Book Reviews                                                       

Cappetti, Carla. Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Pp. 274 with notes, bibliography and index. $39.50 (cloth); $17.50 (paper).

Mellow, James R. Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. Pp. 704 with illustrations, notes, bibliography and index. $30 (cloth).

Reynolds, Michael S. Hemingway: The American Homecoming. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell, 1992. Pp. 264 with chronology, maps, illustrations, notes and index. $24.95 (cloth).

Weber, Ronald. The Midwestern Ascendancy in American Writing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Pp. 252 with notes and index. $35 (cloth).

Except for summer vacations, the winter holidays probably provide the average reader a better chance to curl up with a good book than any other time of the year. With this in mind, four new studies of Illinois literature are reviewed here because individually they illuminate interesting aspects of an important topic and collectively they point the reader to many other good books — enough to satisfy the New Year's resolution of even the most ardent bibliophile.

The most broadly focused of these volumes is The Midwestern Ascendancy in American Writing by Ronald Weber, professor of American studies at Notre Dame. Acknowledging that concepts like regionalism in general and the Midwest in particular have long vexed literary scholars, Weber nevertheless argues that from the 1870s through the 1920s the Midwest — with Illinois playing a major role — replaced New England as the nation's dominant literary region, before being superseded in turn by the South. Although the period of Midwestern dominance was neither long nor deep, Weber examines its major authors and works as well as the literary movements it advanced, from local color writing to realism to naturalism to modernism. The result is more a balanced overview than a radical reassessment. Weber reprises the contributions of a predictable pantheon, including Theodore Dreiser, the first major writer to emerge from the Midwest; Sherwood Anderson and his young protege Ernest Hemingway, who together exercised the greatest influence on American literature of all their regional contemporaries; and Willa Gather, whose half-dozen masterpieces differentiate her career from the one-book reputations of many others, such as Edgar Lee Masters of Spoon River Anthology fame, and from the short-lived success of authors more celebrated in their times than in ours, such as Sinclair Lewis, whose satires earned him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1930 but win him few readers today. Weber concludes that the most enduring Midwestern literature of the period challenged popular perceptions of the region. While Midwestern writers helped to liberate American literature from "the grip of the genteel," they also generally avoided extremes or excesses, preferring to tell deceptively simple stories about plain people enacting their plain lives against a plain environment. Within their work, Weber exposes two recurring conflicts — the Midwest as concept versus the Midwest as fact, and the region as a fallen garden of Eden versus the region as a pastoral repository of national values. For Weber, the paradoxes persist: "The Midwest as a place is more than ever in danger of vanishing completely, erased ... by more pragmatic ways of thinking about regional realignment" or "absorbed into a featureless mass-media culture national in scope. Yet at the same time the idea of the Midwest seems stubbornly with us."

Courtesy of The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park The Marcelline Hemingway Sanford Collection Ernest Hemingway and his brother and sisters at Windemere (1916); Ursula and Sunny (standing); Marcelline and Ernest (sitting); Carol and Leicester (on their laps)

If Weber deserves credit for updating the regional approach and applying it to Midwestern literature, Carla Cappetti, an assistant professor at the City College of New York, wins praise for charting new territory. In Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel, she explores the rich relationship between the tenets of the Chicago school of sociology and the work of James T. Farrell, Nelson Algren and Richard Wright, three Chicago writers who incorporated these tenets into their fiction and nonfiction during the 1930s and 1940s.

Cappetti reveals how Chicago sociologists like Robert Park and Louis Wirth often imitated creative writers and literary

28/December 1993/Illinois Issues

scholars in developing their influential approach to the study of the modern city. Similarly, Chicago novelists found in the new discipline of urban sociology a fresh way to understand and describe the city's migrants and immigrants, neighborhoods and slums, gangs and gangsters. By tracing this intellectual interaction, Cappetti not only offers original interpretations of Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy, Algren's novel Never Came Morning, and Wright's autobiographies Black Boy and American Hunger, but she also argues for a reevaluation of their place in literary criticism. Traditionally dismissed as naturalistic, ethnic or proletarian, these works cannot be properly read outside the context of the contemporary urban novel — a form to which, Cappetti claims, Chicago gave birth. Until this critical relocation occurs, the literary histories of Chicago, the Midwest and the nation will continue to be distorted, and the insights such writers and works can offer into the modern malaise in our cities will continue to be obscured.

Just as critics are constantly challenging our received opinions of literary periods, places and people, so are biographers regularly revising our understanding of the lives and careers of major authors. No Illinois writer, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln, has been subjected to more frequent or fractious scrutiny of late than Ernest Hemingway, native of Oak Park and winner of the Nobel Prize for 1954. Ironically, the difficulties that arise in telling his story reflect not a paucity of material but a plethora of it, not a need to rescue him from undeserved oblivion but a desire to save him from unconsidered fame. The continuing reappraisal of Hemingway's life is all the more urgent because of the enduring myths (many self created) which still obscure the truth about the man and because of the complex relationship between his personal experience and its transformation in much of his work.

The reader searching for a sound one-volume biography reflecting recent scholarship and avoiding critical hobby-horses could do no better than James Mellow's Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. Compared to Carlos Baker's standard Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969), Mellow's volume is more balanced and reliable; compared to Kenneth Lynn's controversial Hemingway (1987), Mellow's book is less risk-taking and thesis-driven. Although he offers few startling discoveries or insights, he synthesizes a vast amount of material in a judicious and accessible style. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is its attention to Hemingway's intense but conflicted relationships with other males, including his father, his boyhood fishing and hunting companions, his literary mentors and peers. According to Mellow, Hemingway felt a lifelong need for masculine comradeship, but his competitiveness strained many of these friendships to the breaking point while his fictional depiction of such relationships fueled speculation that he had homosexual leanings. Mellow discounts these rumors, but agrees that they worried Hemingway nonetheless.

No Illinois writer, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln, has been subjected to more frequent or fractious scrutiny of late than Ernest Hemingway ...

The reader who prefers a more leisurely look at Hemingway's life will appreciate the magisterial multivolume biography by Michael Reynolds, professor of English at North Carolina State University. The Young Hemingway (1986) and Hemingway: The Paris Years (1989) precede the latest volume, which covers the pivotal years 1926-1929. During this tumultuous period, Hemingway divorced his first wife and married his second, parodied his sponsor Sherwood Anderson in order to change publishers and suppress charges that his writing imitated Anderson's, became a father for the second time, buried his own father after the latter's suicide by a gunshot wound to the head, resumed residence in the United States, and emerged as a world-famous writer and celebrity.

Few contemporary scholars can rival Reynolds, either in his diligence as a researcher (Mellow acknowledges this debt) or in his skill as a reporter of the results. *

Judith Everson is associate editor of Illinois Issues and associate professor in the English program at Sangamon State University in Springfield, where she teaches modem American literature.

December 1993/Illinois Issues/29