A Neglected Source for The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald's development as a serious artist prior to 1925 has been a subject of continuing critical interest. According to James E. Miller Jr., "Sometime between The Beautiful and Damned (1922) and The Great Gatsby (1925), Fitzgerald won "intellectual control" over his imagination, and, in doing so, abandoned one literary tradition and embraced another."1 For Miller, it was Fitzgerald's emerging consciousness of form, of the need for selectivity and shaping, that accounted for this change. "By the time Fitzgerald was ready to write The Great Gatsby? Miller concludes, "... Wells, Mackenzie, and Mencken had been replaced in his critical esteem by Joyce, Cather, and Conrad, all novelists acutely conscious of the primary significance of technique" (p. 81). Because in later years Fitzgerald himself lent credence to these connections, particularly the influence of Conrad, Miller's argument has seemed highly persuasive.2

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• A Literary Note - An Unnoticed Source for the Great Gatsby

  Helen Killoran•Canadian Review of American Studies•1990

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