Word: fitzgerald
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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WHEN the artist must eat, and at the very best night clubs, art flies out the window. F. Scott Fitzgerald has decided to live well and write too. This is forgiveable and understandable in a young man of means. But when his writings maintain him in the style to which he is unaccustomed it take a good deal of writing for the Red Book to keep the purse at the proper bulge...
...latest book of short stories is handpicked from All the Sad Young Men, his accumulated magazine work of months. And it is only the cream from skimmed milk. Fitzgerald is safe, at least for a while. Reviewers will pardon him a last youthful indiscretion or two now that he has shown himself on the verge of his long expected maturity by the writing of "The Great Gatsby", But it is that he cannot have praise without strings tied to it for the writing of "All the Sad Young...
...subject and treatment than any previous work of his. To say this is not wholly to praise it. It is as if he had given us examples in "All the Sad Young Men" of the many types of short stories he has written since his last publication. "Step up," Fitzgerald seems to cry. "Something for everybody. We aim to please. Flappers and philosophers, you'll find something here you'll like if only you'll look far enough...
...hotsy-totsy style there is the fantasy. "Rags Martin-Jones." full of the unbelievable tosh of which Fitzgerald was master. But there is something new, something un-Fitzgeraldian, which has an aroma of Sherwood Anderson. All the other stories in the book have it, now faint and thin, now strong and assailing. Perhap it is unfair to shout "Sherwood Anderson!" It may be that this is what happens to all young men who grow serious before they have grown truly wise. And so it may be that this is merely a phase in the growing-up process of which...
...Absolution" there is a Catholic mysticism not wholly new to Fitzgerald but handled with a new power and a directness which scarcely falters until the end when it seems to become too much for the author and goes off into mumblings. Throughout there is the figure of Anderson looming up, omnipresent and brooding...