Conclusion

Rather than being defined by their membership of a particular constituency of ideological or sociopolitical war experience, writers hold and express complex and evolving views on the war. Studying authors’ careers reveals not only that their writing was influenced by the war, but that, simultaneously, the circumstances of their artistic and professional development shaped the manner and mode of their literary reactions. More than has been fully appreciated, American writers drew on native literary and historical culture to assess the Great War. Ultimately, however, American writing about the war was idiosyncratic, complex, and subject to change, as writers’ ongoing reactions to the war were influenced by the intricate group of intrapersonal and interpersonal variables that shaped professional authorship.

Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway’s World War I writing developed, first, as he honed his distinctive style and progressed toward completing his first novel. In the 1930s, Hemingway shifted approach, however, and his World War I-related writings came under the influence of his interest in social inequality (To Have and Have Not); his shift toward showing instead of implying interiority in Across the River and into the Trees; and the general imposition of his ego into his private and public writing. He remained committed, however, to the idea of the inherently complex nature of warfare.

Laurence Stallings

Perhaps more than any author, Stallings exemplified the multimedia and collaborative nature of World War I writing in America. Following his bitter anti-war novel Plumes, Stallings co-authored the popular play What Price Glory with Maxwell Anderson, which led to Stallings’s involvement in The Big Parade—one of the most lucrative films of the silent era—and a film adaptation of What Price Glory As well as his diversity of representational forms, Stallings’s war writing was marked by an increasingly positive attitude to warfare, which emerged in his later short stories and his World War I history, The Doughboys.

Introduction

This chapter addresses the war’s multifaceted effect, not only on different areas of society but in terms of the competing interpretations that existed within various social groups. David Rennie suggests that authors, too, could demonstrate shifting, sophisticated, and even contradictory reactions to the war in their fictional and non-fictional outputs. The machinations of the publishing industry, advertising, Hollywood, and authors’ artistic and personal development meant that writers’ reactions to the war were complex, provisional, and subject to change in relation to intrapersonal and interpersonal variables. Rennie also proposes, contrary to the findings of Paul Fussell, that American writers did draw on native historical and literary examples to express contrast—but also some elements of continuity—between modern war and nineteenth-century notions of heroism.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

This chapter overviews how Fitzgerald’s war writing was refracted through his evolution as a writer, from The Side of Paradise—his chaotic and immature debut novel—through his experimentations with naturalism in The Beautiful and Damned, to the ambiguous portrayal he gives of World War I in The Great Gatsby. Tender Is the Night, while more stylistically mature than Fitzgerald’s first novel, I argue, revisits many of the representational strategies explored in his debut. Like Boyd, Fitzgerald’s World War I-related projects were caught up in his commercially necessitated magazine fiction and spells in Hollywood.

The Business of War

War writing was implicated in and shaped by wider cultural forces. During the war, patriotic bestsellers flooded the literary marketplace, censorship suppressed certain anti-war writing, while authors participated in the CPI’s propaganda machine. After the war, changes in the publishing industry, allied to a growing awareness of the importance of advertising, shaped the way war writing was presented to the public. Hollywood, meanwhile, provided opportunities for writers to supplement their income, either by writing for the studios or by sanctioning adaptations of their work. Discussing the work of Guy Empey, John Dos Passos, and E. E. Cummings, this chapter considers the ways the content of American World War I texts—and the formats in which they were presented to the public—were influenced by these factors.

Thomas Boyd

Boyd is best known for his debut novel, Through the Wheat, which is typically thought of as an anti-war modernist work. However, I argue, Boyd’s novel is, in fact, a more ambiguous take on World War I experience. Moreover, his war writing evolved in relation to his career trajectory, as reflected in Boyd’s need to write World War I magazine fiction and his attempt at Hollywood screenwriting on a World War I project. Toward the end of his life, Boyd turned to communism, which influenced his commentary on the war in In Time of Peace, his proletarian bildungsroman sequel to Through the Wheat.

Ellen La Motte and Mary Borden

Ellen La Motte and Mary Borden worked together at the same field hospital during the war, an experience that prompted them to write their best-known works, The Backwash of War and The Forbidden Zone. La Motte and Borden have often been compared, and even described as collaborators. This chapter, however, contrasts their approaches to war writing and demonstrates that, moreover, the works for which they are commonly associated with the war do not typify their literary reaction to it. La Motte moved away from fiction-writing to concentrate on the opium trade. Borden, meanwhile, broached the war in a variety of novels throughout her prolific career—in works that eschew the fragmented aesthetics of The Forbidden Zone and focus on the nuances of interpersonal relations that are all but absent in her most noted work.

Edith Wharton

Chapter 2 discusses the ways in which Wharton’s prolific, if short-lived, output of World War I writing changed in reaction to external forces. Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort and French Ways and their Meaning were influenced by the military authorities, while The Book of the Homeless was spurred on by the need to raise funds for Wharton’s charities. A comparison between The Marne and A Son at the Front, however, reveals that, after the war, Wharton’s perspective shifted, as she came to doubt the moral efficacy of the war effort that she had so intently supported in her writing and philanthropic work.