Book Review: The Fitzgerald Reader, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edited by Arthur Mizener (1963)

 

My battered paperback copy of The Fitzgerald Reader, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edited by Arthur Mizener, 1963. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

The Fitzgerald Reader, a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writings, was first published in 1963. By the early 1960’s, the Fitzgerald boom that had begun a decade earlier was in full swing. When F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, he feared that he was forgotten writer, and to some degree he was correct. The New York Times obituary of Fitzgerald pigeonholed him as a dusty relic of the bygone Jazz Age. But a generation after his death, Fitzgerald was firmly in the canon of Great American Writers, and he’s maintained that position even today, more than 100 years after he first came to prominence. Fitzgerald is one of the few authors whose importance has increased, rather than decreased, since his death.

The inside cover of The Fitzgerald Reader tells the tale: in the Scribner Library, The Great Gatsby was given the catalogue number SL 1, indicating it’s pride of place among Scribner’s authors. Tender Is the Night was SL 2. Fitzgerald no doubt would have been tickled to know that he was ahead of his friend and sometimes rival Ernest Hemingway, who had SL 4 (For Whom the Bell Tolls) and SL 5 (The Sun Also Rises). (For the record, John Galsworthy had SL 3, The Man of Property.)

The Fitzgerald Reader gathers together the entire text of The Great Gatsby, excerpts from Tender Is the Night and The Last Tycoon, along with many of Fitzgerald’s best short stories and essays. Altogether, it’s an excellent one volume introduction to the genius and beauty of Fitzgerald’s best work.

The book starts strong, with four of Fitzgerald’s very best short stories: “May Day,” “Winter Dreams,” “Absolution,” and “The Sensible Thing.” Mizener isn’t pulling any punches here; he’s showing you the best of the best of Fitzgerald. After those four stories, you get the full text of The Great Gatsby. If those four stories and Gatsby haven’t convinced you of Fitzgerald’s brilliance, there’s probably nothing that will.

Mizener skips over Fitzgerald’s first two novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned. That’s telling of their place in Fitzgerald’s canon, as so much attention is paid to The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, while This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned are left to languish.

“Echoes of the Jazz Age,” one of Fitzgerald’s finest essays is included, along with the three “Crack-Up” essays that were originally published in Esquire magazine in 1936. At the time, authors like John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway were shocked and outraged by the “Crack-Up” essays, and the very idea that Fitzgerald would admit that his personal life was in turmoil. Because we know so much more now about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s personal life, what’s remarkable about the “Crack-Up” essays isn’t how much Fitzgerald reveals to the reader, but how little. The true crises in his life at the time the essays were written were his alcoholism and his wife Zelda’s mental illness—these go unmentioned in the “Crack-Up” essays. Fitzgerald still had enough old-world reticence that there was no way he was going to write about those two intensely personal topics for public consumption.

The fine short stories of the early 1930’s are here: “Babylon Revisited” and “Crazy Sunday,” along with “Family in the Wind,” an excellent story that is a departure from Fitzgerald’s usual milieu. The late 1930’s are also well represented by the autobiographical “Afternoon of an Author,” and the bitterly funny “Financing Finnegan,” which pokes fun at Fitzgerald’s own problems with money.

The Fitzgerald Reader is a collection that ably demonstrates why F. Scott Fitzgerald was such a brilliant talent.