Project MUSE®: The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/620
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 11 (2013) through current issueLatest Articles: The F. Scott Fitzgerald ReviewTWOProject MUSE®The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review1755-63331543-3951Latest articles in The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Abbreviations of Fitzgerald Titles
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970774
<p></p>
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970791">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/620/image/coversmallAbbreviations of Fitzgerald Titles2025-10-02text/htmlen-USAbbreviations of Fitzgerald Titles2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®34922026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02The Bad Old Days in St. Paul—and "the Ingersoll Girls"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970775
<p></p>
The name F. Scott Fitzgerald has long been chiseled on the portal of American literature. The closing line of The Great Gatsby—"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" (GGVar 218)—may well be one of the most recognizable quotes ever crafted by a modern writer. Whether his work in its totality deserves to be compared to that of Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, or Hemingway is, however, beyond the scope of this article—apologies if that disappoints any of you. What I do focus on is an aspect of his work that has a very personal ring to me: the city where I grew up and my own family that has its own personal connections to Fitzgerald.I'm talking about my mother, Georgie, and her older
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970791">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/620/image/coversmallThe Bad Old Days in St. Paul—and "the Ingersoll Girls"2025-10-02text/htmlen-USThe Bad Old Days in St. Paul—and "the Ingersoll Girls"2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®193112026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02From Fiction to Facts: Unraveling F. Scott Fitzgerald's Arrest in Rome
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970776
<p></p>
Rome did not agree with F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he did his best to spread the news, most famously in Tender Is the Night. As readers may remember, two-thirds of the way into the novel an intoxicated Dick Diver has a vicious scuffle with some taxi drivers and manages to get himself arrested and then beaten up by a group of carabinieri (TITN 254–56) in Rome. Before his release, Dick is also mistaken for a child rapist by a booing and hissing crowd gathered outside the courthouse (TITN 265). All these events take place in November 1928 and signal the hastening of Dick's emotional disintegration. More relevant for the purpose of this article is the fact that Fitzgerald's biographers have taken this specific incident
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970791">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/620/image/coversmallFrom Fiction to Facts: Unraveling F. Scott Fitzgerald's Arrest in Rome2025-10-02text/htmlen-USFrom Fiction to Facts: Unraveling F. Scott Fitzgerald's Arrest in Rome2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®1293022026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02The Curious Case of Benjamin Fitzgerald (1778–1828): Ancestry and Racial Anxiety in Fitzgerald
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970777
<p></p>
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born into what was ultimately a monied family in St. Paul, Minnesota. His mother was Mary McQuillan (1859–1936), the daughter of an 1840s Irish Catholic immigrant who had made a fortune in the wholesale grocery business. His genteel but professionally unsuccessful father, Edward Fitzgerald (1853–1931), was a Catholic from Maryland. Fitzgerald tended to stress family connections to the Maryland elite through his paternal grandfather's marriage into the Anglo-American establishment Scott family. The novelist always discussed the Irish ancestry that embarrassed him as being on his maternal side alone (Bruccoli, Some Sort 11–12, 22, 149). However, not only did the author misrepresent his
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970791">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/620/image/coversmallThe Curious Case of Benjamin Fitzgerald (1778–1828): Ancestry and Racial Anxiety in Fitzgerald2025-10-02text/htmlen-USThe Curious Case of Benjamin Fitzgerald (1778–1828): Ancestry and Racial Anxiety in Fitzgerald2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®1116122026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Adapting Fitzgerald
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970778
<p></p>
Almost everyone who watched Baz Luhrmann's 2013 film adaptation of The Great Gatsby seems to have decided that it was more invested in the novel's characters and plot than in F. Scott Fitzgerald's authorial voice, and more invested in deliriously overscaled period set pieces than in the characters or plot. A. O. Scott's advice to prospective reviewers was typical of other reviewers' reactions: "The best way to enjoy Baz Luhrmann's big and noisy new version of 'The Great Gatsby'—and despite what you may have heard, it is an eminently enjoyable movie—is to put aside whatever literary agenda you are tempted to bring with you." Even fans who loved the film loved it not as a Fitzgerald adaptation but as a Gatsby
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970791">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/620/image/coversmallAdapting Fitzgerald2025-10-02text/htmlen-USAdapting Fitzgerald2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®1022832026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Gatsby in Bed: Reflections on Listening (as Opposed to Reading) Fitzgerald's Great American Novel Night after Night in the Age of Alexa
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970779
<p></p>
It is one the most famous last lines in literature, emblazoned on T-shirts and coffee mugs and so familiar to the public that journalists can confidently allude to it in the newspaper: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" (GGVar 218). As British writer and editor Robert McCrum wrote in the Guardian in 2014, "Nick Carraway's signing off after the death of Gatsby is my favourite last line in the Anglo-American tradition—resonant, memorable and profound. It hovers between poetry and the vernacular and is the magnificent chord, in a minor key, which brings this 20th-century masterpiece to a close. Somehow, it sums up the novel completely, in tone as much as meaning, while
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970791">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/620/image/coversmallGatsby in Bed: Reflections on Listening (as Opposed to Reading) Fitzgerald's Great American Novel Night after Night in the Age of Alexa2025-10-02text/htmlen-USGatsby in Bed: Reflections on Listening (as Opposed to Reading) Fitzgerald's Great American Novel Night after Night in the Age of Alexa2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®579032026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Filming and Scripting of War and Empire in Tender Is the Night
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970780
<p></p>
In a provocative study of how memories are created, preserved, and transmitted through different media, David Williams describes in Media, Memory, and the First World War how the emergence of film media in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fundamentally changed the way in which history was recorded and culture defined. Williams argues that "film was revolutionizing perception in the decades leading up to the Great War" (107) with audiences "watching the past come crowding into the present moment," initiating a "momentous shift in our human relation to time, to memory, and to language" (108). Cinematography accelerated a process that began with photography in which images from the past could "invade
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970791">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/620/image/coversmallFilming and Scripting of War and Empire in Tender Is the Night2025-10-02text/htmlen-USFilming and Scripting of War and Empire in Tender Is the Night2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®1180852026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Transcendental Modernity in Fitzgerald's "How to Live on $36,000 a Year," "How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year," and Other Writings
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970781
<p></p>
Many modernist groups, such as the Italian Futurists, argued for a radical break from history, deriding the "useless admiration for the past" (Marinetti 5). Yet other practitioners, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, agreed with Van Wyck Brooks that a "useable past" provided "an inexhaustible storehouse of apt attitudes and adaptable ideals" for modern writers (223). Fitzgerald applied Brooks's notion of a useable past to fashion characters whose "future[s are] largely a matter of pasts" (Tanner xiv). While the most popular Fitzgerald character with a present that intersects with the past is the title figure of The Great Gatsby, there are others who seek the specter of the past in Fitzgerald's longer fiction. Within
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970791">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/620/image/coversmallTranscendental Modernity in Fitzgerald's "How to Live on $36,000 a Year," "How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year," and Other Writings2025-10-02text/htmlen-USTranscendental Modernity in Fitzgerald's "How to Live on $36,000 a Year," "How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year," and Other Writings2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®1563172026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Emerging from the Lonely Night: F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Shadow of Fin-de-Siècle Aestheticism
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970782
<p></p>
F. Scott Fitzgerald absorbed significant inspiration from fin-de-siècle aestheticism throughout his youth, then later turned against that movement, viewing it as incomplete and facile. His first two novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, fittingly detail protagonists allured by aestheticism, because of its promises of renouncing a convoluted and impersonal world for an artful, secluded realm of fantastical mysticism and sensuous sophistication, only eventually to comprehend the insularity and irrelevance of such a mindset. This article focuses on not only how these novels reject aestheticism as an ideal to emulate in response to an adrift and atomized age but also why, specifically, they reject
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970791">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/620/image/coversmallEmerging from the Lonely Night: F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Shadow of Fin-de-Siècle Aestheticism2025-10-02text/htmlen-USEmerging from the Lonely Night: F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Shadow of Fin-de-Siècle Aestheticism2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®816362026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02"Creeping, Damp Souls of … This North": Minnesota Gothic and Indigenous Erasure in "The Ice Palace"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970783
<p></p>
F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "The Ice Palace" (F&P 5–35), first published on 22 May 1920 in the Saturday Evening Post, is best known as a witty, jazzy tale contrasting the South of Sally Carrol Happer with the North of her fiancé, Harry Bellamy. It charts her disillusionment with the North and eventual breakup with Harry and retreat to her home region. The South is pictured as sleepy, hot, agrarian, childlike, and, above all, a place where the Civil War and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy are still an obsession, five decades after the war. Sally Carrol admires these traits of the South yet wants to flee from them, or so she thinks, for a useful life on a grand scale in the forward-thinking, bustling
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970791">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/620/image/coversmall"Creeping, Damp Souls of … This North": Minnesota Gothic and Indigenous Erasure in "The Ice Palace"2025-10-02text/htmlen-US"Creeping, Damp Souls of … This North": Minnesota Gothic and Indigenous Erasure in "The Ice Palace"2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®1279792026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Is Alix a Bartender? Reconsidering the Opening of Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited"
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970784
<p></p>
A notoriously puzzling feature of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited" (1931; TAR 157–77) is Charlie's decision, in the story's opening scene, to leave his in-laws' address at the Ritz Bar for it to be given to his old drinking buddy Duncan Schaeffer (TAR 157). Charlie's decision is perplexing for at least two reasons. One is that Charlie, a recovering alcoholic, hopes throughout the rest of the story to avoid the still-drinking Duncan (and his companion Lorraine Quarrels). Even if, as Charles Sweetman suggests, Charlie has "a moment of nostalgia" in which he wants to see his old friend (170), he certainly would not have wanted Duncan anywhere near his in-laws. After all, Charlie's purpose in "revisiting"
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970791">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/620/image/coversmallIs Alix a Bartender? Reconsidering the Opening of Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited"2025-10-02text/htmlen-USIs Alix a Bartender? Reconsidering the Opening of Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited"2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®269132026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Simmel and Fitzgerald: Secrecy and Knowledge in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Love of the Last Tycoon
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970785
<p></p>
F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920s have been mythologized by American popular culture. His 1930s, however, hardly seem remembered except by scholars and specialists (Donaldson 107). He died at the end of 1940 while experimenting with a novel based on his experiences of Depression-era Hollywood, hoping it would restore his legacy as a novelist and bring back his 1920s success (Bruccoli xiii–xiv). At the time of his death, half of his novel The Last Tycoon—later retitled The Love of the Last Tycoon by Matthew J. Bruccoli in 1993—existed only in draft form and the other half in a collection of scattered notes.1 Inspired by Fitzgerald's stint in late 1931 and between 1937 and 1939 struggling to write screenplays for
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970791">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/620/image/coversmallSimmel and Fitzgerald: Secrecy and Knowledge in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Love of the Last Tycoon2025-10-02text/htmlen-USSimmel and Fitzgerald: Secrecy and Knowledge in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Love of the Last Tycoon2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®727152026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Current Bibliography
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970786
<p></p>
To help keep this bibliography up to date, please send notices and citations to
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970791">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/620/image/coversmallCurrent Bibliography2025-10-02text/htmlen-USCurrent Bibliography2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®827642026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Editors' Note
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970787
<p></p>
On 3 May 1924 F. Scott Fitzgerald, accompanied by his wife, Zelda Sayre, and their toddler daughter, Scottie Fitzgerald, boarded the SS Minnewaska at Pier 58 on the Hudson River, New York. Setting off for Cherbourg, France, they soon settled on the Côte d'Azur, where one of the most legendary summers in literary history unfolded—one that involved much alcohol, marital friction that included intimations of adultery, a potential suicide attempt, and, somehow, the writing of a Great American Novel (Donaldson 172–86; Taylor 65–82). Despite the domestic melodrama, it is the departure for France itself that most intrigues, for it symbolizes the most transformative act an artist can undertake. When he left Great Neck, New
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970791">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/620/image/coversmallEditors' Note2025-10-02text/htmlen-USEditors' Note2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®866382026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Another Suspect in the Search for Gatsby
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970788
<p></p>
This book provides as full an account of the life of George Gordon Moore (1875–1971) as we are likely ever to have. Fitzgerald might have known Moore. Certainly, he knew of him, for Moore's name and image appeared frequently in the newspapers and gossip columns of the 1920s. Moore might have served as one of the models for Jay Gatsby. He was a self-made man who held large parties, associated with the upper crust, and engaged in shady business dealings. Mickey Rathbun, the author of this biography, is Moore's granddaughter and knew him when she was a child. He was past his period of great success and visibility by then but was plotting a comeback. Rathbun is an experienced journalist who writes a lively prose. She
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970791">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/620/image/coversmallAnother Suspect in the Search for Gatsby2025-10-02text/htmlen-USAnother Suspect in the Search for Gatsby2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®101762026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Biographical Beckoning
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970789
<p></p>
As 2024 advances the countdown clock to the centennial of The Great Gatsby, publishers are proving eager to join the conversation about the novel's legacy and endurance. At the forefront of this year's efforts is John Marsh's A Rotten Crowd: America, Wealth, and One Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby, whose main focus is economy in both senses of the word: not only does Marsh examine the meaning of income inequality in ways that remind one of the days a decade or so when the late Ronald Berman would cite Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013; Berman) when the influence of the French theorist of wealth distribution was at its peak, but the author here does so with an almost blink-and-miss-it
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970791">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/620/image/coversmallBiographical Beckoning2025-10-02text/htmlen-USBiographical Beckoning2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®853702026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02A Gatsby Palimpsest
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970790
<p></p>
The publication, by Cambridge University Press, of Owen Davis's (1874–1956) script for the 1926 Broadway production of The Great Gatsby is a gift to Fitzgerald enthusiasts; it is an invitation for scholars of drama and adaptation studies; and it is an opportunity, particularly for those with intimate knowledge of the novel, to experience the work in a different key. The text of the play is once again available to readers by virtue of Anne Margaret Daniel's excellent scholarship, and this slim and handsome volume has been carefully edited by Daniel and James L. W. West III with an introduction by West (xii–xxxviii). While it is impossible to re-create the experience of reading Gatsby in the 1920s, the publication of
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970791">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/620/image/coversmallA Gatsby Palimpsest2025-10-02text/htmlen-USA Gatsby Palimpsest2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®148912026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02Small Bites Add Up To A Big Fitzgerald Meal
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970791
<p></p>
There is no question that this new "composite biography" of F. Scott Fitzgerald presents the full life of the writer, or as much as any biography can hope to wrangle in a reasonable amount of pages within two covers. Then again, as Fitzgerald himself once wrote, "Biography is the falsest of the arts" (Notebooks 325), so this multifaceted version of the writer's life may well have two mountains to climb. One is to create a credible and readable life of one of the most famous American authors. The other is to convince the audience that multiple voices can cohere without too many speedbumps or structural distractions.Some of us, of course, beg to differ with Fitzgerald's observation about the nature of biography. One
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/970791">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/620/image/coversmallSmall Bites Add Up To A Big Fitzgerald Meal2025-10-02text/htmlen-USSmall Bites Add Up To A Big Fitzgerald Meal2025-10-022025TWOProject MUSE®225332026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-10-02