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Misters Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner were all alcoholics
Wrll, of course. Booze and drugs make you more talented. It's a proven fact.
(as far as the authors, I read a story of Cather's in college called 'Paul's Case that was actually pretty good. Wharton I was never much interested in because I always had the impression that it was all society drama and stuff like that, but as the article mentions, that image might be part of the problem)
She's great. I tend to prefer her NYC novels, which are more comedic, but she also wrote a great series of Ohio novels, which are more dramatic. Regardless, both are great.
I've never heard of the Times before - they have to be one of the last papers in the US using the old-fashioned honorifics! "Misters Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald," "Miss Cather." Wow, dinosaur.
But thank you. I completely agree with this assessment, especially as regards Cather. I tend to go on writer sprees and read everything I can get my hands on by someone, and I had a Cather spree sometime in my early 20s. A.S. Byatt is right: she's more than My Antonia. Her writing was more urban and cleverer than one might think if you never go beyond that and O, Pioneers. I do agree that the sexual dimension is oddly missing from her work, though. Wharton has it, though in a removed way. I've never read (or even heard of) Powell, and might have just discovered some of my summer reading!
I think this writer is spot-on in suggesting that it was the male writers' flash carryings-on that made them pop culture heroes, to some extent, whereas the womens' lives were more reserved and less the stuff of lionization. Hemingway I love, Faulkner I appreciate, Fitzgerald I can find little use for. Both Hemingway and Faulkner were groundbreaking in their unconvential use of language, and the two women I've read were not, so perhaps they were also less iconoclastic - but that's probably rolled up with their image as independent rebels.
I love Wharton and Cather (though in my 40s I find myself oddly unable to get through a book after a lifetime of reading). Never heard of Dawn Powell but she sounds good. Others I really like from that era of American female writers: Sarah Orne Jewitt (New England) and Ellen Glasgow (the South).
jonmc -- I love society drama! Nowadays we seem to pretend that there aren't any classes or caste in our world -- it's all underground. It's fun to read U.S. literature from an era when those divisions were recognized and sharply detailed.
Claudia SF: I understand that, it just dosen't appeal to me, too little at stake, too soap opera. I like either novels where there's life-and-death stuff, like crime fiction or war novels or simply novels that are funny and raw since refinement always comes across prissy and stuffy to me.
Jon, you gotta get aholda a copy of Murdaland, a new lit mag devoted to crime fiction. It's great. Also, check out Plots With Guns website via the wayback machine. I think I linked it here before, but no one went for it.
Paul's Case is Cather's most-anthologized story, and My Antonia (or maybe O Pioneers) her most-assigned novel, but I think they're not her best work by far. I couldn't finish either of those novels, and Paul's Case is good but not outstanding. Maybe I prefer her West/Southwest stories to her Midwest ones. The Professor's House and the novella Old Mrs. Harris are good examples, and Death Comes for the Archbishop is one of my must-have-if-stranded-on-desert-island books. The prose is just beautiful.
As a college student, years ago, I didn't "get" Edith Wharton until I saw Martin Scorsese's film version of The Age of Innocence. There's a way in which that film uses the language of movie violence to depict behavior that isn't physically violent, if you know what I mean. He really gets across the cutthroat yet well-mannered nature of the society of Wharton's novel.
I've read My Antonia, but it's gone right out of my head (I think I read while studying for my special field exams in graduate school, and I didn't retain anything I read that summer past the exam).
I've never read any Dawn Powell, but the Library of America has two volumes of her collected works (1, 2), and I intend to pick them up at some point, as soon as I can cut down on my backlog.
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