American Moderns: Hemingway, Hurston, Faulkner, & Fitzgerald

While Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were flirting with the expatriate avant-garde in Europe, Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner were performing anthropological field-work in the local cultures of the American South. We will read four short novels - Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby - to address the tremendous diversity of concerns and styles of four writers who marked America's coming-of-age as a literary nation with their multifarious experiments in the regional and the global, the racial and the cosmopolitan, the macho and the feminist, the decadent and the impoverished."