The Kansas City Public Library welcomes author Keith Gandal for a discussion of his new book The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization on Wednesday, December 10, at 6:30 p.m. at the Central Library, 14 W. 10th St.

Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner all wrote famous postwar novels – widely considered to be based on their own wartime experiences. In this groundbreaking work, Gandal argues that these authors were motivated not by their experiences of the horrors of war, but rather by their failure to have those experiences.

By bringing to light previously unexamined archival U.S. Army records, Gandal demonstrates that the lack of combat experience for these Lost Generation writers became a failure to compete successfully in a rising social order. The Gun and the Pen restores these seminal novels to their proper historical context and proffers a radical revision of our understanding of the impact of World War I on 20th century American literature.

Gandal is the author of The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum, and Class Representation in Modern Fiction and Film. He is also the author of a novel, Cleveland Anonymous.