Featured Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
With News and Reviews From the Archives of The New York Times

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In This Feature

Reviews of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Earlier Books

Articles About and by F. Scott Fitzgerald

An Audio Reading by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Caleb Crain Reviews 'F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels and Stories, 1920-1922' (Dec. 24, 2000)

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The Associated Press

F. Scott Fitzgerald, his wife, Zelda, and daughter, Scotty, in their Paris apartment in 1926.

AUDIO:

F. Scott Fitzgerald Reads From John Masefield's 'On Growing Old' (1 minute)

F. Scott Fitzgerald Reads From John Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale' (1 minute 53 seconds)

F. Scott Fitzgerald Reads From Shakespeare's 'Othello' (2 minute 55 seconds)

Recording courtesy of: Papers of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Manuscripts Division. Princeton University Library.

REVIEWS OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD'S EARLIER BOOKS:

'This Side of Paradise' (1920)
"The glorious spirit of abounding youth glows throughout this fascinating tale. . . The whole story is disconnected, more or less, but loses none of its charm on that account. It could have been written only by an artist who knows how to balance his values, plus a delightful literary style."

'Flappers and Philosophers' (1920)
"Not the most superficial reader can fail to recognize Mr. Fitzgerald's talent and genius. . . . It is the blatant tone of levity which runs through his work that almost drowns out the perception of this literary substance. But its overtones are unmistakable. Mr. Fitzgerald is working out an idiom, and it is an idiom at once universal, American and individual."

'The Beautiful and Damned' (1922)
". . . its slow-moving narrative is the record of lives utterly worthless utterly futile. . . . It is to be hoped that Mr. Fitzgerald, who possesses a genuine, undeniable talent, will some day acquire a less one-sided understanding."

'Tales of the Jazz Age' (1922)
"If ever a writer was born with a gold pen in his mouth, surely Fitzgerald is that man. The more you read him, the more he convinces you that here is the destined artist. . . . These stories are announced as beginning in the writer's second manner. They certainly show a development in his art, a new turn."

'The Great Gatsby' (1925)
"With sensitive insight and keen psychological observation, Fitzgerald discloses in these people a meanness of spirit, carelessness and absence of loyalties. . . . A curious book, a mystical, glamourous story of today. It takes a deeper cut at life than hitherto has been enjoyed by Mr. Fitzgerald. He writes well -- he always has -- for he writes naturally, and his sense of form is becoming perfected."

'All the Sad Young Men' (1926)
"[T]he collection as a whole is not sustained to the high excellence of 'The Great Gatsby,' but it has stories of fine insight and finished craft. That Scott Fitzgerald has realized the promise of his brilliant juvenilia in a short writing period of six years must be a bitter shock to those who saw in him a skyrocketing flash in the pan."

'Tender Is the Night' (1934)
"It seemed to us that Mr. Fitzgerald proceeded accurately, step by step, with just enough documentation to keep the drama from being misty, but without destroying the suggestiveness that added to the horror lurking behind the surface."

'Taps at Reveille' (1935)
"The characteristic seal of his brilliance stamps the entire book, but it is a brilliance which splutters off too frequently into mere razzle-dazzle. One wishes for more evidence that he has changed and matured . . ."

'The Last Tycoon' (1941)
". . . an ambitious book, but, uncompleted though it is, one would be blind indeed not to see that it would have been Fitzgerald's best novel . . . Even in this truncated form it not only makes absorbing reading; it is the best piece of creative writing that we have about one phase of American life -- Hollywood and the movies."

'The Crack Up' (1945)
". . . a collection of Fitzgerald's unpublished sketches, notebooks, letters and doggerel . . . For all their inanities and juvenile posturings, for all their borrowed melancholy and half-formed wisdom, these notes are a blurred but fascinating blueprint of the development -- and the breakdown -- of a major literary talent."

'The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald,' reviewed by Alice B. Toklas (1951)
"To read these stories now is indeed a melancholy pleasure, for Fitzgerald has become a legend and the epoch he created is history."

'Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays' (1958)
". . . fourteen stories and six essays, never before between book covers . . . The stories are, perhaps, not quite up to the best he ever wrote. The essays are unequal in contemporary interest. But the standard is remarkably high, the authentic magic is here."

'The Pat Hobby Stories' (1962)
"Fitzgerald created this anti-hero out of his own long and painful experience as a scriptwriter. . . . The seventeen stories in this volume are short . . . but they are the work of a master hand."

'The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald' (1963)
"Here is the first full selection of Scott Fitzgerald's letters, assembled by Andrew Turnbull, his best biographer, and what makes the book worthwhile is that it does not speculate about Scott Fitzgerald -- it is about him."

'The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald: 1909-1917' (1965)
". . . consists of 13 stories and two one-act plays which he wrote between the ages of 13 and 21 for school and college publications . . . Fitzgerald was precocious . . . yet he was no demon of precocity . . . aimed primarily at the Fitzgerald specialist . . ."

'The Basil and Josephine Stories' (1973)
"[T]he stories lack dramatic progression, resembling in form those radio and TV serials about youth in its daily encounters with the facts of social life. . . . Slight as they are they delight us, as fragments of a Mozart or Chopin do because we know the work as a whole."

'The Price Was High: The Last Uncollected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald' (1979)
"Fifty stories, then -- or nearly one-third of Fitzgerald's magazine work -- are collected for the first time . . . The barrel has been turned upside down, but I was happy to find that there are things other than dregs at the bottom of it. . . . The sad fact remains that three-fourths of the stories . . . are below his usual level of achievement."

ARTICLES ABOUT AND BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD:

Holds 'Flappers' Fail as Parents (1933)
Elaborating on a critique made by his 12-year-old daughter, Fitzgerald told a reporter, "My contemporaries have found their own lack of religious and moral convictions makes them incompetent to train their children."

Books of The Times (1934)
John Chamberlain, responding to Fitzgerald's preface for an edition of "The Great Gatsby," writes that "the sort of criticism that Mr. Fitzgerald hates may be all too prevalent among those who go to literature for political support," but that does "not mean that good books can't get a hearing."

Scott Fitzgerald, Author, Dies at 44 (1940)
The Times's obituary said that "Fitzgerald in his life and writings epitomized 'all the sad young men' of the post-war generation."

Scott Fitzgerald -- Odds and Ends, by John O'Hara (1945)
In an essay about "The Crack-Up," a posthumous book of miscellaneous Fitzgerald writing edited by Edmund Wilson, O'Hara writes, "I regard its publication as an unfriendly act."

Screen: 'The Great Gatsby' (1949)
"Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum have achieved a dutiful plotting of the novel without the substance of life that made it stick. Blame it, too, upon direction; Elliott Nugent's handling of the cast and of supposedly significant behavior is completely artificial and stiff."

Scott Fitzgerald: Ten Years After (1950)
In an essay, Burke Wilkinson addresses the question "Why the post-mortem, post-World War II revival" of interest in Fitzgerald's work?

A Review of 'F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work' (1951)
"Here is a collection of reviews and essays, some of them brilliant indeed, on the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald . . ."

TV: 'Tender Is the Night' (1955)
"The memory of the late F. Scott Fitzgerald was dishonored last night in an unfortunate television adaptation of his novel, 'Tender Is the Night.'"

F. Scott Fitzgerald to His 11-Year-Old Daughter in Camp (1958)
The Times printed a 1933 letter from Fitzgerald to his daughter, which included advice such as, "All I believe in in life is the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties, which are doubly costly."

Gatsby, 35 Years Later (1960)
In an essay about the posthumous recognition of "The Great Gatsby" as an American classic, Arthur Mizener writes that Fitzgerald "lost his faith in its possibility for good with 'Gatsby's' failure to achieve recognition."

Screen: 'Tender Is the Night' (1962)
". . . a film that slowly lets slip its dramatic momentum and credibility . . ."

Gertrude Stein and Scott Fitzgerald Are Defended Against Hemingway's Attack (1964)
Brooks Atkinson defends Fitzgerald against what he calls Hemingway's "defamation" of his character in "A Moveable Feast," a book which Atkinson calls "extraordinarily mean."

Scribner's Is Giving Archives to Princeton (1967)
Among the archives that Charles Scribner's Sons gave to Princeton University were 468 letters from Fitzgerald, mostly to Maxwell Perkins, his editor, and 1,248 documents, such as letters to Fitzgerald, financial records and letters to agents and editors.

A Fitzgerald Story Is Discovered (1969)
A hitherto unknown short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald was discovered among his papers at the Princeton University Library.

Text of 'Dearly Beloved'

A Review of Milton R. Stern's 'The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald' (1970)
"It is the work of a devotee, indeed an enthusiast who seems to have mounted his hobby horse and ridden off in all directions."

Hemingway's Letters Tell of Fitzgerald (1972)
The strangely ambivalent relationship between Hemingway and Fitzgerald was pitilessly traced in a series of letters that Hemingway wrote between 1949 and 1951 to Arthur Mizener, Fitzerald's biographer.

For Fitzgerald's Works, It's Roaring 70's (1974)
After earning an average of $16,000 to $17,000 annually during his lifetime, Fitzgerald's work was earning his estate "six figures a year" during the 1970's.

They've Turned 'Gatsby' to Goo (1974)
In his review of the 1974 movie version of "The Great Gatsby," Vincent Canby writes, "The substance of the novel has largely vanished. Remaining are the plot, some exceptionally good performances and an almost eye-boggling attention to the mid-nineteen-twenties Long Island settings."

The Best Gatsby (1975)
Budd Schulberg finds in the facsimile of the hand-written manuscript of "The Great Gatsby" evidence of Fitzgerald's careful process of composition.

A Literary Friendship (1976)
Matthew J. Bruccoli writes about the "serious literary consequences" of Fitzgerald's friendship with Ring Lardner.

A Review of Matthew J. Bruccoli's 'Scott and Ernest' (1978)
"I thought I had learned all I wanted to know about Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald until Matthew J. Bruccoli changed my mind . . . There is no doubt that Hemingway maligned Fitzgerald, while Fitzgerald, with an almost Christ-like patience, continued to try to promote Hemingway's career."

A Review of Andre Le Vot's 'F. Scott Fitzgerald' (1983)
"Le Vot wants to lift Fitzgerald out of the too narrow context of American literature and make him international, French in particular . . . [T]hings get much better as soon as the biographer stops talking grandly about Fitzgerald and the age and begins with care to set down the story of a life."

A Review of James R. Mellow's 'Invented Lives' (1984)
". . . readable, polished and professional, but Mr. Mellow has little new to add. He has done all the research, his writing is smooth and efficient, and the story is so good it seems to tell itself."

Lost Fitzgerald Story to Be Published (1988)
A half-century after it was written, an unpublished short story by Fitzgerald -- rejected by Redbook but now seen by scholars as a forerunner of black humor and a new insight into the author's time of despair -- finally appeared in print.

A Review of Jeffrey Meyers's' 'Scott Fitzgerald' (1994)
". . . decidedly unsympathetic . . . [Meyers depicts] the author of 'The Great Gatsby' as a foolish, sniveling alcoholic, who spent the first half of his life squandering his talent and the last half paying the dire consequences."

For Lack of a Coffin, a Gift Is Born (1994)
Matthew J. Bruccoli, a Professor of English at the University of South Carolina, talks about the books and the papers that constitute what he calls the most comprehensive F. Scott Fitzgerald archive in the world.

Scott and Zelda: Their Style Lives, by Eleanor Lanahan (1996)
Fitzgerald's granddaughter writes about the "lasting influence" F. Scott and Zelda "had on popular culture in the 20th century."

Scott Fitzgerald Slept Here, Briefly, by Garrison Keillor (1996)
Keillor writes about Fitzgerald's youth in St. Paul, Mn. and St. Paul's plans for a Fitzgerald centenary celebration.

Still Timely, Yet a Writer of His Time (1996)
In an appreciation written for Fitzgerald's centenary, Margo Jefferson wrote that Fitzgerald's work is "still at the center of everything that is modern or post-modern."

An Earlier Version of 'Gatsby' Is Prepared for Publication (1999)
Professor James L. W. West III is preparing to bring out the 1924 novel that Fitzgerald completed and then tore apart to create "Gatsby."

A Review of Scott Donaldson's 'Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald' (1999)
". . . turns out to be another exercise in what Joyce Carol Oates has called 'pathography,' a form of biography that pays scant attention to an artist's work and instead focuses on his dysfunctional relationships and his slide into disrepute."

Opera: Music Catering to the Words of Fitzgerald (1999)
"A friend suggested to me that opera ought not to be allowed near great writing, which 'Gatsby' certainly is. . . . Somewhere in 'The Great Gatsby,' partly buried, lies an effective opera."

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