Book Review: F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli with Judith S. Baughman (1996)

The cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, with Judith S. Baughman, 1996. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship is a 1996 collection that aimed to assemble Fitzgerald’s writings and letters in which he described the creative process. For diehard Fitzgerald fans, it’s an essential title as it collects many disparate pieces of Fitzgerald’s writing. During Fitzgerald’s lifetime, his intelligence and seriousness as a writer were often denigrated. (Edmund Wilson, I’m looking at you!) A collection like F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship is an attempt, in part, to better place Fitzgerald as a craftsman who was serious about his work. For anyone who has studied Fitzgerald’s work, it’s obvious he was serious about his writing. He wouldn’t have been able to create such beautiful short stories and novels if he wasn’t serious.  

Fitzgerald wrote a number of book reviews in the early 1920’s, and these are instructive in learning what the young author thought about books written by his contemporaries. Fitzgerald was quick to recognize the talent of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. After 1925, Fitzgerald wrote very few book reviews, but he wrote about being an author in several autobiographical pieces from the 1930’s like “One Hundred False Starts,” “Author’s House,” “Afternoon of an Author,” and “Early Success.” He also wrote the very funny short story “Financing Finnegan,” which satirized his own problems with money.  

Throughout F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, the Fitzgerald buff will find passages of interest. One of my own favorite finds was this, in Fitzgerald’s review of his friend Thomas Boyd’s 1923 novel Through the Wheat: “No one has a greater contempt than I have for the recent hysteria about the Nordic theory...” (p.88) What does this have to do with anything? This gives us some proof that Fitzgerald was satirizing Tom Buchanan’s noxious views of race in The Great Gatsby. It seems clear from the novel that Fitzgerald is satirizing Tom, but here we have F. Scott Fitzgerald saying so, not under the cover of the fictional Nick Carraway, but in his own voice.  

It’s clear how much Fitzgerald admired Joseph Conrad from many passages in the book. Fitzgerald wrote prophetically in 1923 that Conrad’s novel Nostromo was “The great novel of the past fifty years, as Ulysses is the great novel of the future.” (p.86) 

As always with Fitzgerald, there are passages of wonderful beauty. Consider this sentence, from a 1934 letter to H.L. Mencken: “It is simply that having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.” (p.138)  

There’s also a heart wrenching letter from 1938 that Scott wrote to his daughter Scottie. Scott judges his marriage to Zelda quite harshly in the letter: “You came along and for a long time we made quite a lot of happiness out of our lives. But I was a man divided—she wanted me to work too much for her and not enough for my dream. She realized too late that work was dignity and the only dignity and tried to atone for it by working herself but it was too late and she broke and is broken forever.” (p.170) It’s fascinating that Scott seems to blame Zelda for distracting him from his dream of being a writer. This was also one of Ernest Hemingway’s criticisms of Zelda, put forth decades later in his posthumously published memoir A Moveable Feast. And it’s fascinating that Scott’s last sentence is so reminiscent of Hemingway’s rhythms, with the long sentence connected with “and.”  

For Fitzgerald fans who are interested in learning more about Fitzgerald’s own thoughts on writing and literature, F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship is a must read.