The First Reviews of
Every F. Scott Fitzgerald Novel

Poor F. Scott Fitzgerald. The highs were so high, but the lows, ultimately, proved too much for him to bear. At the peak of their powers in the early-to-mid-1920s, the young and vibrant Fitzgerald and Zelda lived an opulent celebrity lifestyle funded by the success of early novels This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), as well as the then quite lucrative side gig of penning short stories for popular magazines. Fitzgerald’s writing, and the couple’s flamboyant (and volatile) conjoined public persona, made them the toast New York high society and garnered them a place among the fashionable expatriate literary set of Paris and the French Rivera.

By the late 1920s, however, things had begun to fall apart. The Great Gatsby (1925) didn’t receive the critical praise that Fitzgerald so desperately hoped for, or the sales required to fund their lavish lifestyle and increasing medical expenses (Fitzgerald’s alcoholism and Zelda’s decent into debilitating mental illness left the pair in a near-constant state of financial panic). For the Fitzgeralds, the 1930s were characterized by creative frustration, crippling self-doubt, mercenary Hollywood hack work, institutionalization, infidelity, acrimonious splits followed by short-lived reconciliations, and, eventually, total estrangement. Fitzgerald died suddenly of a heart attack in 1940, while Zelda followed eight years later when a fire broke out in Highland Sanatorium, where she was locked into a room, awaiting electroshock therapy.

Perhaps the quintessential chronicler of the Jazz Age whose opus is considered by many to be the greatest of the Great American Novels, Fitzgerald’s work shines brighter now than ever, selling hundreds of thousands of copies every year while Zelda, whose own creative endeavors were overshadowed (and, many would argue, frustrated) by those of her husband, has, at least, had her image rehabilitated by in recent decades through reengagements with her writing and life story by Nancy Milford, Therese Ann Fowler, and others.

Below, you’ll find the first newspaper and magazine reviews of all five of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels, from This Side of Paradise to the posthumously published The Last Tycoon.

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This Side of Paradise (1920)

I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

“The glorious spirit of abounding youth glows throughout this fascinating tale. Amory, the romantic egotist, is essentially American, and as we follow him through his career at Princeton, with its riotous gayety, its superficial vices, and its punctilious sense of honor which will tolerate nothing less than the standard set up by itself, we know that he is doing just what hundreds of thousands of young men are doing in colleges all over the country. As a picture of the daily existence of what we call loosely ‘college men,’ this book is as nearly perfect as such a work could be.

The philosophy of Amory, which finds expression in ponderous observations, lightened occasionally by verse that one thinks could have been evolved only in the cloistered atmosphere of his age-old alma mater, is that of any other youth in his teens in whom intellectual ambition is ever seeking an outlet. Amory’s love affairs, too, are racy of the soil, while the girls, whose ideas of the modern development of their sex seem to embrace a rather frequent use of the word ‘Damn,’ and of being kissed by young men whom they have no thought of marrying, quite obviously belong to Amory’s world. Through it all there is the spirit of innocence in so far as actual wrongdoing is implied, and one cannot but feel that the sexes are well matched according to the author’s presentment.

“Amory Blaine has a well-to-do father and a mother who lives the somewhat idle, luxurious life of a matron who has never known the pinch of even economy, much less of poverty, and the boy is the creature of his environment. One knows always that he will be safe at the end. So he is, for he does his bit in the war, finds afterwards that his money has all gone and goes to work writing advertisements for an agency. Also, he has his supreme love affair, with Rosalind Connage, which is broken off because the nervous temperaments of both would not permit happiness. At least, so the girl thinks. So Amory goes on the biggest spree noted in the book-a spree which is colorfully described as taking in everything in the alcoholic line from the Knickerbocker ‘Old King Cole’ bar to an out-of-the-way drinking den where Amory is ‘beaten up’ artistically and thoroughly. The whole story is disconnected, more or less, but loses none of its charm on that account. It could have been written only by an artist who knows how to balance his values, plus a delightful literary style.”

–The New York Times, May 9, 1920

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The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

“It would not be easy to find a more thoroughly depressing book than this new novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned. Not because there is something of tragedy in it—tragedy may be and often is fine and inspiring—but because its slow-moving narrative is the record of lives utterly worthless utterly futile. Not one of the book’s many characters, important of unimportant, ever rises to the level of ordinary decent humanity. Not one of them shows a spark of loyalty, of honor, of devotion, of generosity, of real friendship or of real affection.Anthony Patch, most important of them all, lacks even physical courage. His one admirable quality is that of ‘understanding too well to blame,’ and the reader more than suspects that this refraining from blame is due more to his general laziness, his general inertia, than to anything else. The book traces, at very great length, with much repetition of a not particularly profound subtle psychological analysis and numerous dissertations, the course of his mental, moral and physical disintegration.

…

“So far as its style is concerned, much of the novel is well written, and Anthony’s gradual loss of his mental curiosity, his gradual degeneration into ‘a bleak and sordid wreck’ is convincingly depicted, though to the reader he never seems one-third as intelligent as the author apparently thinks him. The long conversations between Anthony and his two friends, Maury Noble and Dick Caramel, are often merely tedious and pretentious, in spite of the fact that now and then one of them does make a remark which is fairly clever. The general atmosphere of the book is an atmosphere of futility, waste and the avoidance of effort, into which the fumes of whisky penetrate more and more, until at last it fairly reeks with them. The novel is full of that kind of pseudo-realism which results from shutting one’s eyes to all that is good in human nature, and looking only upon that which is small and mean—a view quite as false as its extreme opposite, which, reversing the process, results in what we have learned to classify as ‘glad’ books. It is to be hoped that Mr. Fitzgerald, who possesses a genuine, undeniable talent, will some day acquire a less one-sided understanding.”

–Louise Maunsell Field, The New York Times, March 5, 1922

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The Great Gatsby (1925)

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

*

“Of the many new writers that sprang into notice with the advent of the post-war period, Scott Fitzgerald has remained the steadiest performer and the most entertaining. Short stories, novels and a play have followed with consistent regularity since he became the philosopher of the flapper with This Side of Paradise. With shrewd observation and humor he reflected the Jazz Age. Now he has said farewell to his flappers—perhaps because they have grown up—and is writing of the older sisters that have married. But marriage has not changed their world, only the locale of their parties. To use a phrase of Burton Rascoe’s—his hurt romantics are still seeking that other side of paradise. And it might almost be said that The Great Gatsby is the last stage of illusion in this absurd chase. For middle age is certainly creeping up on Mr. Fitzgerald’s flappers.

In all great arid spots nature provides an oasis. So when the Atlantic seaboard was hermetically sealed by law, nature provided an outlet, or inlet rather, in Long Island…Both boisterous and tragic, it animates this new novel by Mr. Fitzgerald with whimsical magic and simple pathos that is realized with economy and restraint.

The story of Jay Gatsby of West Egg is told by Nick Caraway, who is one of the legion from the Middle West who have moved on to New York to win from its restless indifference—well, the aspiration that arises in the Middle West—and finds in Long Island a fascinating but dangerous playground. In the method of telling, The Great Gatsby is reminiscent of Henry James’s Turn of the Screw. You will recall that the evil of that mysterious tale which so endangered the two children was never exactly stated beyond suggested generalization. Gatsby’s fortune, business, even his connection with underworld figures, remain vague generalizations.

…

“The inevitable consequence that follows, in which violence takes its toll, is almost incidental, for in the overtones—and this is a book of potent overtones—the decay of souls is more tragic. With sensitive insight and keen psychological observation, Fitzgerald discloses in these people a meanness of spirit, carelessness, and absence of loyalties. He cannot hate them, for they are dumb in their insensate selfishness, and only to be pitied. The philosopher of the flapper has escaped the mordant, but he has turned grave. A curious book, a mystical, glamourous story of today. It takes a deeper cut at life than hitherto has been enjoyed by Mr. Fitzgerald. He writes well—he always has—for he writes naturally, and his sense of form is becoming perfected.”

–Edwin Clark, The New York Times, April 15, 1925

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“Scott Fitzgerald’s new novel, The Great Gatsby is in form no more than a glorified anecdote, and not too probable at that. The scene is the Long Island that hangs precariously on the edges of the New York City trash dumps—the Long Island of the gandy villas and bawdy house parties. The theme is the old one of a romantic and preposterous love—the ancient fidelis ad urnum motif reduced to a macabre humor. The principal personage is a bounder typical of those parts—a fellow who seems to know every one and yet remains unknown to all—a young man with a great deal of mysterious money, the tastes of a movie actor and, under it all, the simple sentimentality of a somewhat sclerotic fat woman.

…

“This story is obviously unimportant and, though, as I shall show, it has its place in the Fitzgerald canon, it is certainly not to be put on the same shelf with, say, This Side of Paradise. What ails it, fundamentally, is the plain fact that it is simply a story—that Fitzgerald seems to be far more interested in maintaining its suspense than in getting under the skins of its people. It is not that they are false: it is that they are taken too much for granted. Only Gatsby himself genuinely lives and breathes. The rest are mere marionettes—often astonishingly lifelike, but nevertheless not quite alive.”

–H.L. Mencken, The Chicago Tribune, 1925

“F. Scott Fitzgerald, who won premature fame in 1920 as the author of This Side of Paradise, a book that first turned into literary material the flapper of wealthy parents and of social position, whose principal lack was inhibitions, has in The Great Gatsby written a remarkable study of today. It is a novel not to be neglected by those who follow the trend of fiction.

…

“But it is for no such ordinary denouement that Mr. Fitzgerald tells his tale. Instead, he builds up a tense situation in which Daisy has the chance to choose Gatsby, with his doubtful antecedents and mysterious present connections, or to be as false as it has ever fallen to the lot of woman to be. She took the meaner way, the safe way, and plotted with her husband to save herself from smirch while letting Gatsby in for the worst that could befall him.

“Still the brightest boy in the class, Scott Fitzgerald holds up his hand. It is noticed that his literary trousers are longer, less bell-bottomed, but still precious. His recitation concerns Daisy Fay who, drunk as a monkey the night before she married Tom Buchanan, muttered: ‘Tell ’em all Daisy’s chang’ her mind.’ A certain penniless Navy lieutenant was believed to be swimming out of her emotional past. They gave her a cold bath, she married Buchanan, settled expensively at West Egg, L. I., where soon appeared one lonely, sinister Gatsby, with mounds of mysterious gold, ginny habits and a marked influence on Daisy. He was the lieutenant, of course, still swimming. That he never landed was due to Daisy’s baffled withdrawal to the fleshly, marital mainland. Due also to Buchanan’s disclosure that the mounds of gold were ill-got. Nonetheless, Yegg Gatsby remained Daisy’s incorruptible dream, unpleasantly removed in person toward the close of the book by an accessory in oil-smeared dungarees.

–TIME, May 11, 1925

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Tender is the Night (1934)

Strange children should smile at each other and say, “Let’s play.”

“Tender is the Night is a good novel that puzzles you and ends by making you a little angry because it isn’t a great novel also. It doesn’t give the feeling of being complete in itself.

…

“The Divers and their friends are, in reality, the characters he has always written about, and written well. They are the richer members of his own generation, the young women who learned to smoke and pet in 1917 and the Yale and Princeton men who attended their coming-out parties in new uniforms. In his early books, especially in This Side of Paradise, he celebrated the youth of these people in a tone of unmixed pride—’Here we are,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘the children of the conquerors, the free and beautiful and very wicked youngsters who are setting the standards for a nation.’ Later, when he described their business careers and their life in great country houses on the north shore of Long Island, his admiration began to be mixed with irony and disillusionment. In the present novel, which chronicles their years of exile, the admiration has almost completely vanished; the prevailing tone is one of disillusionment mixed with nostalgia. ‘We had good times together,’ Fitzgerald seems to say, ‘but that was a long time ago.’

…

“Here is a magnificent subject for a novel. The trouble is that Fitzgerald has never completely decided what kind of novel he wanted to write—whether it should center round a single hero or deal with a whole group. Both types of approach are present, the individual and the collective, and they interfere with each other. We are conscious of a divided purpose that perhaps goes back to a division in the author himself.

Fitzgerald has always been the poet of the American upper bourgeoisie; he has been the only writer able to invest their lives with glamor. Yet he has never been sure that he owed his loyalty to the class about which he was writing. It is as if he had a double personality. Part of him is a guest at the ball given by the people in the big house; part of him has been a little boy peeping in through the window and being thrilled by the music and the beautifully dressed women—a romantic but hard-headed little boy who stops every once in a while to wonder how much it all cost and where the money came from.

…

“Fitzgerald says that this book is his farewell to the members of his own generation; I hope he changes his mind. He has in him at least one great novel about them, and it is a novel that I want to read.”

–Malcolm Cowley, The New Republic, June 6, 1934

“The critical reception of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night might serve as the basis for one of those cartoons on ‘Why Men Go Mad.’ No two reviews were alike; no two had the same tone. Some seemed to think that Mr. Fitzgerald was writing about his usual jazz age boys and girls; others that he had a ‘timeless’ problem on his hands. And some seemed to think that Doctor Diver’s collapse was insufficiently documented.

With this we can’t agree. It seemed to us that Mr. Fitzgerald proceeded accurately, step by step, with just enough documentation to keep the drama from being misty, but without destroying the suggestiveness that added to the horror lurking behind the surface. Consider Dr. Diver’s predicament in being married to a woman with a ‘split personality’ deriving from a brutal misadventure in adolescence. He had married Nicole against his better judgment, partially because she brought him memories of home after years spent abroad. He was drawn into accepting her money, for reasons that living up to a certain income and ‘cushioning’ existence were bound up with the cure. His husband-physician relationship to Nicole, involving constant companionship, cut him off from his practice, and he thought wistfully at times of how the German psychiatrists were getting ahead of him.

With all these factors preparing the ground, it would merely take the sight of an uncomplicated girl (Rosemary) to jar him into active unrest. And when Nicole, subconsciously jealous of Rosemary, comes to a new phase of her disease, and attempts to throw the car off the road when Dick is driving with her and the two children, it is enough to give any one the jitters. Weakness indeed! The wonder to us is that Dick didn’t collapse long before Mr. Fitzgerald causes him to break down. And when he does collapse, his youth is gone, it is too late to catch up with the Germans who have been studying new cases for years. This seems to us to be a sufficient exercise in cause-and-effect. Compared to the motivation in Faulkner, it is logic personified.

–John Chamberlain, The New York Times, April 16, 1934

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The Last Tycoon (1941)

Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

“The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best novel and the best of his short stories are rightly as well as dramatically included with the unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, in this really important volume, for, good as The Great Gatsby was, it makes plain that The Last Tycoon would have been a greater novel, that it would have been, indeed, one of the major novels of the day.

There is a maturity and a roundness and a depth about The Last Tycoon (even unfinished) which makes one grieve anew over the untimely death of Scott Fitzgerald last December. He had written the first episode of chapter 6 the day before he died, and he had made a careful outline of the whole book.

…

“Even ‘out of focus’ this truncated novel is obviously not only the best thing Scott Fitzgerald ever did but it is the first major novel of Hollywood and the great director, Monroe Star, is the most completely realized of Hollywood characters.”

–The Chicago Tribune, November 19, 1941