This book demonstrates that Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner were motivated, in their famous postwar books, not by their experiences of the horrors of the war but rather by their failure to have those experiences. These “quintessential” male American novelists of the 1920s were all deemed unsuitable as candidates for full military service or command and the result was that they felt themselves “emasculated”: not, as the usual story goes, because of their encounters with trench warfare in a mechanized army, but because either they got nowhere near the trenches or because they got to them in ... More

This book demonstrates that Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner were motivated, in their famous postwar books, not by their experiences of the horrors of the war but rather by their failure to have those experiences. These “quintessential” male American novelists of the 1920s were all deemed unsuitable as candidates for full military service or command and the result was that they felt themselves “emasculated”: not, as the usual story goes, because of their encounters with trench warfare in a mechanized army, but because either they got nowhere near the trenches or because they got to them in “trivial,” noncombat roles. By bringing to light previously unexamined archival records of the Army, the book shows that the frustration of these authors' military ambitions took place in the forgotten context of a whole new set of methods employed in the mobilization for World War I, unprecedented procedures that had as their aim the transformation of the Army into a meritocratic institution, indifferent to ethnic and class difference (though not black-white difference). So, for these writers, the humiliating failure to get into or to be promoted in the Army was also a failure to compete successfully in a rising social order and against a new set of people. And it is that social order and those people — these effects of mobilization, and not other effects supposedly produced by mass war and a mass army — that The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, and The Sound and the Fury register and re-imagine.