488. THE WOMEN OF FITZGERALD AND HEMINGWAY: READING LITERARY BIOGRAPHY...

Women are at the heart of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s and Ernest Hemingway’s fiction. At the height of their popularity in the mid-1920s, Fitzgerald and Hemingway published short story collections that wrestle with shifting gender roles, female sexuality, and male-dominated power structures. They do so, in large part, through rich, complex, independent, contradictory women characters. For each author, we will read a brief biography that focuses on their relationships with women—Scott Donaldson’s Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Linda Wagner-Martin’s Hemingway: A Literary Life. Through these texts, we will consider the line between biography and fiction, and we will examine the portrait of love and loss in selections from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s All the Sad Young Men (1926) and Ernest Hemingway’s Men Without Women (1927).

10:00 – 12 noon                                                                                            6 Sessions

Thursdays, September 4 – October 9                                                           Fee:  $165

Note: A Zoom Link will be sent to you at least one day prior to the first day of class and again on a weekly basis prior to each successive class. 

ABOUT THE LECTURER

Thomas Fahy is a nonfiction writer, novelist, and professor of literature and creative writing. His most recent book, The Life of the Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald, is being released in the fall of 2025. He has also published essays on everything from Paris Hilton and 1980s vampire films to contemporary television and theater. His works have been translated into several languages, and he has been interviewed by the Associated Press, Salon, and other publications, as well as radio hosts in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and Malaysia. He was recently featured in a documentary about Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood for Arte Television and on the BBC radio program “Literary Pursuits.” When he is not writing, Dr. Fahy performs regularly as a classical pianist with the New York Paino Society and has appeared in recent concerts at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Merkin Concert Hall, and other venues in New York City. He has a degree in music from the University of California, Davis, and he served as an adjunct professor of piano at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for several years before moving to New York. He is a fascinating and dynamic teacher who is able to bring his wide interdisciplinary knowledge to whatever the subject.