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Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination, and: Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form (review)

not seen as fit for a combat command. Given his well-documented erratic ways, his peers must have been amazed that one so seemingly unsuited to military life would have done as well as he did. Just as Gandal has created a new way of analyzing war fiction with his concept of the mobilization wound, he adds enormous value to literary study by drawing attention to “lost knowledge” (51), newly rediscovered in this decade, which points to personnel practices of the U.S. Army that clearly led to major social and literary consequences. Because of the widely-noted Army practice of discrimination against African-Americans during World War I, literary scholars have assumed that the Army acted upon similar prejudices against Jews, immigrants, and sons of recent immigrants. In fact, the U.S. Army introduced new and thoroughly meritocratic processes for selecting those fit to serve and to hold officer rank. (Indeed, the Army intended to extend the same objective selection procedures to blacks but was dissuaded by Congress.) This “lost knowledge” has been rediscovered within the present decade by scholars such as Jennifer Keene (Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America, 2000), Nancy Gentile Ford (Americans All! Foreign-born Soldiers in World War I, 2001), and Richard Slotkin (Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality, 2005.) Gandal points to these discoveries to explain the increasing appearance of “ethnics” (other than blacks) in the literature of the 1920s and beyond: because of forced association in the Army, such figures had become more familiar to both writers and readers. Gandal’s third point, like the second one, applies not only to war novels but generally to fiction beginning in the 1920s. Whereas formerly scholars had been unable to account for the sudden appearance of the promiscuous “New Woman” in novels of the 1920s, it is now clear that there was a major change in sexual behavior of the younger generation during the War years. By detailing statistics on condom use, prostitute incarceration, doughboy activities in France, and the like, Gandal shows that the New Woman was not merely a phenomenon of fiction but primarily of plain observation in contemporary American life. Keith Gandal’s The Gun and the Pen deserves to be read, discussed, and debated widely; it adds new depth to the study of not only war novels but of twentieth-century American literature at large.