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Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the Muse of Romantic Music

McFarland Press, 2023

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald lived so largely that they became caricatures of themselves. Their mythologies tend to eclipse their fierce devotion to their craft, a commitment animated by many sources, including music. After catapulting to success in the 1920s, both men encountered an artistic crisis of conscience. Faced with a reading public whose expectations of them had crystallized by the early thirties, they strove to achieve something different. Though both writers are inextricably tied to modernism and the post WWI generation they describe in their prose, they invariably drew upon the rich sublimity of Romantic music as inspiration for it. Hemingway’s ear for form and Fitzgerald’s penchant for lyricism stem from early and frequent exposure to such masters as Johannes Brahms and Franz Schubert. This project traces each author’s musical biography as a prelude to examining fiction from the critical juncture of the early to mid-1930s, when each man faced a turning point that demanded he challenge his aesthetic horizons or risk his creative legacy.

Praise

“Countless studies have examined the influence of modernist art on Ernest Hemingway’s style or the place of jazz in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction, but Nicole J. Camastra’s work examines the underappreciated influence of Western classical music on both authors’ aesthetics. Specifically, Camastra explores how in a period of artistic crisis in the 1930s Hemingway and Fitzgerald both incorporated Romantic musical idioms and analogues to retune their modernist ideals. Rich in music theory but always accessible, this work dramatizes the harmony between the aural and print world, allowing unrecognized correspondences between two arts to sing forth.”

—Kirk Curnutt, executive director, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society

“Dr. Camastra’s remarkable study of the unsuspected depth and breadth of classical music’s influence on the prose of Hemingway and Fitzgerald is interdisciplinary scholarship of the finest sort. After reviewing all-too-familiar claims linking their prose with the advent of jazz, she methodically lays the groundwork for a series of counterclaims for classical music’s larger and longer inspiration. In fascinating ways, the book itself becomes symphonic as she turns biographical information, styles of Romantic music, the experiments of musical modernism, the varying musicalities of prose, and the quasi-musical composition of individual works into a web of interpretive themes. This book is an invitation to return to celebrated masterworks with an ear newly attuned to the musical possibilities of prose.”

—David Haas, professor of music, University of Georgia

“An important contribution for specialists in Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the Jazz Age. Historians of popular music will also find it invaluable, especially those in American Studies.”

—Mark P. Ott, general editor of the Teaching Hemingway Series