F. Scott Fitzgerald
THE PLACE OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD in the pantheon of literary greats is supposedly unassailable, with two of his novels — effectively half his long-form corpus — regularly featuring in critics’ polls of greatest works of fiction. Admittedly, one of those books — The Great Gatsby — justifies its high esteem and any writer who manages to create such a masterpiece before an untimely death at 44 is rightly celebrated. Yet, Gatsby aside, the Jazz-Age chronicler is dispensable.
Fitzgerald’s iron-clad reputation owes much to the fact that, apart from some excavated juvenilia, he was never an unequivocally bad writer, elegant even when he was insubstantial, audacious even when. Published in 1920 when he was just 23, it’s a with a difference.
