Duke University Press Twentieth Century Literature

Four Decades of Fitzgerald Studies: The Best and the Brightest
Author(s): Jackson R. Bryer

Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 26, No. 2, F. Scott Fitzgerald Issue (Summer,
1980), pp. 247-267
Published by: Duke University Press
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Four Decades of Fitzgerald Studies:
The Best and the Brightest
JACKSON R. BRYER
The appearance at the beginning of the 1980s of a special

Fitzgerald issue of Twentieth Century Literature would seem to be an
especially appropriate occasion on which to look over the research and
criticism which Fitzgerald's life and writings have generated. It has
been forty years since he died; it has been thirty-five years since the
posthumous publication of The Crack-Up and The Portable F. Scott
Fitzgerald gave birth to what we call the "Fitzgerald Revival"; it has been
almost thirty years since Arthur Mizener's The Far Side of Paradise, the
first book about Fitzgerald. Statistically, the four decades since his
death have seen the production of over fifty books entirely devoted to
Fitzgerald, approximately twenty new collections of his writings (this
number does not include reprintings of volumes which appeared dur-
ing his lifetime), four volumes of his letters (a fifth is scheduled for
early 1980), and close to 1000 critical, scholarly, or quasi-scholarly
articles on his work. What I should like to do here is give one person's
highly subjective selection of the best of this material. While a large
percentage of my choices will be familiar to specialists and generalists
alike, I hope that in a few instances at least I will rescue from obscurity
pieces which deserve more attention than they have heretofore re-
ceived.
Summing up the past three decades of Fitzgerald scholarship, I
would suggest that, aside from Mizener's critical biography and a very
few other seminal critical pieces, in general the biographical, biblio-
graphical, and textual research done on Fitzgerald during the 1950s and
1960s exceeded, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the literary criti-
cism produced during the same period. Only in the 1970s, perhaps
247
TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE
because of the impetus provided by the several studies of Fitzgera

composition process and with the aid of the numerous reference aids
print, has there begun to be anything like consistent and serious att
tion paid to the texts themselves.
Largely through the efforts of Matthew J. Bruccoli and oth
scholars who received their training in bibliographical research fr
him, students of Fitzgerald have at their disposal perhaps the mo
complete array of bibliographical, textual, and reference works av
able on any modern American writer. Chief among these is Brucc
own F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Descriptive Bibliography (Pittsburgh: Univer
of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), which presents in scholarly detail all releva
information about Fitzgerald's published works. Divided into nin
major sections, ten appendices, and an index, Bruccoli's volume n
only includes descriptions and listings of well-known works, it a
unearths many obscure items, settles numerous textual disputes whil
stimulating others, and is a graphic illustration of the fact that a bib
ography is far more than a dreary catalogue. In the years since his b
appeared, Bruccoli has prepared lists of Addenda to it which he
published in the 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, and 1977 issues of th
Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual.
Prior to the appearance of his Fitzgerald bibliography, Brucco
had also published brief but important textual pieces on three o
Fitzgerald's novels. These include "A Collation of F. Scott Fitzgera
This Side of Paradise" (Studies in Bibliography, 1957), "Bibliograph
Notes on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned" (Studies
Bibliography, 1960), and "Material for a Centenary Edition of Tender
the Night" (Studies in Bibliography, 1964). These pieces, along with Bru
Harkness' "Bibliography and the Novelistic Fallacy" (Studies in Bibliog
raphy, 1958), which deals with The Great Gatsby, all illustrate in graph
terms how corrupt reprinted texts of Fitzgerald's novels are. This sam
subject is dealt with at greater length and in a more narrative fashio
by Bruccoli in " 'A Might Collation'-Animadversions on the Text of F
Scott Fitzgerald," in Editing Twentieth Century Texts, ed. Francess G
Halpenny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972). This essay
which ranges widely and convincingly over several Fitzgerald works,
the best place to begin a study of Fitzgerald's texts. It should be
supplemented by the pieces on the novels mentioned above, as well as
by several excellent studies of how Fitzgerald's short stories were al-
tered in various stages of composition and publication. Among them
are William White's "Two Versions of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'Babylon
Revisited': A Textual and Bibliographical Study" (Papers of the Biblio-
248
FOUR DECADES OF FITZGERALD STUDIES
graphical Society of America, Fourth Quarter 1966), Colin

"Fitzgerald's Second Thoughts About 'May Day': A Collation and
Study" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1970), James L. W. West III and
J. Barclay Inge's "F. Scott Fitzgerald's Revision of 'The Rich Boy'"
(Proof, 1976), and Thomas E. Daniels' "The Texts of 'Winter Dreams'"
(Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1977). Finally, Brian Higgins and Her-
shel Parker's "Sober Second Thoughts: The 'Author's Final Version' of
Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night" (Proof, 1975) is the definitive essay on
the relative merits of the original 1934 edition of the novel as opposed
to the 1951 revised version. Higgins and Parker review all the previous
debate on the question and then present in meticulous and thoroughly
convincing fashion their argument for the superiority of the 1934 text.
One need not agree with them in order to find their essay stimulating
and firmly based in the verbal and thematic patterns of the novel.
Higgins and Parker devote considerable attention to Fitzgerald's
process in composing Tender Is the Night, thus supplementing the major
work on this topic, Matthew J. Bruccoli's The Composition of "Tender Is the
Night" (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963). Bruccoli's
painstaking reconstruction of the seventeen drafts and three versions
of the novel serves both as a model of scholarly research and as one of
the earliest efforts to use bibliographical tools to draw attention to
Fitzgerald as "a deliberate and serious artist" whose work was carefully
written and intricately patterned. As noted earlier, this kind of valuable
bibliographical spadework, which is apparent as well in Bruccoli's "The
Last of the Novelists": F. Scott Fitzgerald and "The Last Tycoon" (Carbon-
dale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), James L. W. West III's
The Making of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise" (Columbia, S.C.:
J. Faust & Co., 1977), Bruccoli's Introduction to and edition of "The
Great Gatsby": A Facsimile of the Manuscript (Washington, D.C.: Microcard
Editions, 1973), Bruccoli's Apparatus for F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great
Gatsby" [Under the Red, White, and Blue] (Columbia, S.C.: University of
South Carolina Press, 1974), and Kenneth Eble's "The Craft of Re-
vision: The Great Gatsby" (American Literature, November 1964), has not
until very recently led to the kind of close-to-the-text literary analysis
which it would seem logically to imply.
Reference works on Fitzgerald are also readily available. My own
The Critical Reputation of F. Scott Fitzgerald. A Bibliographical Record
(Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1967), although now several years and much
new material out-of-date (a supplement is planned for publication in
late 1980 or early 1981), presents an annotated listing of some 2,100
pieces about Fitzgerald-reviews, articles in newspapers and scholarly
249
journals, books and book sections, dissertations and masters theses, an

foreign references-which is as complete as possible through 1966. The
successive volumes of the Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual (1970-1978) a
its predecessor, the Fitzgerald Newsletter (1958-1968) contain, in e
issue, quite extensive unannotated listings of material about Fitzgerald
Linda Berry and Patricia Powell's "Fitzgerald in Translation: A
Checklist" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1972) and Margaret M. Dug
gan's "Fitzgerald in Translation" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1973
provide the best resources on this topic (Bruccoli does not inclu
translations in his Bibliography). And Andrew T. Crosland's A Concor
dance to F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" (Detroit: Bruccoli Clar
Gale Research, 1975) is indispensable in assisting the kind of clo
attention to Fitzgerald's style which has been so rare.
With the publication in 1978 of Matthew J. Bruccoli's edition
The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark) and in 1979 of Bruccoli's edition of Th
Price Was High: The Last Uncollected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Ne
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark), and with Brucco
large edition of previously unpublished Fitzgerald letters due to appea
early in 1980, it would appear that, as the 1980s begin, virtually ever
thing Fitzgerald wrote is now in print in book form. This situati
should have enormously facilitated the task of the literary critic
providing him with the full range of Fitzgerald's writings on which
base his remarks; but, again, the desired and seemingly inevitable res
has been slow in taking place and critical commentary on Fitzgeral
work stubbornly clusters around The Great Gatsby and Tender Is t
Night. Thus, it largely ignores such well-edited volumes as John Kueh
editions of The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1909-1917 (Ne
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1965) and The Thoughtbook
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University
brary, 1965), and the material in the first half of F. Scott Fitzgerald in
Own Time: A Miscellany (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 197
edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and myself. Kuehl's two books present,
respectively, fifteen short stories and two plays which Fitzgerald wro
while a student at St. Paul Academy, the Newman School, and Prin
ton University, and his adolescent diary begun in 1910, when he w
ten, and completed eighteen months later. The Miscellany contai
further samples of his Princeton writings-verse, Triangle Club lyrics
Nassau Lit and Princeton Tiger humor-as well as the several book
reviews he did at Princeton and in later years and the humorous
250
articles on love, marriage, and sex which he wrote to order for mass-
circulation magazines and newspaper syndicates in the 1920s.
Also available is Bruccoli's edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Ledger"
(Washington, D.C.: NCR Microcard Editions, 1973), valuable chiefly
for Fitzgerald's "Outline Chart of my Life" from 1896 to 1935 and for
his year-by-year itemized record of "Money Earned by Writing Since
Leaving Army" which extends from 1919 to 1937. Much of the money
which Fitzgerald earned came from the sale of short stories written to
order for the Saturday Evening Post and other mass-circulation maga-
zines. While many of these do not represent work of the highest
quality, they do often contain passages of great prose. As such, they
deserve the attention of anyone concerned with Fitzgerald as a literary
artist. Aside from Malcolm Cowley's collection, The Stories of F. Scott
Fitzgerald (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1951), which includes the
most widely-known stories, the best sources are Arthur Mizener's edi-
tion of Afternoon of an Author (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1958),
containing both fiction and essays; The Pat Hobby Stories (New York:
Charles Scribner's, 1962), seventeen short sketches of a Hollywood
script-writer, originally written for Esquire in the late 1930s; Bits of
Paradise: 21 Uncollected Stories By F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (London:
Bodley Head, 1973; New York: Charles Scribner's, 1974), eleven stories
by Scott, nine sketches by Zelda, and one written by the two in collab-
oration; and the aforementioned Uncollected Stories, which brings to-
gether forty-nine of the fifty-seven Fitzgerald stories which remained
uncollected and adds one ("On Your Own") of the approximately ten
previously unpublished. For information on and summaries of the
unpublished stories, one should consult Jennifer McCabe Atkinson's
"The Lost and Unpublished Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald" (Fitzgerald/
Hemingway Annual, 1971), Alan Margolies' "A Note on Fitzgerald's Lost
and Unpublished Stories" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1972), and
Ruth Prigozy's "The Unpublished Stories: Fitzgerald in His Final
Stage" (Twentieth Century Literature, April 1974).
Fitzgerald's brief careers as a writer of scripts for the stage and for
the screen are exemplified in Alan Margolies' beautifully edited F. Scott
Fitzgerald's St. Paul Plays, 1911-1914 (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton Uni-
versity Library, 1978), in a new edition of his one professionally pro-
duced play, The Vegetable (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1976), which
includes an Introduction by Charles Scribner III and an appended
section of scenes which Fitzgerald cut before the play was originally
published in 1923, and in Bruccoli's edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's
251
Screenplay for "Three Comrades" by Erich Maria Remarque (Carbon

Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), featuring a fascinating A
word in which Bruccoli tells in detail how producer Joseph Manki
butchered Fitzgerald's script by demanding revisions (many o
revisions are printed as an Appendix). Finally, a valuable footn
the record of Fitzgerald's publications is provided by Elaine P. Mai
in "F. Scott Fitzgerald's Book Sales: A Look at the Record" (Fitzg
Hemingway Annual, 1973), where she charts for the years 1936
the number of Fitzgerald titles in print and their total sales, rang
from a low of seventy-two in 1940 (eight titles in print) to a h
480,256 in 1967 (sixteen titles in print). Maimon's figures, whil
refer only to titles published by Scribner's, nonetheless dispel the
that Fitzgerald was out of print when he died and also show th
burgeoning academic interest in his work during the late 1940
early 1950s was not reflected in sales of his books (with the excepti
1951, when the Stories appeared).
Although Bruccoli's new edition of letters will undoubtedly
model of scholarly thoroughness and bring into print for the first
many new letters of importance, it also will probably not ent
supplant the three major volumes of letters already available.
cases of two of these, Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins C
spondence, ed. John Kuehl and myself (New York: Charles Scrib
1971) and As Ever, Scott Fitz-: Letters Between F. Scott Fitzgerald a
Literary Agent, Harold Ober: 1919-1940, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, w
the assistance of Jennifer McCabe Atkinson (Philadelphia: J. B. Lip
cott, 1972), their value rests primarily on the picture of two of the
important relationships in Fitzgerald's life which they provide, ra
than on the quality or importance of the individual letters. T
Fitzgerald-Perkins collection has much to tell about how the most
ented of twentieth-century American editors worked with one of
most famous authors, encouraging, cajoling, supporting (literal
figuratively), and occasionally making suggestions-always with
tact. It also gives much evidence of Fitzgerald's considerable intere
the physical production of his books, of his eagerness to discover
help younger writers, and of his delight in the type of literary g
for which Perkins was such a great source. The Fitzgerald-Ober co
spondence probably gives as vivid a view of what it was like to
professional author in America in the 1920s and 1930s as any w
likely to get. Fitzgerald's dealings with Ober were invariably
money; but implied also throughout are the constant internal stru
the author had about the need to sustain himself financially while a
252
same time producing good fiction. Some letters from bo

collections had previously appeared in Andrew Turnbull'
The Letters ofF. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Charles Scribne
undeniably important resource for Fitzgerald research bu
has justifiably been attacked for the shoddy editorial practi
in it. Bruccoli's new edition will surely correct these and it w
incorporate all the significant new letters which have been
since 1970. The most important of these is Fitzgerald's lette
Hemingway suggesting important changes in the opening
The Sun Also Rises (Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1970). Als
are a letter about his story "The Ice Palace" (Fitzgerald/Hem
nual, 1972), and a marvelously moving and evocative letter f
Fitzgerald to a childhood friend in 1944 or 1945 commentin
cally on her husband (Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1975).
this material is the text of a memo which Fitzgerald wrote
read the typescript of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms;
which Hemingway apparently heeded in at least one insta
aced with an admirable introduction by Charles Mann (
Hemingway Annual, 1976).
A great deal of new biographical information about Fitzg
surfaced in the past thirty years, a fact which indicates
full-scale biography is needed. Nonetheless, Arthur Mizen
Side of Paradise (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951; rev. ed
mains not only the best biographical source available but
rather remarkably as still the best critical book on Fitzgera
with Bruccoli's Bibliography, as one of two volumes truly in
to Fitzgerald studies. Mizener bases his detailed account of F
life on letters, on interviews, and on his autobiographical w
he contributes much incisive and perceptive critical com
fiction as well as succinct summaries of its contemporary r
is unfailingly balanced in his appraisals; and his book is
tainhead of a great deal of Fitzgerald scholarship and critici
Turnbull's Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Charles Scribner's, 19
exclusively biographical and a much more personal acco
Mizener's, primarily because it draws heavily on its auth
acquaintance with Fitzgerald when Turnbull was a boy o
Fitzgerald was thirty-six. The chapters dealing with that fr
the best in the book; but there is an abundance of biograph
mation here as well which makes Turnbull's work far more than a
duplication of Mizener's. Similarly, Nancy Milford's Zelda: A Biograph
(New York: Harper & Row, 1970) goes well beyond previous resear
253
in giving both the most complete view we have of Zelda Fitz

well as of the complex and troubled marriage which is so ba
understanding of F. Scott Fitzgerald's career. As such, while its
primarily on Zelda, Milford's book is so full of important prim
secondary materials that it is required reading for those wh
attempt to understand Scott and his work.
Although these three books stand apart from and well ab
rest of the biographical work on Fitzgerald, there are other
importance in this most overcrowded area of Fitzgerald stu
several brief but charming and revealing essays which Scottie F
Lanahan Smith has written about her parents are unfairly n
and overlooked by most scholars. She has contributed introduct
Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories (New York: Charles Sc
1960), to As Ever, Scott Fitz- (see above), to Bits of Paradise (see
her father's Letters to His Daughter (New York: Charles Scribner
to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest M. Hemingway in Paris: An Ex
(Bloomfield Hills, Mich. and Columbia, S.C.: Bruccoli Clark,
and to The Romantic Egoists: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scr
and Albums of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (New York: Charles Sc
1974); and she has reminisced about her father's affection for h
mater in "Princeton & My Father" (Princeton Alumni Weekly, M
1956). The Romantic Egoists, which Mrs. Smith assembled with
Kerr and Matthew J. Bruccoli, is, as a total volume, an extreme
resource drawn from the Fitzgeralds' scrapbooks, photo albums,
and manuscripts. It is, for the most part, presented in facsimil
with exactly the necessary amount of editorial commentary. Th
lection has not received the attention it deserves-as a biog
source, as a reference work, and, perhaps most uniquely, as a co
of the flavor of the 1920s and 1930s as it affected and was affe
this remarkable couple.
Also deserving of more respect as biographical sources on
Fitzgerald are Sheilah Graham's memoirs. Beloved Infidel (New York:
Henry Holt, 1958), College of One (New York: Viking Press, 1967), and
The Real F. Scott Fitzgerald: Thirty-Five Years Later (New York: Grosset &
Dunlap, 1976), while they are frequently repetitive and stylistically
breezy, nevertheless contain the most authoritative information we
have about Fitzgerald's last years. This period has also been dealt with
more briefly but quite effectively by Fitzgerald's Hollywood secretary,
Laura Guthrie Hearne, in "A Summer With F. Scott Fitzgerald" (Es-
quire, December 1964), by Frances Kroll Ring, who also served as his
secretary, in "Footnotes on Fitzgerald" (Esquire, December 1959) and in
254
"Sisyphus in Hollywood: Refocusing F. Scott Fitzgerald" (Fitzge

Hemingway Annual, 1973), by Budd Schulberg in "Old Scott: The M
the Myth, and the Man" (Esquire, January 1961), and by Engli
novelist Anthony Powell in "Hollywood Canteen: A Memoir of
Fitzgerald in 1937" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1971).
Fitzgerald's personal relationships with his contemporaries i
literary and art world of the 1920s and 1930s have received m
attention in both primary and secondary accounts. Foremost a
these is his friendship with Ernest Hemingway, which the latter w
about in A Moveable Feast (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1964),
Morley Callaghan, a contemporary and acquaintance of both,
inisces about in That Summer in Paris (New York: Coward-McC
1963), and which receives its definitive scholarly treatment in Mat
J. Bruccoli's Scott and Ernest: The Authority of Failure and the Authorit
Success (New York: Random House, 1978). Of comparable value
series of pieces on Fitzgerald and Hemingway in Paris published in
1973 Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual which include scholarly essays
Roger Asselineau and Andre Le Vot and reminiscences by Harold
Loeb, Morrill Cody, Florence Gilliam, Donald Ogden Stewart, and
Andre Chamson. A. Scott Berg's excellent biography of Maxwell Per-
kins, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978),
contains a wealth of material about the circumstances of the publica-
tions of Fitzgerald's books and about his relationships with many of his
contemporaries, especially Hemingway, Ring Lardner, and Thomas
Wolfe. Calvin Tomkins' Living Well Is The Best Revenge (New York:
Viking Press, 1971), a reprinted New Yorker profile of Fitzgerald's
friends, Gerald and Sara Murphy, provides many fascinating glimpses
of the Fitzgeralds on the Riviera and in Paris.
Tony Buttitta's After the Good Gay Times: Asheville-Summer of '35: A
Season With F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Viking Press, 1974) presents a
remarkably vivid recreation of a brief friendship with Fitzgerald during
what was surely the nadir of his life emotionally and creatively. The
picture is a depressing one, of a man consistently drunk and mourning
the loss of his talent and his youth; but it is probably essentially an
accurate one and it is skillfully drawn. Memories of a much earlier and
much happier time in Fitzgerald's life are in Elizabeth Beckwith Mac-
Kie's charming "My Friend Scott Fitzgerald" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway An-
nual, 1970) which deals with a month spent with Fitzgerald in the
summer of 1917 in Charles Town, West Virginia. Carol Irish goes back
further, in "The Myth of Success in Fitzgerald's Boyhood" (Studies in
American Fiction, Autumn 1973), which draws fruitfully and fully on
255
details from Fitzgerald's childhood in making assertions abo

themes of his fiction. Arthur Mizener's Scott Fitzgerald and Hi
(New York: G.P. Putnam's, 1972) does not, in its narrative of
Fitzgerald's life, go beyond previous accounts; but it contains the best
collection of photographs-of the Fitzgeralds and their families and
friends, of places visited or lived in, and of persons and scenes typical
of the period about which Fitzgerald wrote-which we have.
Critical interest in Fitzgerald has spawned a large number of col-
lections of reprinted reviews and criticism. The best gathering of con-
temporary comment on Fitzgerald is my F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Critical
Reception (New York: Burt Franklin, 1978), which reprints over three-
hundred reviews of his books from This Side of Paradise (1920) through
The Last Tycoon (1941). These pieces are drawn from newspapers and
magazines all over the United States and are written by famous critics
like Mencken, Gilbert Seldes, Edmund Wilson, John Peale Bishop, J.
Donald Adams, Conrad Aiken, Stephen Vincent Benet, Robert Bench-
ley, Malcolm Cowley, Henry Seidel Canby, and Gorham B. Munson,
as well as by local reviewers. Students of Fitzgerald's contemporary
reputation should supplement this collection by consulting the second
half of F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time (see above), which reprints
some of these same reviews but also all of the known interviews with
Fitzgerald, the few essays on his work which appeared in his lifetime,
and a selection of the tributes which were written at the time of his
death. Of the numerous collections which emphasize the posthumous
criticism, the most comprehensive and best is Alfred Kazin's F. Scott
Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work (Cleveland: World, 1951). Although it
is now almost thirty years out of date, Kazin's anthology contains the
most representative sampling of the articles and review-essays which
stimulated the Fitzgerald Revival in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
There is really no comparable volume for the equally important and
much more abundant work done in the last three decades. The best of
a meager lot are Arthur Mizener's F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection of
Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), Frederick J.
Hoffman's more narrowly focused collection, "The Great Gatsby": A
Study (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1962), Kenneth E. Eble's F. Scott
Fitzgerald: A Collection of Criticism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), and
Marvin J. LaHood's "Tender Is the Night": Essays in Criticism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969).
As noted earlier, critical comment on Fitzgerald in the past forty
years has been, in general, much less satisfactory or helpful than bio-
graphical, bibliographical, and textual work. Aside from Mizener's The
256
Far Side of Paradise, which remains a fine critical study as we

best biography, the best critical books are James E. Miller, Jr
Fitzgerald: His Art and His Technique (New York: New York Un
Press, 1964), Sergio Perosa's The Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald (An
University of Michigan Press, 1965), Richard D. Lehan's F. Scott
Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univer-
sity Press, 1967), and Milton R. Stern's The Golden Moment: The Novels of
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970). None of
these books is without weaknesses; but each is worthwhile as a totality.
Miller's study is valuable for its emphases on the literary influences to
which Fitzgerald was subject and on close readings of the novels. Perosa
ranges more widely, presenting a comprehensive chronological tracing
of the "interdependent links" which exist between the novels and the
short stories, dealing almost entirely in a "literary" approach to
Fitzgerald's fiction. Similarly, Lehan's volume presents extremely good
explications of the major fiction and also adds suggestive comparisons
between Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway. Stern's book is the best
of those which view Fitzgerald's work in the context of the American
experience. His readings effectively balance knowledge of Fitzgerald's
life and of his times with insight into the prose itself.
One should consult others of the critical books more carefully.
William Goldhurst's F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries (Cleveland:
World, 1963) contains a useful chapter on Mencken's influence on
Fitzgerald; Henry Dan Piper's F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait (New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965) makes a major contribution
only in its discussion of Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz and Tender
Is the Night as "presenting the same marriage seen from the wife's and
husband's points of view," with Tender Is the Night a "defense" of
Fitzgerald's role in the relationship; Robert Sklar's F. Scott Fitzgerald:
The Last Laocobn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967) is worth-
while primarily for its examination of Fitzgerald's heroines and for its
brief explications of several short stories; Milton Hindus' F. Scott
Fitzgerald: An Introduction and Interpretation (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1968) includes a brief last chapter which attempts to
analyze Fitzgerald's style; Kenneth Eble's F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York:
Twayne, 1963; rev. ed., 1977) deserves attention for its readings of The
Vegetable and the Basil stories; and John A. Higgins' F. Scott Fitzgerald: A
Study of the Stories Jamaica, N.Y.: St. John's University Press, 1971)
presents a wealth of valuable primary and secondary information about
virtually all of the stories, especially in relating little-known pieces to
more widely recognized stories or novels.
257
Strangely enough, with the abundance of articles and bo

ters on Fitzgerald, we have had very few good general essays,
which survey the range of his career or consider several work
particular point of view. Of the book chapters, the best ar
Geismar's "F. Scott Fitzgerald: Orestes at the Ritz," in his The L
Provincials (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1943), John W. A
"Fitzgerald: The Horror and the Vision of Paradise," in his
Lost Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951), James W.
"F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Romantic Tragedian as Moral Fabul
The Novel of Manners in America (Chapel Hill: University
Carolina Press, 1972), and Walter Wells's "The Hero and the
his Tycoons and Locusts: A Regional Look at Hollywood Fiction o
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973). Geis
Aldridge present effective general reviews of the five novels
eral stories; while Tuttleton's piece is the finest we have on Fi
as a novelist of manners and Wells's is the most successful ove
of Fitzgerald's fiction about Hollywood.
Many of the best general periodical essays on Fitzgerald ar
among the review-essays which signalled the beginnings of the
Fitzgerald Revival in 1945 and 1951. Alfred Kazin has reprinted pieces
of this sort by Malcolm Cowley, J. F. Powers, Mark Schorer, Lionel
Trilling, Andrews Wanning, and Kazin himself in his F. Scott Fitzgerald:
The Man and His Work (see above). But because Kazin's collection only
includes material through 1945, many good 1951 essay-reviews remain
for the most part, uncollected. The most valuable are William Barrett's
"Fitzgerald and America" (Partisan Review, May-June 1951), Leslie A.
Fiedler's "Notes on F. Scott Fitzgerald" (New Leader, April 9, 1951 &
April 16, 1951), D. W. Harding's "Scott Fitzgerald" (Scrutiny, Winter
1951-1952), R. W. B. Lewis' "Fitzgerald's Way" (Hudson Review, Sum-
mer 1951), D. S. Savage's "The Significance of F. Scott Fitzgerald"
(Envoy, June 1951), James Thurber's "'Scott in Thorns' "(The Reporter,
April 17, 1951), Delmore Schwartz's "The Dark Night of F. Scott
Fitzgerald" (The Nation, February 24, 1951), and Lionel Trilling's
"Fitzgerald Plain" (New Yorker, February 3, 1951). Two articles by Mal-
colm Cowley are perhaps more important than any one of the other
early general essays. "Fitzgerald: The Double Man" (Saturday Review of
Literature, February 24, 1951) is the fullest delineation of one of the
seminal approaches to Fitzgerald's fiction, the thesis that his "distin-
guishing mark as a writer" was his double vision, "the maximum of
critical detachment ... combined with the maximum immersion in the
drama." "The Scott Fitzgerald Story" (New Republic, February 12, 1951)
258
presents a contemporary's perspective on the "moral atmospher

period in which Fitzgerald flourished and declined." Two oth
essays, both reprinted in Kazin's collection, also represent se
proaches. Charles Weir, Jr.'s "'An Invite with Gilded Edges'
Quarterly Review, Winter 1944) characterizes Fitzgerald as c
tween the compulsion to write well and the necessity to mak
doing it. William Troy's "Scott Fitzgerald: The Authority of
(Accent, Autumn 1945) views the fiction as too preoccupied wit
to be successful.
Another of the many surprises in Fitzgerald studies is the realiza-
tion that, since 1951, very few general essays have added substantially
to the insights of these early articles. The exceptions to this rule include
James Gindin's "Gods and Fathers in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Novels"
(Modern Language Quarterly, March 1969), with its perceptive comments
on Fitzgerald's changing conception of the Romantic hero; John R.
Kuehl's "Scott Fitzgerald: Romantic and Realist" (Texas Studies in Liter-
ature and Language, Autumn 1959), which traces "romanticism and
social realism" through Gatsby, Tender, and The Last Tycoon; Arthur
Mizener's "Scott Fitzgerald and the 1920's" (Minnesota Review, Winter
1961), a brilliant analysis of how successful Fitzgerald was at revealing
the quality of his era, the movement of attitude and feeling in it; Scott
Donaldson's "Scott Fitzgerald's Romance With the South" (Southern
Literary Journal, Spring 1973), the best examination of Fitzgerald's atti-
tude towards the South, a two-part attitude Donaldson sees as molded
on the one hand by his relationship with Zelda and on the other by his
view of his father; and Ruth Prigozy's "'Poor Butterfly': F. Scott
Fitzgerald and Popular Music" (Prospects, 1976), an intriguing and
thorough survey of Fitzgerald's use of popular music in his fiction.
Turning to critical studies of individual Fitzgerald works, we find,
with the exception of Gatsby and, to a much lesser extent, Tender, an
even more striking absence of worthwhile material than among the
general essays. This Side of Paradise, the novel that launched his career
and a work which has consistently been underrated if not ignored by
critics, is the subject of only a handful of pieces. John P. Marquand's
"Looking Backwards: 1. Fitzgerald: 'This Side of Paradise'" (Saturday
Review of Literature, August 9, 1949) and A. J. Liebling's "Amory, We're
Beautiful" (New Yorker, May 19, 1951) are gracefully written but not
very scholarly calls for re-examination of the novel. Of the more recent
pieces, the best are Barry Gross's "This Side of Paradise: The Dominating
Intention" (Studies in the Novel, Spring 1969), Clinton S. Burhans, Jr.'s
"Structure and Theme in This Side of Paradise" (Journal of English and
259
Germanic Philology, October 1969), and Robert Roulston's "Thi

Paradise: The Ghost of Rupert Brooke" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway
1975). Both Gross and Burhans do well in relating This Side of
thematically and structurally to Fitzgerald's later novels; while
uses Fitzgerald's fascination with and references to Brooke in t
as a fruitful touchstone to its strengths and weaknesses.
The Beautiful and Damned is even more ignored by serious
than This Side of Paradise. Because they are literally the on
available, Richard Astro's "Vandover and the Brute and The Beau
Damned: A Search for Thematic and Stylistic Reinterpretations
ern Fiction Studies, Winter 1968), Barry Gross's "The Dark
Twenty-five: Fitzgerald and The Beautiful and Damned" (Buckne
December 1968), Leonard A. Podis' "The Beautiful and Damned:
Fitzgerald's Test of Youth" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1973), and
Robert Roulston's "The Beautiful and Damned: The Alcoholic's Revenge"
(Literature and Psychology, No. 3, 1977) are all worthy of some attention,
although Gross, Podis, and Roulston do over-emphasize the autobio-
graphical aspects of the novel at the expense of considering its literary
qualities.
The situation with critical essays on The Great Gatsby is, of course,
quite different. There are so many that in order even to point out some
of the best it is necessary to divide them somewhat arbitrarily into
categories. Very good general pieces include Richard Chase's in his The
American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957),
Arthur Mizener's "F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby," in The American
Novel From James Fenimore Cooper to William Faulkner, ed. Wallace
Stegner (New York: Basic Books, 1965), John W. Aldridge's "The Life
of Gatsby," in Twelve Original Essays on Great American Novels, ed.
Charles Shapiro (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1958), Richard
Lehan's "Focus on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: The Nowhere
Hero," in American Dreams, American Nightmares, ed. David Madden
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), James E. Miller,
Jr.'s "Fitzgerald's Gatsby: The World As Ash Heap," in The Twenties:
Fiction, Poetry, Drama, ed. Warren French (Deland, Fla.: Everett/
Edwards, 1975), and Kenneth Eble's "The Great Gatsby" (College Litera-
ture, Winter 1974). Eble's and Mizener's essays are particularly valuable
for their surveys of the various aspects of Gatsby which have concerned
critics over the years; Miller and Aldridge deal more specifically with
the intricate patterns of images and scenes in the novel.
A number of worthwhile studies have linked Gatsby with the works
of other writers, sometimes with claims of influence, sometimes merely
260
to show coincidental similarities. Robert Emmet Long's "The Grea

Gatsby and the Tradition of Joseph Conrad" (Texas Studies in Literat
and Language, Summer 1966 & Fall 1966) is the definitive discussion o
this popular topic. In "Scott Fitzgerald's Waste Land" (Kansas Magazin
1956), Philip Young briefly but wisely suggests the parallels betw
Eliot's poem and Fitzgerald's novel. The Keats influence, which
most often been applied to Tender Is the Night, is skillfully urged w
respect to Gatsby by Dan McCall in " 'The Self-Same Song That Found
Path': Keats and The Great Gatsby" (American Literature, January 19
Lawrence Thornton's "Ford Madox Ford and The Great Gatsby"
(Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1975) is a plausible assertion of connec-
tions between Fitzgerald's novel and Ford's The Good Soldier. Ties with
two Victorian novelists are offered in excellent essays by Norman
Friedman and Steven Curry and Peter L. Hays. Friedman's "Versions
of Form in Fiction: 'Great Expectations' and 'The Great Gatsby'" (Ac-
cent, Autumn 1954) is a brilliant exploration of the similarities and
differences between the two novels and of the implications these have
for the history of the novel as a form. Hays and Curry, in "Fitzgerald's
Vanity Fair" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1977), are less ambitious than
Friedman but not less thorough in their tracing of likenesses between
Gatsby and Thackeray's masterpiece.
Nick Carraway's personality and his reliability as a narrator have
been the subjects of several important essays. E. Fred Carlisle's "The
Triple Vision of Nick Carraway" (Modern Fiction Studies, Winter 1965-
1966) does a good job of defining the several perspectives on the
characters and action which Nick provides. Articles by Richard Foster,
Oliver H. Evans, Albert E. Elmore, John J. McNally, and Peter Lisca
tend to be more argumentative in their appraisals of Nick. Foster's "The
Way to Read Gatsby," in Sense and Sensibility in Twentieth-Century Writing,
ed. Brom Weber (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970)
and Evans' "'A Sort of Moral Attention': The Narrator of The Great
Gatsby" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1971) are the most articulate at
tacks on Nick as "a flawed narrator" and one who really fails to learn
very much from his experiences. Elmore, in "Nick Carraway's Self-
Introduction" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1971), and McNally, in
"Prefiguration of Incidents in The Great Gatsby" (University of Dayton
Review, Spring 1971), provide good defenses of Nick; while Lisca's
"Nick Carraway and the Imagery of Disorder" (Twentieth Century Liter-
ature, April 1967), most sensibly of all, corrects earlier suggestions of
Nick as the "moral fulcrum" of Gatsby, noting that Nick and his judge-
ments are merely "parts of the novel."
261
Other characters in the novel have also attracted critical attention.

Barry E. Gross's "Jay Gatsby and Myrtle Wilson: A Kinship" (Tennesse
Studies in Literature, 1963) notes how Myrtle and Gatsby share "'a
immediate perceptible vitality' " and are the only characters in the bo
who "cherish an illusion, who pursue a vision." Nicholas Canady, Jr
"Portrait of Daisy: Studies By James and Fitzgerald" (Forum [Houston],
Summer 1966) and Joan S. Korenman's "'Only Her Hairdresser. ..':
Another Look at Daisy Buchanan" (American Literature, January 1975)
are solid pieces; and Leland S. Person, Jr.'s "'Herstory' and Daisy
Buchanan" (American Literature, May 1978) is provocative and controv-
ersial in its view of Daisy as Gatsby's "double." Tom Buchanan is the
subject of two good essays, Christian Messenger's "Tom Buchanan and
the Demise of the Ivy League Athletic Hero" (Journal of Popular Culture,
Fall 1974) and Robert Roulston's "Tom Buchanan: Patrician in Motley"
(Arizona Quarterly, Summer 1978). Finally, we have Josephine Z. Kopf's
"Meyer Wolfsheim and Robert Cohn: A Study of Jewish Type and
Stereotype" (Tradition, Spring 1969), where Wolfsheim is characterized
as a stereotyped "villainous Jew."
Another group of essays on Gatsby have focused on its affinities
with various literary forms. David Parker's "The Great Gatsby: Two
Versions of the Hero" (English Studies, February 1973) argues con-
vincingly for the presence in the novel of the hero of romance and the
hero of the novel of "sentimental education." In "White Sheep on Fifth
Avenue: The Great Gatsby as Pastoral" (Genre, December 1971), David
Stouck does a good job of demonstrating his contention that through a
sense of the pastoral the true dialectic of Gatsby comes into focus; and
John H. Kuhnle's "The Great Gatsby as Pastoral Elegy" (Fitzgerald/
Hemingway Annual, 1978) carefully supports his description of the novel
as "a pastoral elegy emphasizing Nick's interpretation of the life and
death of Gatsby, and their effect on the survivors." Peter L. Hays, in
"Gatsby, Myth, Fairy Tale, and Legend" (Southern Folklore Quarterly,
1977), presents a similarly effective argument that Gatsby combines
characteristics of the fairy tale with those of the legend for the purpose
of mocking the American dream, "to show that it is no more than a
legend to those who believe in it, and a fairy tale, in the most pejorative
sense, for most of us."
Two extremely valuable essays place Gatsby in the context of a
wider vision of America and the American dream. Brian M. Barbour's
"The Great Gatsby and the American Past" (Southern Review, Spring 19
relates two opposing forces in the novel to two American dream
stemming from two American thinkers, Franklin and Emerson. T
262
Franklinian dream of "self-validating materialism" is em

Buchanans; while Gatsby, who has repudiated the Frankl
his youth, embodies a version of the Emersonian dream,
based on wealth but rather on "the moral ground of its
puritanism." Barry Gross, in "Back West: Time and Place
Gatsby" (Western American Literature, Spring & Summe
intelligently and originally with the opposition of East and
novel, pointing out that "West is past, East future"; thus th
deficiency which Nick remarks that the Westerners in Gat
their inability to live in the future.
The most encouraging trend in recent Fitzgerald stu
towards close readings of the fiction. This is apparent with
Gatsby in two kinds of essays-those which trace pattern
and symbols through the novel and, most significantly,
focus on the style. Early good work on the symbol of the e
J. Eckleburg was done by Tom Burnam, in "The Eyes of Dr.
Eckleburg: A Re-examination of 'The Great Gatsby'" (College English,
October 1952); by Milton Hindus, in "The Mysterious Eyes of Doctor
T. J. Eckleburg" (Boston University Studies in English, Spring 1957); and
by Daniel J. Schneider, in "Color-Symbolism in The Great Gatsby" (Uni-
versity Review, October 1964), an equally important piece on an equally
important symbol pattern. More recently, John J. McNally, in "Boats
and Automobiles in The Great Gatsby: Symbols of Drift and Death"
(Husson Review, No. 1, 1971), and Laurence E. MacPhee, in "The Great
Gatsby's 'Romance of Motoring': Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker"
(Modern Fiction Studies, Summer 1972), provide complementary explo-
rations of the leitmotifs of boats and automobiles in Gatsby. And Robert
J. Emmitt's "Love, Death and Resurrection in The Great Gatsby," in
Aeolian Harps: Essays in Literature in Honor of Maurice Browning Cramer,
ed. Donna G. Fricke and Douglas C. Fricke (Bowling Green, Ohio:
Bowling Green University Press, 1976), renders superficial all previous
studies of the symbols underlying Fitzgerald's use of the Waste Land,
Grail, and resurrection myths in Gatsby.
Until the early 1970s, the only article on style or language in Gatsby
was W. J. Harvey's largely ignored or undervalued "Theme and Tex-
ture in The Great Gatsby" (English Studies, February 1957). In "The Great
Gatsby: Fitzgerald's Meditation on American History" (Fitzgerald/
Hemingway Annual, 1972), Kermit W. Moyer presented some close
readings which touched on images of circularity in the novel and the
persistent flower metaphor; and F. H. Langman, in "Style and Shape in
The Great Gatsby" (Southern Review [University of Adelaide], March
263
1973), began to point Fitzgerald studies in a fruitful directio

marking that we read Gatsby "for the sake of its distinctive vo
voices, for the way in which it puts things, at least as much as
significance of the episodes it recounts." Langman's assertion
significant and impressive support in the next four years
several excellent essays. The best of these are Bruce R. Stark
Intricate Pattern in The Great Gatsby" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway
1974), B. W. Wilson's "The Theatrical Motif in The Great Ga
(Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1975), Joan S. Korenman's "A V
the (Queensboro) Bridge" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1975),
Gerber Sanders' "Structural Imagery in The Great Gatsby: Meta
Matrix" (Linguistics in Literature, Fall 1975), Leonard A. Pod
Unreality of Reality': Metaphor in The Great Gatsby" (Style
1977), Edwin Moses' "Tragic Inevitability in The Great Gatsby" (
Language Association Journal, September 1977), Robert Emm
"The Opening Three Chapters of The Great Gatsby" (English Re
1975), and Christiane Johnson's "The Great Gatsby: The Fina
(Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1976). Long, Johnson, Korenma
are particularly specific in providing explications of limited
rather than starting with a pattern of images and tracing it thr
novel. Long's recent book, The'Achieving of "The Great Gatsby"
Fitzgerald, 1920-1925 (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press,
1979), is, in many respects, the fitting culmination of this trend with its
emphases on Fitzgerald's process in composing the novel and on the art
of Gatsby and "the aesthetic strategies it involves." Long's study incorpo-
rates his earlier material on the Conradian elements of the novel and
also includes valuable considerations of the literary-cultural milieu ou
of which it grew and of the earlier Fitzgerald works which led to
This volume is a welcome addition to the small list of essential items in
Fitzgerald studies.
Happily, the focus on style and language which has developed in
recent work on Gatsby has also spilled over into studies of Fitzgerald's
other most-frequently studied novel, Tender Is the Night. Again, essays
written in the 1950s and 1960s tend either to be general overviews o
the novel or to be considerations of individual characters. The best of
the general studies is Arthur Mizener's chapter in his Twelve Great
American Novels (New York: New American Library, 1967); good pieces
on Dick Diver are Eugene White's "The 'Intricate Destiny' of Dick
Diver" (Modern Fiction Studies, Spring 1961), A. H. Steinberg's
"Fitzgerald's Portrait of a Psychiatrist" (University of Kansas City Review,
March 1955), and James Ellis' "Fitzgerald's Fragmented Hero: Dick
264
Diver" (University Review, October 1965); the influence of

covered well by John Grube, in "Tender Is the Night: Keats
Fitzgerald" (Dalhousie Review, Winter 1964-65), and by William
erty, in "Tender Is the Night and the 'Ode to a Nightingale,'" i
tions of Literature, ed. Rima Drell Reck (Baton Rouge: Louis
University Press, 1966); the novel's theme of incest is treated
Stanton's "'Daddy's Girl': Symbol and Theme in 'Tender Is the
Night'" (Modern Fiction Studies, Summer 1958); and good applications
of the American Studies approach to Tender are offered by Alan
Trachtenberg, in "The Journey Back: Myth and History in Tender Is the
Night," in Experience in the Novel: Selected Papers From the English Institute
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), and by Frank Kinahan,
in "Focus on F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night," in American
Dreams, American Nightmares, ed. David Madden (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1970).
Work on Tender Is the Night in the last decade has, to some extent,
narrowed in focus. We do, however, have several good broader essays.
The best are Scott Donaldson's "'No, I Am Not Prince Charming':
Fairy Tales in Tender Is the Night" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1973),
Marjory Martin's "Fitzgerald's Image of Woman: Anima Projections in
Tender Is the Night" (English Studies Collections, September 1976), Maria
DiBattista's "The Aesthetic of Forbearance: Fitzgerald's Tender Is the
Night" (Novel, Fall 1977), Judith Wilt's "The Spinning Story: Gothic
Motifs in Tender Is the Night" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1976), Bruce
L. Grenberg's "Fitzgerald's 'Figured Curtain': Personality and History
in Tender Is the Night" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1978), and Robert
Roulston's "Slumbering With the Just: A Maryland Lens for Tender Is
the Night" (Southern Quarterly, January 1978). Again, as with recent
Gatsby essays, a number of these general pieces-those by Donaldson,
Wilt, and Grenberg-tend to suggest literary and cultural resonances in
Fitzgerald's fiction. The notion that he was a deliberate craftsman with
a sophisticated sense of literary form who was always experimenting
with the novelistic framework is just one of the many healthy conclu-
sions one can draw from studies of this sort.
Studies of style and language in Tender begin with William F. Hall
"Dialogue and Theme in Tender Is the Night" (Modern Language Notes,
November 1961), continue with Arthur Mizener's misleadingly tit
"On F. Scott Fitzgerald," in Talks With Authors, ed. Charles F. Madden
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), which exami
the opening chapter of Tender in detail, and culminate in John Stark'
"The Style of Tender Is the Night" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1972
265
an excellent explication of the three opening paragraphs of the

edition of the novel, and in Robert Roulston's "Dick Diver's Plunge
the Roman Void: The Setting of Tender Is the Night" (South At
Quarterly, Winter 1978), which examines closely the five chapters
Rome. These last two articles, taken together with those cited in the
paragraph, represent one of the most encouraging signs in re
Fitzgerald studies, the number of original and insightful essay
pearing on another of Fitzgerald's novels besides Gatsby.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for criticism of Fitzger
last novel, the incomplete The Last Tycoon, or for studies of his sh
fiction and essays. Robert E. Maurer's "F. Scott Fitzgerald's Unfinis
Novel, The Last Tycoon" (Bucknell University Studies, May 1952), Jo
Hart's "Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon: A Search for Identity" (M
Fiction Studies, Spring 1961), Michael Millgate's section on the nove
his American Social Fiction: James to Cozzens (New York: Barnes & N
1964), Barry Edward Gross's "Success and Failure in The Last Ty
(University Review, June 1965), and Arthur Mizener's "The Maturit
Scott Fitzgerald" (Sewanee Review, Autumn 1959) are the best o
early pieces. Among the more recent ones, the most worthwhi
Gross's "Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon: The Great American No
(Arizona Quarterly, Autumn 1970), Alan Margolies' "The Dram
Novel, The Great Gatsby, and The Last Tycoon" (Fitzgerald/Heming
Annual, 1971), and Kermit W. Moyer's "Fitzgerald's Two Unfini
Novels: The Count and the Tycoon in Spenglerian Perspective" (
temporary Literature, Spring 1974), which views The Last Tycoon alo
Fitzgerald's other unfinished novel, "Count of Darkness." The latter
also the sole subject of an excellent study, Janet Lewis' "Fitzge
'Philippe, Count of Darkness'" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1
Fitzgerald's film scripts, which are dealt with very unsatisfactorily
all in most accounts, are the subject of two very substantial essays,
Margolies' "F. Scott Fitzgerald's Work in the Film Studios" (Prin
University Library Chronicle, Winter 1971) and Lawrence D. Stew
"Fitzgerald's Film Scripts of 'Babylon Revisited'" (Fitzgerald/Heming
Annual, 1971).
Fitzgerald's short stories, despite their number and quality,
been almost entirely ignored in serious criticism of his works. Vir
the only substantial exceptions to this are Clinton S. Burhans,
"'Magnificently Attune to Life': The Value of 'Winter Dreams'"
(Studies in Short Fiction, Summer 1969), Constance Drake's "Josephine
and Emotional Bankruptcy" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1969), Alan
Casty's "'I and It' in the Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald" (Studies in Short
266
Fiction, Winter 1972), Lawrence D. Stewart's "'Absolu

Great Gatsby" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1973), Da
and Retribution in 'Babylon Revisited'" (Fitzgerald/Hemi
1973), Thomas E. Daniels' "Pat Hobby: Anti-Hero" (Fitzgerald/
Hemingway Annual, 1973), Edwin Moses' "F. Scott Fitzgerald and the
Quest to the Ice Palace" (CEA Critic, January 1974), Anthony J. Maz-
zella's "The Tension of Opposites in Fitzgerald's 'May Day' " (Studies in
Short Fiction, Fall 1977), Charlotte LeGates' "Dual-Perspective Irony
and the Fitzgerald Short Story" (Iowa English Yearbook, 1977), Kenneth
Johnston's "Fitzgerald's 'Crazy Sunday': Cinderella in Hollywood"
(Literature/Film Quarterly, Summer 1978), the Introduction by myself
and John Kuehl to Fitzgerald's Basil and Josephine Stories (New York:
Charles Scribner's, 1973), and Janet Lewis' "'The Cruise of the Rolling
Junk': The Fictionalized Joys of Motoring" (Fitzgerald/Hemingway An-
nual, 1978). Of these, those by Burhans, Stewart, Mazzella, Johnston,
and Lewis are most successful in providing the specific explications of
Fitzgerald stories which we so badly need. The fact that there have
been more such essays in the last decade than previously is perhaps yet
another encouraging portent for the future.
As a footnote to this survey of the best in Fitzgerald studies, I
would like to add a valedictory tribute and a suggestion. The careful
reader of this essay will note how often I have cited material from the
Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual. That is because so much of the important
Fitzgerald criticism and scholarship of the past decade has appeared in
its pages. The 1979 volume-which had not yet appeared when I
prepared this piece-has been announced as the last in the series; and
one can mourn its passing while at the same time one must congratu-
late its editors for advancing and stimulating Fitzgerald studies. Its
greatest legacy will, hopefully, be the future work which its many
valuable contributions have encouraged. Finally, it is time for an en-
lightened publisher and an energetic editor to gather together some of
the best of the Fitzgerald criticism of the past thirty years in a collection
which would begin where Kazin's ended in 1951. As I have tried to
demonstrate in this survey, there are many exciting and innovative new
directions in Fitzgerald studies reflected in the work of the 1960s and
1970s; a collection of the best of this material is long overdue.
267

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Four Decades of Fitzgerald Studies: The Best and the Brightest

Author(s): Jackson R. Bryer

The appearance at the beginning of the 1980s of a special

because of the impetus provided by the several studies of Fitzgera

graphical Society of America, Fourth Quarter 1966), Colin

journals, books and book sections, dissertations and masters theses, an

Screenplay for "Three Comrades" by Erich Maria Remarque (Carbon

same time producing good fiction. Some letters from bo

in giving both the most complete view we have of Zelda Fitz

"Sisyphus in Hollywood: Refocusing F. Scott Fitzgerald" (Fitzge

details from Fitzgerald's childhood in making assertions abo

Far Side of Paradise, which remains a fine critical study as we

Strangely enough, with the abundance of articles and bo

presents a contemporary's perspective on the "moral atmospher

Germanic Philology, October 1969), and Robert Roulston's "Thi

to show coincidental similarities. Robert Emmet Long's "The Grea

Other characters in the novel have also attracted critical attention.

Franklinian dream of "self-validating materialism" is em

1973), began to point Fitzgerald studies in a fruitful directio

Diver" (University Review, October 1965); the influence of

an excellent explication of the three opening paragraphs of the

Fiction, Winter 1972), Lawrence D. Stewart's "'Absolu

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