Writing Celebrity

Writing Celebrity is divided into three major sections. The first part traces the rise of a national celebrity culture in the United States and examines the impact that this culture had on "literary" writing in the decades before World War II.  The second two sections of the book demonstrate the relevance of celebrity for literary scholarship by re-evaluating the careers of two major American authors, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein.

"Galow has written a shrewd, often surprising, and always entertaining study of literary celebrity in the modernist era. His pairing of Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald as mirror opposites transforms our understanding of both writers even as it radically revises the notion of 'the author' as produced in various American media between the two World Wars." - John McGowan, Ruel W. Tyson Jr. Distinguished Professor of Humanities, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

"In this well-researched and consistently interesting book, Galow complicates our understanding of literary modernism by exploring the rise of the culture of celebrity and its not always predictable impact on the profession of authorship in the United States. His account of how F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein struggled to position themselves within a literary field that was often too simply divided between the high and the low is surprising and deftly presented. Galow does a wonderful job of explaining how the history of their efforts at authorial self-presentation ought to affect our reading of their work." - Jan Radway, Walter Dill Scott Professor of Communication Studies, Northwestern University

"Depression, Galow (visiting professor, Wake Forest Univ.) depicts these modernist writers as attempting to define

themselves through mass media. The author divides the book into three sections: part 1 connects literary modernism

to the rise of media; part 2 focuses on Stein's 1930s autobiographies; part 3 analyzes Fitzgerald's Depression-era

Crack-Up essays. As do a number of recent studies (for example, Jonathan Goldman's Modernism Is the Literature of

Celebrity, CH, Oct'11, 49-0719), Galow finds that these modernist authors needed to reconcile a dichotomy between

low and high culture. Laboring for more than 30 years before becoming a best-selling author in the 1930s, Stein

embraced this dichotomy, defining herself as an isolated, spontaneous genius who could produce artistic objects that

sell well. In the Crack-Up essays, Fitzgerald created a Künstlerroman, a narrative that exposes his internal struggles

and failings but recommits him to his craft. Fitzgerald's confessional writings were popular but controversial, later

helping to revive his reputation. Galow adroitly analyzes the rhetorical function of these modernist texts, repeatedly

supporting his claim that Fitzgerald and Stein employed popular autobiographical writings to shape their images."- Choice

TIMOTHY W. GALOW is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Wake Forest University, USA.