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Cocaine + Surfing: Reviewed By Jack Ryan, Gettysburg College, Jack Ryan

English Faculty Publications

If you seek a conclusive answer to the question that seems to anchor Chas Smith's Cocaine + Surfing: A Sordid History of Surfing's Greatest Love Affair, "Did surfing and cocaine start together in Peru and never leave each other's embrace?," you will be disappointed. In his preface, Smith discusses the death of Andy Irons, the three-time world surfing champion from Hawaii who died November 2, 2010, alone in a Dallas hotel room of cardiac arrest brought on by cocaine abuse. Irons was thirty-two years old. According to Smith, no one in the cosseted surfing world was surprised: "Drugs and …

“Borne Back Ceaselessly Into The Past”: Fitzgerald’S Forgotten Civil War Literature, Cameron T. Sauers

The Gettysburg Compiler: On the Front Lines of History

“So, we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” These are the brilliant last lines of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, lines that speak to the fallibility of Gatsby’s American Dream and his inescapable, yet simultaneously unreachable, past. The legendary ending sentence in The Great Gatsby has captured me since I first read the book as a freshman in high school and made me want to read every Fitzgerald book I could find. The more I read, the more I realized the unique implications this famous last line had for Fitzgerald’s own …

Review Of The War That Used Up Words: American Writers And The First World War, By Hazel Hutchison, Ian A. Isherwood

Interdisciplinary Studies Faculty Publications

There is a vast array of scholarship on the literature of the First World War, much of it concerning British authors. When American war literature is considered, it is usually the so-called “Lost Generation” writers of the 1920s and 1930s. If the war had a significant effect upon American literature, it is argued, then it served as a trope for some of the great writers of the 1920s—Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner—who wrote of living in its generational shadow in the following decades of so-called peace.

Hazel Hutchison’s book is a corrective to the many assumptions about …