To a considerable extent this still remains the “myth” of Fitzgerald, the myth that sees him as what Lionel Trilling once called him, the “maimed hero” of modern writing. It has encouraged the still very common view that of the truly important and genuinely radical modern writers—Hemignway, Stein, Faulkner, Dos Passos—who emerged in the United States during the remarkable literary decade of the 1920s, when the American novel was totally transformed and when it acquired the dignity and character of a true world literature, Fitzgerald, though of the greatest representative importance, was one of the most profligate and least realized authors of the generation. So, where Hemingway, through style, achieved a pure and hard perfection of modernist prose, and Faulkner and Dos Passos, through complex formal experiment, achieved the experimental radicalism of modernist vision, Fitzgerald was to stay the eternal amateur who never mastered what his talent and imagination offered. It is certainly true that Fitzgerald was one of the less obviously experimental writers of experimental times; but that was largely because he made the first object of his experiment not the literary text, rather life itself in an experimental time which he sought to understand in its contradiction and complexity. For Fitzgerald, style in life and style in art were always to be inextricably interwoven, and his writing is in endless passage from one to the other. It is of course entirely true that, of the many short stories Fitzgerald wrote and indeed lived by, many were slight and trivial. It is also true that, of the five novels he wrote, the first two—This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, so popular in their time—were works of youthful charm but indulgent and imperfect method, while the last two –the brilliant Tender Is the Night and the final The Last Tycoon, which were largely disliked in their time—were works of vast ambition that were nonetheless, for different reasons, never truly finished. This, however, still leaves us with a good deal worthy of the highest respect. There remain many remarkable short stories, some cunning and subtle criticism and commentary, of which the once despised “Crack-Up” essays are a distinguished example, and one novel so perfect that it surely stands among the finest of twentieth-century American novels. That book, the book T. S. Elio called “the first step the American novel has taken since Henry James,” the book that in fact offers the most profound and critical summing up we have of the ironies and disorders behind the wonderful glow of the Twenties, the great novel of the American Dream in its modern condition, was The Great Gatsby. \
Malcolm Bradbury introduction to The Great Gatsby
