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The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization.

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The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization. By Keith Gandal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 271 pp. Cloth $55.00

To our significant if doomed scholarly efforts to unknot the complex tangle of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and war, we have new help in the form of Keith Gandal's The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization.

The crux of Gandal's argument is threefold: (1) Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner experienced the U.S. mobilization for the Great War but were denied the manhood-conferring experience of proper combat service on a real front; (2) the military's new meritocratic system gave ethnic Americans unprecedented opportunities to upstage "native" white Americans; and, finally, (3) the military's campaign to prevent casualties from sexually transmitted diseases demonized female promiscuity while sanctifying manly restraint. These three issues converge in interesting if different ways in what Gandal calls the three writers' mobilization (or postmobilization) racist promiscuity novels: The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and The Sound and the Fury.

Much of Gandal's book performs the important task of introducing literary scholars to work being done by our historian colleagues and in doing a good deal of historical work himself. About ethnicity, Gandal makes the case that the World War I experience in training camps and the war itself was "arguably...

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