DeFazio, Albert J. III

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DeFazio, Albert J. III

PERSONAL: Male. Education: University of Virginia, Ph.D., 1992.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of English, George Mason University, Robinson A 487, 4400 University Dr., MSN 3E4, Fairfax, VA 22030. E-mail—adefazio@gmu.edu.

CAREER: George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, adjunct professor.

WRITINGS:

Literary Masterpieces: The Sun Also Rises ("Gale Study Guides to Great Literature" series), Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 2000.

(Editor) Dear Papa, Dear Hotch: The Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway and A.E. Hotchner, preface by A.E. Hotchner, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 2005.

Contributor to the Hemingway Review, F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Newsletter, American Literary Scholarship: An Annual, and the Journal of Foreign Literature.

SIDELIGHTS: Albert J. DeFazio III has taught introductory and advanced composition and literary surveys. He particularly focuses on the moderns, including Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. His Literary Masterpieces: The Sun Also Rises is a study guide for the Hemingway novel first published in 1926. The volume is divided into eight sections that contain a plot summary, profiles of the characters, themes, biographical information on Hemingway, and DeFazio's thirteen-page analysis. Ellen Andrews Knodt wrote in the Hemingway Review that the first section, titled "About The Sun Also Rises," "is the most student-oriented of the sections with a chapter-by-chapter plot summary of the novel, sprinkled with quotations to anchor the key events in each chapter." The second section describes Hemingway's writing process and the revisions that were made before the manuscript was completed, as well as a discussion of the relationship between writer and editor. "In the third section on themes, DeFazio does a superb job of explaining Hemingway's use of irony and ambiguity to a readership who may not readily understand those ideas as expressed in literature," noted Knodt. The fourth section covers early criticism and reviews, with DeFazio providing a range of opinion. DeFazio includes sidebars that provide personal glimpses into Hemingway's life and thoughts, and includes quotes that include a line from a Nobel acceptance speech. Other sections deal with the novel in history, adaptations, resources and study questions, and an index.

DeFazio is also editor of Dear Papa, Dear Hotch: The Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway and A.E. Hotchner, a collection of letters between Hemingway and his good friend who sought out the writer while he was living in Cuba with his fourth wife, Mary. Hotchner originally contacted Hemingway to solicit writing for Cosmopolitan, then a general publication, and he became part of the author's entourage. The letters reveal Hemingway's ego. He felt he was the greatest of American writers and criticized the works of others. They note accidents and injuries he suffered while on fishing expeditions and safari and his crushes on young girls and women that Mary to become increasingly irritated. The man who had been held up as the model for the Lost Generation and decades of men became clinically depressed, and decided to take his own life. Mary, who was preparing to leave him, did not recognize the extent of his depression.

Carolyn See reviewed this volume for the Washington Post, writing: "What was it in 20th-century society that spawned Hemingway and his decision—all through life—to valorize death, melancholy, risk-taking and misery? Was it that emblematic injury in Italy when he felt his soul going out of his body like a handkerchief out of a pocket? His earliest stories insist on this nihilistic point of view. But the real question remains: Why did we buy it? Why did we enlist so easily in the vast army of the Lost Generation?" See called the collection "fascinating."