The Magnificent F. Scott Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise, the Beautiful and the Damned, Flappers and Philosophers, Tales of the Jazz Age

F. Scott Fitzgerald created his own legends. The man frequently overshadows the work as he has become a clustered overlapping of archetypes: the drunken writer, the ruined novelist, the spoiled genius, the personification of the Jazz Age, the sacrificial victim of the Depression. The glamour, the triumph, the euphoria, the heartbreak, the tragedy of his life were genuine; but the most important thing is what he wrote. Nothing else matters. Not even the most superficial reader can fail to recognize F. Scott Fitzgerald's talent and genius. The ingenuity which marks his work is a necessity in American fiction both new and now. It is the blatant tone of levity which runs throughout his work that almost drowns out the perception of literary substance. But its overtones are unmistakeable. Fitzgerald is working out an idiom, and it is an idiom at once universal, American and individual.