F. Scott Fitzgerald, Trickster: Images of Irishness in Edmund Wilson’s Bookman Essay

Edmund Wilson’s 1922 essay “F. Scott Fitzgerald,” which appeared in The Bookman magazine, contains ethnic stereotypes of the Irish-American F. Scott Fitzgerald. Wilson’s piece is important as an early critical assessment of Fitzgerald as an author; it helped establish Fitzgerald’s reputation. This article explores Wilson’s essay in order to show the nature and origin of these stereotypes. In so doing, it examines allusions in Wilson’s essay to characters and situations in the plays of Irish playwrights George Bernard Shaw and J. M. Synge, to the original Playboy magazine, and to the harlequinade. It also examines the ways in which The Bookman itself was part of the racial discourse of the time. Wilson was to revise his essay in 1924 and again in 1952, but he did not remove the stereotypes—a significant fact in itself.