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The Price Was High: The Last Uncollected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli Harcourt, Brace, 785 pp., $19.95 The received version of Scott Fitzgerald’s career needs to be drastically revised, and The Price Was High, containing virtually all of Fitzgerald’s hitherto uncollected stories, should help a great deal. “We poets in our youth begin in gladness,” wrote Wordsworth, “but thereof come in the end despondency and madness.” When serious critical and biographical attention began to be paid to Fitzgerald during the late 1940s, that pattern of Romantic failure was imposed upon his career. Thus Fitzgerald, according to Cyril Connolly, was “an American version of the Dying God, an Adonis of letters, born with the century, flowering in the Twenties, . . . quietly wilting through the Thirties, to expire— as a deity of spring and summer should —on December 21, 1940, at the winter solstice and the end of an epoch.” And Fitzgerald is widely believed to have crashed with the Market, spent the Thirties drunk, and revived only briefly to lament his fate and begin The Last Tycoon.

Fitzgerald himself is partly responsible for this entirely mistaken view. From Anthony Patch of The Beautiful and the Damned, through Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, Charlie Wales, Pat Hobby, and a host of other Fitzgerald characters, failure represented a central theme of his fiction. In a characteristic remark, Fitzgerald observed that Ernest Hemingway spoke with the “authority of success,” he, for his part, with the “authority of failure.” His 1936. essays, especially “The Crack-Up,” contributed to the impression that Fitzgerald was a burnt-out case; this impression was reinforced by Budd Schulberg’s novel The Disenchanted (1950), with its portrait of Fitzgerald/Manley Halliday as a broken-down drunk, and also Arthur Mizener’s pioneering critical biography, The Far Side of Paradise (1949).

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Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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The Price Was High: The Last Uncollected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli Harcourt, Brace, 785 pp., $19.95 The received version of Scott Fitzgerald’s career needs to be drastically revised, and The Price Was High, containing virtually all of Fitzgerald’s hitherto uncollected stories, should help a great deal. “We poets in our youth begin in gladness,” wrote Wordsworth, “but thereof come in the end despondency and madness.” When serious critical and biographical attention began to be paid to Fitzgerald during the late 1940s, that pattern of Romantic failure was imposed upon his career. Thus Fitzgerald, according to Cyril Connolly, was “an American version of the Dying God, an Adonis of letters, born with the century, flowering in the Twenties, . . . quietly wilting through the Thirties, to expire— as a deity of spring and summer should —on December 21, 1940, at the winter solstice and the end of an epoch.” And Fitzgerald is widely believed to have crashed with the Market, spent the Thirties drunk, and revived only briefly to lament his fate and begin The Last Tycoon.

Fitzgerald himself is partly responsible for this entirely mistaken view. From Anthony Patch of The Beautiful and the Damned, through Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, Charlie Wales, Pat Hobby, and a host of other Fitzgerald characters, failure represented a central theme of his fiction. In a characteristic remark, Fitzgerald observed that Ernest Hemingway spoke with the “authority of success,” he, for his part, with the “authority of failure.” His 1936. essays, especially “The Crack-Up,” contributed to the impression that Fitzgerald was a burnt-out case; this impression was reinforced by Budd Schulberg’s novel The Disenchanted (1950), with its portrait of Fitzgerald/Manley Halliday as a broken-down drunk, and also Arthur Mizener’s pioneering critical biography, The Far Side of Paradise (1949).