F. Scott Fitzgerald
Novels

More so than most contemporary writers of his era, F. Scott Fitzgerald's authorial voice evolved and matured over time, and his each successive novel represented a discernible progression in literary quality. Although his peers eventually hailed him as possessing "the best narrative gift of the century," this narrative gift was not perceived as immediately evident in his earliest writings. Believing that prose has a basis in lyric verse, Fitzgerald initially crafted his sentences entirely by ear and, consequently, his earliest efforts contained numerous malapropisms and descriptive non sequiturs which irritated both editors and readers. During these early attempts at writing fiction, he received over 122 rejection letters, and the publishing house Scribner's rejected his first novel three times despite extensive rewrites.

For his first novel, Fitzgerald used as his literary templates H. G. Wells ' 1909 work Tono-Bungay and Sir Compton Mackenzie 's 1913 novel Sinister Street, which chronicled a young college student's coming-of-age at Oxford University. Although Fitzgerald imitated the plot of Mackenzie's novel, his debut work differed remarkably due to its experimental style. He discarded the stodgy narrative technique of most novels and instead unspooled the plot in the form of textual fragments, letters, and poetry intermingled together. This atonal blend of different fictive elements prompted cultural elites to fête the young Fitzgerald as a literary trailblazer whose work modernized a staid literature that had lagged "as far behind modern habits as behind modern history." His work, they declared, pulsed with originality.

Although critics praised This Side of Paradise as highly original, they criticised its form and construction. They highlighted the fact that the work had "almost every fault and deficiency that a novel can possibly have," and a consensus soon emerged that Fitzgerald's prosemanship left much to be desired. He could write entertainingly, his detractors conceded, but he gave scant attention to form and construction. Having read and digested these criticisms of his debut novel, Fitzgerald sought to improve upon the form and construction of his prose in his next work and to venture into a new genre of fiction altogether.

For his sophomore effort, Fitzgerald discarded the trappings of collegiate bildungsromans and crafted an "ironical-pessimistic" novel in the style of Thomas Hardy 's oeuvre. With the publication of The Beautiful and Damned, editor Max Perkins and others commended the conspicuous evolution in the quality of his prose. Whereas This Side of Paradise had featured workmanlike prose and chaotic organization, The Beautiful and Damned displayed the superior form and construction of an awakened literary consciousness.

Although critics deemed The Beautiful and Damned to be less ground-breaking than its predecessor, many recognized that the vast improvement in literary form and construction between his first and second novels augured great prospects for Fitzgerald's future. John V. A. Weaver predicted in 1922 that, as Fitzgerald matured as a writer, he would become regarded as one of the greatest authors of American literature. Consequently, expectations arose that Fitzgerald would significantly improve with his third work.

When composing The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald chose to depart from the writing process of his previous novels and to fashion a conscious artistic achievement. He eschewed the realism of his previous two novels and composed a creative work of sustained imagination. To this end, he consciously emulated the literary styles of Joseph Conrad and Willa Cather. He was particularly influenced by Cather's 1923 work, A Lost Lady, which features a wealthy married socialite pursued by a number of romantic suitors and who symbolically embodies the American dream.

With the publication of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald had refined his prose style and plot construction, and the literati now hailed him as a master of his craft. Readers complimented him that Gatsby "is compact, economical, polished in the technique of the novel," and his writing now contained "some of the nicest little touches of contemporary observation you could imagine—so light, so delicate, so sharp". By eliminating the earlier defects in his writing, he had upgraded from "a brilliant improvisateur" to "a conscientious and painstaking artist." Gertrude Stein posited that Fitzgerald had surpassed contemporary writers such as Hemingway due to his masterful ability to write in natural sentences.

The realization that Fitzgerald had improved as a novelist to point that Gatsby was a masterwork was immediately evident to certain members of the literary world. Edith Wharton lauded Gatsby as such an improvement upon Fitzgerald's previous work that it represented a "leap into the future" for American novels, and T. S. Eliot believed it represented a turning point in American literature. After reading Gatsby, Gertrude Stein declared that Fitzgerald would "be read when many of his well-known contemporaries are forgotten."

Nine years after the publication of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald completed his fourth novel Tender Is the Night in 1934. By this time, the field of literature had greatly changed due to the onset of the Great Depression, and once popular writers such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway who wrote about upper-middle-class lifestyles were now disparaged in literary periodicals whereas so-called " proletarian novelists " enjoyed general applause.

Due to this change, although Fitzgerald showed a mastery of "verbal nuance, flexible rhythm, dramatic construction and essential tragi-comedy" in Tender Is the Night, many reviewers dismissed the work for its disengagement with the political issues of the era. Nevertheless, a minority opinion praised the work as the best American novel since The Great Gatsby. Summarizing Fitzgerald's artistic journey from apprentice novelist to magisterial author, Burke Van Allen observed that no other American novelist had shown such "a constantly growing mastery of his equipment, and a regularly increasing sensitivity to the esthetic values in life."

After Fitzgerald's death, writers such as John Dos Passos assayed Fitzgerald's gradual progression in literary quality and posited that his uncompleted fifth novel The Last Tycoon could have been Fitzgerald's greatest achievement. Dos Passos argued in 1945 that Fitzgerald had finally attained a grand and distinctive style as a novelist; consequently, even as an unfinished fragment, the dimensions of his work raised "the level of American fiction" in the same way that "Marlowe's blank verse line raised the whole of Elizabeth verse."
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