American Fiction, American Myth: Essays by Philip Young

by Philip Young, Sandra Spanier (Introduction), David Morrell (Foreword)

Few experts in American literature have written as insightfully and brilliantly as did Philip Young, renowned Hemingway critic and scholar at large. His unique work bursts with a joy in the humanities, with a sensibility, a humor, and a style that communicate to academics and general readers alike. Although Young died in 1991, he survives in his remarkable prose. American Fiction, American Myth features nineteen groundbreaking essays in which Young masterfully reveals the "so what?" that he insisted all literary studies ought to have. In the first section, he demonstrates his fascination with such American myths as Pocahontas and Rip Van Winkle, reaching powerful conclusions about America and its people. In the second section, he becomes "Our Hemingway Man," explaining his germinal and still provocative theory that Hemingway's severe wounding in World War I so traumatized the novelist that his fiction was to a great degree unwitting self-psychoanalysis. Young's book on Hemingway was the first of its kind, but Young was more than a one-author critic, as his essays demonstrate in the third section, exploring such diverse topics as Hawthorne's secret love, the Lost Generation that was never lost, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debt to T. S. Eliot, and the relationship between American fiction and American life. What Hemingway once said about himself can be equally applied to "I am a very serious but not a solemn writer." The reader comes away from these essays dazzled by the power of Young's observations and the grace with which he expresses them.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2000

About the author

Philip Young is considered to be the first serious Ernest Hemingway scholar; indeed his scholarship brought him into conflict with Hemingway himself. In his 1948 biography of Hemingway, written for his doctoral dissertation, Young argued that Hemingway’s writing was strongly affected by an injury Hemingway received in 1918, while serving in World War I. Hemingway strongly objected to this theory, quoting him as saying, “How would you like it if someone said that everything you’d done in your life was because of some trauma?” Hemingway fought to have the publication of Young’s biography stopped, but after exchanging correspondence with Young, Hemingway agreed to let the book be published.

Young was a Harvard graduate, Fulbright Scholar and a fellow of the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies. He taught at New York University and Kansas State University before joining the Penn State faculty in 1959. He was named Evan Pugh Professor of English at Penn State in 1981. He remained a professor of American literature at the Pennsylvania State University until his death in 1991 at the age of 73.