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. Camastras 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. Camastras remarkable study of the unsuspected depth and breadth of classical musics 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 musics 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
