Years before the publication of "Catch-22" ("A monumental artifact of contemporary literature" -- "The New York Times;" "An apocalyptic masterpiece" -- "Chicago Sun-Times;" "One of the most bitterly funny works in the language" -- "The New Republic"), Joseph Heller began sharpening his skills as a writer, searching for the voice that would best express his own peculiarly wry view of the world.
In "Catch As Catch Can, " editors Matthew J. Bruccoli and Park Bucker have for the first time collected the short stories Heller published prior to that first novel, along with all the other short pieces of fiction and nonfiction that were published during his lifetime. Also included are five previously unpublished short stories, most reflecting the influence on Heller of urban naturalist writers such as Irwin Shaw and Nelson Algren.
The result is an important and significant addition to our understanding and appreciation of Joseph Heller, showing his evolution as a writer and artist. For those unfamiliar with his work, it will serve as an excellent introduction; for everyone else, "Catch As Catch Can" is a chance to explore a new aspect of Heller's remarkable career.

Since its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's account of the American dream gone awry, has established itself as one of the most popular and widely read novels in the English language. Until now, however, no edition has printed the novel exactly as Fitzgerald himself wrote it. From its first edition onward, the text has been subject to rigorous house-styling that has distorted the characteristic rhythms and structure of his sentences. This critical edition draws on the manuscript and surviving proofs of the novel, together with Fitzgerald's subsequent revisions to key passages, to provide the first authoritative text of The Great Gatsby. This volume also includes a detailed account of the genesis, composition, and publication of the novel; a full textual apparatus; crucial early draft material; helpful glosses on the peculiar geography and chronology of the book; and explanatory notes on topical allusions and historical references that contemporary readers might otherwise miss. Fitzgerald's great masterpiece is thus brought closer to a cross-section of readers, more accessibly and more authentically than ever before.

Even in its incomplete form The Love of The Last Tycoon has achieved a reputation as the best novel about Hollywood. When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 he had written seventeen of thirty projected episodes. In 1941 the 'unfinished novel' was published in a text for general readers by Edmund Wilson under the title The Last Tycoon. For more than fifty years this edition, which is not true to the original work in progress, has been the only one available. This critical edition of The Love of The Last Tycoon, first published in 1994, utilises Fitzgerald's manuscript drafts, revised typescipts, and working notes to establish the first authoritative text of the work. The volume includes a detailed history of the gestation, composition, and publication of the novel; full textual apparatus with editorial notes; fascimiles of the drafts; and explanatory notes on topical allusions and historical references for contemporary readers. The reconstruction of Fitzgerald's plan for the thirteen unwritten episodes is particularly useful. F. Scott Fitzgerald's incomplete masterpiece is restored its 1940 state, and thus made fully accessible to a cross-section of readers.

Four essays trace the revival of the popularity of this American classic; analyze it in the context of the perennial quest for the "great American novel" and examine the central themes of love, money, order and illusion in the novel. A final essay focuses on its unique style.

Since its publication in 1925, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's account of the American dream gone awry, has established itself as one of the most popular and widely read novels in the English language. Until now, however, no edition has printed the novel exactly as Fitzgerald intended. The first edition was marred by errors resulting from Fitzgerald's extensive rewriting in proof and the conditions under which the book was produced; moreover, the subsequent transmission of the text introduced proliferating departures from the author's words. This critical edition draws on the manuscript and surviving proofs of the novel, together with Fitzgerald's subsequent revisions to key passages, to provide the first authoritative text of The Great Gatsby. This volume also includes a detailed account of the genesis, composition, and publication of the novel; a full textual apparatus; crucial early draft material; helpful glosses on the peculiar geography and chronology of the book; and explanatory notes on topical allusions and historical references that contemporary readers might otherwise miss. Fitzgerald's masterpiece is thus brought closer to a cross-section of readers, more accessibly and more authentically than ever before. Matthew J. Bruccoli has published widely. He is the author of Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1980) and editor of New Essays on The Great Gatsby (CUP, 1985).

As a writer, scholar, critic, teacher, bibliophile, and publisher, Matthew J. Bruccoli had immeasurable impact on American literary scholarship and history over the past half century. In his more than one hundred published books, Bruccoli demonstrated a rare model of scholarship based on tenacious research, passionate intensity, and encyclopedic knowledge of his subjects. He brought this same spirited mode of inquiry to his essays as well. On Books and Writers brings together thirty of Bruccoli's best short pieces from journals, anthologies, and other publications to illustrate in a single volume the remarkable range and enduring contributions of this accomplished man of letters.

Author of more than forty novels and myriad short stories over a three-decade literary career, Philip K. Dick (1928a1982) single-handedly reshaped twentieth-century science fiction. His influence has only increased since his death with the release of numerous feature films based on his work, including Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall (based on aWe Can Remember It for You Wholesalea), Minority Report (based on aThe Minority Reporta), and Next (based on aThe Golden Mana). In Understanding Philip K. Dick, Eric Carl Link introduces readers to the life, career, and work of this groundbreaking, prolific, and immeasurably influential force in American literature, media culture, and contemporary science fiction.

Dick was at times a postmodernist, a mainstream writer, a pulp fiction writer, and often all three simultaneously, but as Link illustrates, he was more than anything else a novelist of ideas. From this vantage point, Link surveys Dickas own tragicomic biography, his craft and career, and the recurrent ideas and themes that give shape and significance to his fiction. Link addresses Dickas efforts to break into the mainstream in the 1950s, his return to science fiction in the 1960s, and his move toward more theologically oriented work in his final two decades. Link finds across Dickas writing career an intellectual curiosity that transformed his science fiction novels from bizarre pulp extravaganzas into philosophically challenging explorations of the very nature of reality, and it is this depth of vision that continues to garner new audiences and fresh approaches to Dickas genre-defining tales.

This is an illustrated compendium charting the rise in Fitzgerald appreciation among his readers and collectors. As a student in the 1950s, Matthew J. Bruccoli began collecting books by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a practice that culminated in the development of the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald at the University of South Carolina, an unrivaled research archive of materials by and relating to the now-celebrated author. In ""F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Marketplace"", Bruccoli chronicles Fitzgerald's posthumous rise in literary reputation - and the corresponding rise in collectibility of all things Fitzgerald - as evidenced by listings from auction house and antiquarian bookseller catalogues. Of keen interest to bibliophiles and scholars of American literature, this volume serves as a thoughtful examination of the revival of interest in Fitzgerald's life and work over the past seven decades. Bruccoli approaches the Fitzgerald legacy as a scholar and a bookman, charting the mutually reinforcing relationship between the growth of academic interest in the writer following World War II and the onset of serious Fitzgerald collecting. With new scholarship and new audiences of academic and general readers came renewed efforts to acquire primary source materials as research documents and as collectible artifacts. Galleys, manuscripts, correspondence, business documents, screenplays, inscribed copies, dust jacket variants, and multiple editions of every work began to emerge for sale and with escalating prices. First-edition copies of Fitzgerald novels now sell for significantly more than he earned for writing them. In his account of the development and sale of Fitzgerald materials, Bruccoli offers a chronology of dates and dollars proving his statement in the introduction that 'literature runs on money'. The 350 images included here from auction and dealer catalogues illustrate sought-after individual items and distinguished collections; the catalogue entries also document the increasing prices of Fitzgerald materials in the collector marketplace. As many of the items described can no longer be located, these listings serve as a historical record of once-circulating Fitzgerald items. In addition to the insights offered on the history of Fitzgerald collecting and, by extension, on book collecting in general, this volume grants readers a vivid portrait of Bruccoli - Fitzgerald's staunchest literary advocate, his most devoted collector, and a man for whom 'writers matter more than anyone else because books and literature matter more than anything else'.

This is a telling assessment of the divergent works of a daring British writer. ""Understanding Julian Barnes"" surveys the career of an innovative British novelist who has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize on three occasions. In this analysis of Barnes' distinctive qualities and of his place in the British literary establishment, Merritt Moseley suggests that Barnes' greatest achievement is his ability to resist summary and categorization by imagining each book in a dramatically original way. In evaluating Barnes' fiction, Moseley discusses the novelist's admiration for Gustave Flaubert, identifies his technical and thematic concerns, and explores the intrigue surrounding his divided career as a writer of serious novels, published under his own name, and of detective thrillers, published under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh.

This is a critical companion to Vonnegut's early novels. ""Understanding Kurt Vonnegut"" is a critical analysis of Vonnegut's fiction as a point of entrance for students and general readers alike. In close readings of Vonnegut's novels, William Rodney Allen examines the distinctive stylistic, thematic, and formally innovative elements that earned Vonnegut (1922-2007) a mass following, especially among young readers, as well as critical respect among scholars.

To add a significant phrase to our language is no easy feat, but that is precisely what Joseph Heller (1923a1999) did with acatch-22,a the principle of absurdist logic and bureaucratic foul-up that energized his debut novel, Catch-22, in 1961. In this revised edition of Understanding Joseph Heller, Sanford Pinsker explores the idiosyncratic vision that permeates Helleras complete body of work, as he maps the dark terrain Heller carved out, novel by novel, with considerable verbal dazzle and the uncompromising outrage of the classical satirist.

This updated edition includes new chapters on Closing Time, the sequel to Catch-22; Now and Then, Helleras memoir of growing up in Brooklyn; Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, his posthumously published novel; and Catch as Catch Can, a collection of assorted short stories and sketches.

This is the never-before-published extended version of Wolfe's short story in memory of his father.""The Four Lost Men"" is the first publication of the long version of Wolfe's story of familial and national reflection set during World War I. Wolfe supplies a moving portrait of his dying father, as well as a rich mediation on American history and ambitions on the verge of America's entry into a broadening global conflict. Discussion of the title characters - Presidents Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Hayes - provides opportunity for assessment of the mood and promise of the nation, as well as reflection on the obstacles that had obscured paths toward untapped American potential. Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Hayes, the four Republican presidents who followed Grant during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras, were all Civil War generals and self-made men, though none experienced a particularly distinguished term in office.These presidents are iconic figures in the stories and political musings of the narrator's dying father. In his efforts to understand their importance to his father, the teenaged narrator comes to appreciate the act of storytelling that redefines these men in his father's memory and, in turn, redefines his father in the his own memory.Originally published as a short story of 7,000 words in ""Scribner's Magazine"" in 1934 - and later abridged by 1,000 words for reissue in the 1935 anthology ""From Death to Morning"" - Wolfe's expanded tale is published here for the first time in its intended form and full length of some 21,000 words. Editors Arlyn and Matthew J. Bruccoli have employed the same methods to reestablish this text as they used to wide acclaim in their centennial edition of ""O Lost: The Story of a Buried Life"", the unabridged version of Wolfe's ""Look Homeward, Angel"". The reestablishment of the long version of ""Four Lost Men"" opens an undeveloped area of scholarship into Wolfe's short fiction and serves as a model for restoring other such works.

Understanding Charles Johnson offers a critical introduction to the fiction of one of the most highly acclaimed contemporary writers and the first African American male since Ralph Ellison to win the National Book Award, which Johnson received in 1990 for Middle Passage. In addition to providing a biographical sketch, Gary Storhoff analyzes Johnson's four novels and two volumes of short stories. Describing his body of work as unique in American fiction, Storhoff explains how philosophical and religious orientations differentiate Johnson's writings and challenge his readers. Storhoff explores the merging of Johnson's philosophical and spiritual interests with his concern for African American culture. In identifying the literary principles of Johnson's texts, Storhoff emphasizes the writer's commitment to Buddhism and demonstrates its impact on his themes, characters, narratives, and rhetoric. Suggesting that Buddhism is the linchpin of Johnson's work, Storhoff acknowledges that scholars and critics are aware of Johnson's close association with the tradition but provides readers with what they need to appreciate fully its importance in his work. Storhoff also considers Johnson's extensive study of Western philosophy, which includes a Ph.D. in the subject. Storhoff explicates the influence of the British empiricists, including Bishop George Berkeley, on the novelist; his rejection of relativism and utilitarianism; his adaptation of Aristotelian ethics; and his ambivalent treatment of American pragmatism as recently propounded by Cornel West. Johnson emerges from Storhoff's discussion as a profoundly eclectic, sophisticated, interdisciplinary writer, with complex views on race relations in the twenty-first century.

The standard work on Fitzgerald, revised, enlarged, and updated; Since its first publication in 1981, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur has stood apart from other biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald for its thoroughness and volume of information. It is regarded today as the basic work on Fitzgerald and the preeminent source for the study of the novelist. In this second revised edition, Matthew J. Bruccoli provides new evidence discovered since its original edition. This new edition of Some Sort of Epic Grandeur improves, augments, and updates the standard biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald told his editor Maxwell Perkins about a young American expatriate in Paris, an unknown writer with a ""brilliant future"". When Perkins wrote to Ernest Hemingway several months later, he began a correspondence spanning more than two decades and charting the career of one of the most influential American authors of this century. The letters collected here are the record of that professional alliance and of Hemingway's development as a writer.

Tender is the Night, the novel F. Scott Fitzgerald worked longest and hardest on, has not achieved its proper recognition because the text is peppered with errors and chronological inconsistencies. Moreover, the novel has a concentration of references to people, places and events that most readers no longer recognize. In this guide to the novel, Matthew J. Bruccoli corrects those errors and explains the factual details. He also offers maps, photos, correspondence and notes that demystify the writing of one of literature's most misunderstood - and underrated - masterpieces.

Assembling letters and notebook entries with articles and reviews written for publication, F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship provides Fitzgerald's public and private writings on his trade and craft. The forty-six selections in this volume construct an autobiographical account of Fitzgerald's twenty-year endeavor to maintain careers as a commercial writer and as a literary artist. Offering a clear sense of his seriousness about writing, they correct misconceptions that have impeded a proper assessment of Fitzgerald's professional authorship and distorted his reputation as a man of letters. In a substantial introduction to the volume, Matthew J. Bruccoli positions Fitzgerald as a case history for the profession-of-authorship approach to American literary history formulated by William Charvat. Bruccoli notes that more is known about the professional life of Fitzgerald than about that of any other major American author, and, drawing on that wealth of information, he challenges familiar myths about Fitzgerald's squandering of fortunes and literary genius. Bruccoli exposes the error of segregating Fitzgerald's magazine and movie work from his novels, suggesting instead that a symbiotic relationship exists among these works and ties them together. In his own words, Fitzgerald corrects the most condescending and irksome notion about him - that he was a literary ignoramus who wrote brilliantly without knowing what he was doing. As these letters, notebook entries, book reviews, and articles clearly indicate, Fitzgerald reached usable conclusions about the craft of writing, the discipline of authorship, and the obligations of literature.

This pictorial autobiography of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald documents two lives that have become legendary. The book draws almost entirely from the scrapbooks and photograph albums that the Fitzgeralds scrupulously kept as their personal record and provides a wealth of illustrative material not previously available. The book offers: Fitzgerald's thoughts about his early loves in St Paul, Minnesota; a photograph of the country club in Montgomery, Alabama, where the two met; reviews of ""This Side of Paradise""; poems to the couple from Ring Lardner; snapshots of their trips abroad; Fitzgerald's careful accounting of his earnings; a photograph of the house on Long Island where ""The Great Gatsby"" was conceived; postcards with Fitzgerald's drawings for his daughter. These rare photographs and memorabilia combine into a narrative augmented by selections from Scott's and Zelda's own writings, conveying the spirit of particuular moments in their lives.

Peter Wolfe's study of Penelope Fitzgerald's canon illuminates writings he characterizes as possessing unerring dramatic judgment, a friendly and fluid style, and lyrical and precise descriptive passages. In this survey of Fitzgerald's life and career, Wolfe explains how the British novelist brings resources of talent and craft, thought and feeling, courage and vulnerability, to the biographies and novels that have earned her renown. With readings of a broad range of her published works, including her final novel, The Blue Flower, Wolfe describes the unfolding of Fitzgerald's writing as a subtle, ongoing process. He maintains that the novels, though plain and rambling at first glance, grow fuller, stranger, and more stirring the more we invest in them. He details Fitzgerald's skill at sequencing events so as to unsettle readers and her ability to enhance motifs by not leaning too hard on them. Wolfe suggests that Fitzgerald's refusal to overplay effects and emotions, while at first puzzling in its disdain for drama, turns out to be one of her chief virtues, for she enables larger associations to emerge as she keeps big dramatic scenes from interfering with wider patterns. While enumerating Fitzgerald's many talents, Wolfe ultimately attributes much of her success to her style. He concludes that her exceptionally disciplined prose, which gives voice to her candor and compassion, imbues her work with a sense of mood, place, and character.

An essential collection of baseball fiction by the master of the form More than any other writer in the twentieth century, Ring Lardner was identified with baseball. His years as a newspaper reporter in Chicago covering the Cubs and White Sox gave him inside knowledge of the sport and how it reflected the American experience. Lardner's baseball short stories remain the core of his career and the basis of his enduring reputation. With his unerring eye for detail and his sense of the absurd, Lardner ranged over the entire game. He probed not only the nature of the game but also the lives of the men who played it. His famous portraits, such as those in "Alibi Ike" and "My Roomy," express his complex responses to baseball and the people associated with it. Historically accurate and richly textured, Ring Around the Bases reveals the master at the height of his craft and celebrates the American pastime. The collection is the ultimate lineup in baseball fiction. Ring Around the Bases was originally published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1992 in cloth. This new paperback edition includes an additional uncollected short story. Located after the publication of the cloth edition, "The Courtship of T. Dorgan" truly makes this volume of thirty-four stories the complete Lardner baseball collection.

The new ""Student's Encyclopedia of American Literary Characters"" is a comprehensive four-volume set designed to help students approach American literature in what is often the most appealing way - through the most memorable characters of the greatest works. Approximately 900 in depth character entries, ranging from about 1,000 to 1,400 words each, are organized alphabetically by author and then by work. Each entry features an assessment of the character's traits, as well as an indication of the character's role in the work.Two to five discussion questions accompany each entry and help provide topics for papers or classroom discussion. Many questions draw parallels between various works of literature, encouraging students to make connections between literary texts, as emphasized by English Language Arts standards. This invaluable, clearly organized reference also includes further reading lists and an appendix of specialized indexes.

Allows today's readers to observe the development of Fitzgerald's great novel In November 1924 F. Scott Fitzgerald sent the typescript for his third novel, tentatively titled Trimalchio, to his editor, Maxwell Perkins. In the following four months Fitzgerald extensively revised and rewrote the text in galley proof and at the urging of his editor selected a new title for the novel. On April 10, 1925, Charles Scribner's Sons published The Great Gatsby to warm reviews but disappointing sales. In time the work would be recognized as the great American novel and become a staple of high school and college literature courses throughout the country. Published here for the first time is the original version, which permits readers a look at Fitzgerald's progression from a brilliant first draft to a masterpiece. Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, Trimalchio is a facsimile of the only extant set of the novel's unrevised galley proofs, which are now part of the Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald at the University of South Carolina Library. In his afterword to this version of the text, Bruccoli identifies the sources for the novel's characters and setting, corrects commonly accepted notions about Fitzgerald's revision of the novel, and details the correspondence between Perkins and Fitzgerald about the novel's structure and character development. Comparing the final text of The Great Gatsby with the Trimalchio galleys, Bruccoli reconstructs Fitzgerald's work during the winter of 1924-1925, which included substantial rewriting and reordering of chapters 6, 7, and 8.

Working with the complete collection of "Tender is the Night" manuscripts in the Princeton University Library, Matthew J. Bruccoli reconstructs seventeen drafts and three versions of the novel to answer questions about F. Scott Fitzgerald's major work that have long puzzled critics of modern literature.

In 1934, nine years after the appearance of "The Great Gatsby, " Fitzgerald permitted publication of "Tender is the Night." Disappointed by its critical reception, Fitzgerald suggested that the structure of the novel should be drastically rearranged. In 1951, eleven years after his death, Charles Scribner's Sons brought out an edition that incorporated Fitzgerald's changes. Controversy arose over the merits of the two published versions and over the "nine lost years" in Fitzgerald's life between his two great novels, years of rewriting before publication of "Tender is the Night" that resulted in six cartons of notes and drafts. After analyzing this wealth of material, Bruccoli reconstructs every working stage in the novel and reaches his own conclusions about which edition is the most valid.

This is the first critical companion to the works of this darkly comic short story writer and novelist. ""Understanding T. C. Boyle"" is the first book-length study of one of contemporary America's most prolific, popular, and critically acclaimed fiction writers. The author of seven short story collections and eleven novels, T. C. Boyle has been honored with the 1988 PEN/Faulkner Award for ""World's End"", the 1997 Prix Medicis Etranger for ""The Tortilla Curtain"", the 1999 PEN/Malamud Award for ""T. C. Boyle: Stories"", and a 2003 National Book Award nomination for ""Drop City"". Boyle's 1993 novel, ""The Road to Wellville"", was adapted into a feature film. Paul Gleason begins his investigation of Boyle's work by exploring the biographical, historical, and literary contexts at play in the writer's fiction. Gleason maps the literary influences that shaped Boyle's 'wise guy' style, among them Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, and Samuel Beckett. The volume then features chapters on Boyle's short fiction and his novels of the past three decades. Gleason demonstrates Boyle's literary development as entertainer, absurdist, social commentator and critic, and historical novelist who chronicles the baby boomer generation while addressing a range of contemporary social issues, such as race relations, illegal immigration, and feminism. Gleason shows how Boyle uses dark humor as a moral and satiric force for social commentary in the tradition of writers such as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Though the entertainment value of Boyle's writing has much to do with his popularity, Gleason also sees him as an iconoclast who questions his generation's ideals, philosophies, and actions.

This is a collection of Wolfe's earliest publications from his college years.The ""Magical Campus"" collects for the first time Thomas Wolfe's earliest published works - including poems, plays, short fiction, news articles, speeches, and essays - both signed and unsigned, assembled in chronological order. The collegiate career of Wolfe began at UNC Chapel Hill in 1916, at the age of fifteen, with a freshman year marked by obscurity and loneliness. By his junior year, he had emerged as a recognized and popular figure in campus life, a central participant in numerous organizations and fraternities, and the editor of several student publications. Wolfe began in these apprenticeship years his ascendancy to iconic literary status.Included in ""The Magical Campus"" is Wolfe's first published work, the poem ""A Field in Flanders"" from the November 1917 issue of the University of North Carolina Magazine. Here too is the poem ""The Challenge,"" Wolfe's first piece to be subsequently reprinted off campus in his hometown newspaper. ""A Cullenden of Virginia"" marked his inaugural foray into the realm of published fiction and his folk plays, such as ""The Return of Buck Gavin"" and ""Deferred Payment,"" are illustrative of his unrealized ambitions to be a playwright. Though they lack the sophistication and scale of the grand fictions that now define Wolfe's place in literature, his student publications speak to the potential he had tapped into.