World War II.? The second two sections of the book demonstrate the relevance of celebrity for literary scholarship by re-evaluating the careers of two major American authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein.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

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 literalSS