As Jeffrey Hart has argued in The Sewanee Review, the year of the two writers’ meeting was also a crucial time for publishing new volumes that would take their careers to the next level. Hemingway published “In Our Time,” his first collection of short stories, the reception of which was buoyed by praise from the literary heavyweight Ford Maddox Ford.
Meanwhile, F. Scott Fitzgerald (pictured) published “The Great Gatsby,” which, for many readers counts among the greatest novels of the 20th century. Though it wasn’t an immediate success, the novel gained significant attention in Paris literary circles, and its reputation has continued to grow; today, it is named among a handful of others as the definitive Great American Novel.
The aesthetic success of “The Great Gatsby” provoked in Hemingway such jealous feelings that his next project, a novel, was written as a direct riposte to Fitzgerald’s critically-acclaimed work (via Hart). Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” was published in 1926, and, like “Gatsby,” follows the travails of a group of young people and their rivalries and romances. Hart notes that Hemingway’s novel seemingly attempts to outdo Fizgerald’s masterwork by demonstrating the superiority of Hemingway’s sparse modernist style. Hart goes on to say that the novel contains, in the character of Princeton graduate Robert Cohn, a proxy for Fitzgerald, who is characterized as a “romantic and a bad novelist.” Hart continues by saying Hemmingway’s novel was composed with great rage at Fitzgerald’s success and maddened by his own lack of recognition and his minuscule readership by comparison.
