A study of the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Abstract

Henry Dan Piper has exploded the legend that all of Fitzgerald' s books where out of print when he died. There may be similar romantic exaggeration which does not bear examination in the popular view that Fitzgerald's reputation as an artist was eclipsed in his later years and magically revived after his death by the editing and publication by Edmund Wilson in 1941 of the unfinished novel Last Tycoon, and of The Crack-Up. Investigation by Matthew J. Bruccoli has shown the essential oversimplification inherent in the widely-held belief that Fitzgerald's last complete novel to be published, Tender is the Night was dismissed or ignored by reviewers demanding novels of social conscience. Fitzgerald attracted legends and since his death has become something of a folk-hero the type of the golden boy who achieved early and instantaneous fame, lives riotously and is then engulfed by the backwash of his own youthful folly somehow leaving an unpublished masterpiece to confound his critics at his early death. Preface, p. 1.