RELEVANT FICTION

“A day late and a dollar short” as the old expression– possibly dating to Fitzgerald’s time– says.

TWO occurrences motivated this post, both involving New Pop Lit‘s Contributing Editor Kathleen M. Crane.

First was her inability to find F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night at any local library. A few libraries, we discovered, don’t carry any of Fitzgerald’s books. Second, Kathleen recently was at a physical therapist’s for a lingering knee injury. In talking to a young employee, Kathleen mentioned that we hoped to soon make an excursion up to northern Michigan’s Hemingway Country, staying at a hotel where he once lived and frequenting his hangouts. The therapist looked perplexed, had never heard of him.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald: the one-time glamor boys of American literature. Literary rock stars. Throughout our time growing up and discovering ourselves as writers in the latter decades of the Twentieth Century, for Kathleen and I, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were the two larger-than-life figures of the art, combining charismatic personalities and compelling biographies with sparkling literary talent and an involvement in the greater world. Models for what American writers should be doing now.

An example of Fitzgerald’s involvement in the world was his 1920 novella, May Day— a multiple-viewpoint depiction of long-forgotten events on May 1, 1919, when anarchist demonstrations and riots, spear-headed by World War I army veterans, took place in cities across America. Fitzgerald ably weaves glimpses of the New York City riots with more personal stories– in his uniquely romantic literary prose style. The result? A multi-dimensional reading experience combining the “literary” with pop sensibility and a topical, here-and-now story. History-come-alive. Innovation, relevance, and style.

WHY can’t we produce this kind of work in 2025?

Karl Wenclas for New Pop Lit