Fitzgerald and the War Between the Sexes: EssaysRace, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic HistoryWriting Gatsby : The Real Story of the Writing of the Greatest American NovelThe Beautiful and Damned

Abstract

Scott Donaldson, writes James L. W. West III in his short but precise preface to Fitzgerald and the War Between the Sexes, a posthumous collection of essays by the late literary biographer (1928–2020) who was a mainstay of Fitzgerald studies for a half-century, “was an excellent scholar and a good man, generous with his time and knowledge. . . . He brought a newspaperman’s curiosity to his work and an open, accessible style to his writing” (West, “Preface” viii). From the beginning of his career, the prolific Donaldson was also a master of repurposing his wide-ranging contributions to American literary history and its development. Whereas most scholars are content to see an essay or chapter into print in one venue and move on, the author, perhaps most notably of The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography (2015), found inventive ways of repackaging and reconfiguring entries on his vita, sometimes decades after the fact. Twenty years ago, just before the dawn of the e-reader era, such long-out-of-print early efforts as his The Suburban Myth (1968) and Poet in America: Winfield Townley Scott (1972) reappeared under the aegis of the print-on-demand publisher iUniverse, making available in affordable softcover editions valuable studies that remained sequestered in university stacks, unavailable to most readers. This foray into self-(re)publishing soon led to a valuable relationship with Open Road Media, which produced digital versions of his controversy-scarred John Cheever: A Biography (1988) and the unjustly overlooked Archibald MacLeish: An American Life (1992).1 Thanks to the encouragement of the Minnesota Historical Society, the University of Minnesota Press also brought his much-admired Fitzgerald biography, Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1983), back to life for a new generation of scholars and fans.Perhaps most impressively, Donaldson himself rewrote nearly two dozen previously published journal articles to create the essential collection Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days (2009). It is hard to think of another omnibus of a commentator’s lifework whose contents fit together so seamlessly. By updating each essay’s secondary sources and revising for overall unity and cohesion of voice, Donaldson pulled off the rare feat of compiling a “greatest hits” collection that never sounds dated, whose analyses feel fresh and insightful rather than like time capsules from, say, 1973 (when the well-known essay “Scott Fitzgerald’s Romance with the South” first appeared in the Southern Literary Journal) or 1982 (when the oft-republished “Money and Marriage in Fitzgerald’s Stories” was featured in Jackson R. Bryer’s collection The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: New Approaches in Criticism).Fitzgerald and the War Between the Sexes is not, as its title may imply, a focused dissection of a specific theme across an array of Fitzgerald efforts. Rather, it is a gathering of five late efforts either unpublished or uncollected at the time of their author’s death. One main selling point of the book is its compact size and affordability: at a brisk 132 pages and a $15.95 paperback list price, the collection represents an initiative on the part of West and Penn State University Press to produce critical studies of Fitzgerald for the general reader. (West’s own Business Is Good: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Professional Writer, coming in 2023, will be the second book in the series.) The centerpiece here is a sixty-three-page excursion into the gender dynamics of Tender Is the Night, “Tender Is the Night: The War Between the Sexes” (1–63), which West calls “the best close reading of the novel that I have seen” (“Preface” vii). I would agree with this assessment; its core appeal is its neutrality. Ever the journalist, Donaldson declines to take a position on the contentious gender politics in the novel that can make Fitzgerald seem at best an essentialist when it comes to sexual difference and at worst a misogynist in his insistence that modernity eroded the fundamental strengths of manhood.Another of the great pleasures that accounts for the essay’s readability is that Donaldson does not harp on his thesis. Rather, he lets his discussions of key moments in Fitzgerald’s fourth novel flow with a spontaneity that arises in part from his nonchronological analysis. His discussion begins in media res, focusing on the moment in book 2, chapter 14, when Dick Diver treats (not very effectively or with much sympathy) the eczemic “woman in room twenty.” As Donaldson argues, the patient’s inflamed skin is Fitzgerald’s most autobiographical nod to the torments suffered by his wife during the initial months of her protracted hospitalization at Dr. Oscar Forel’s Les Rives de Prangins Clinic in Nyon, Switzerland, a that the to the Dick that is the of the of time who to the and that Fitzgerald his and her in the her novel the and her to and in the that this is as and as the that in gender is Donaldson is the who the the Tender Is the the From the essay on the ways in which the of “the of to Dick Diver by The from the Diver and to a that and the wife and of who as a by a and whose with Fitzgerald’s the to his Donaldson for A on and essential and to Fitzgerald’s 2, chapter a that to on her in the the of Dick and as for the that to by to as the of a as which to Dick to Donaldson not in the have the of his as a for his her own to such as to I to as a from to a from to of the than the during their than a in American Donaldson as part of his the essay also the of which Dick and As Donaldson Fitzgerald’s of the of in the relationship and may have to the the of the of and in that Tender Is the be for in the of the and the of remained a rather for the was the of a a into a a Fitzgerald best his for in which he previously in his first two This of and The and As Donaldson argues, the for of whose for and and from the of which the the in to to and Literary the own in his of his of and the and his to for his from the can the novel and the of the to A on of his “the of his and his into the of politics by a New of of of of his in the in the dissection of the of or is in Donaldson calls the and that can have on of its like who may in the feel to by the of the perhaps the of to have than as the of by and the Diver and the to the for the that one that to the very that that the very as his was in a that Dick is in the the and are to the that into its It may be that the a and is to the but on from for “the of his and and are the main as in a A discussion of book chapter at the that the to an on the that of her in the As Donaldson on de a a at her de in the an their and and A and a after their de was a in a second when her the of was to at a and the of studies that the in the of the to Tender is not and de in their to the novel is not A second to the that a of R. a to in of the to the of the late the of and in Tender was from a also the and the during the two years in which the was to his of is the he that is Fitzgerald’s at than it his in he and in a for that one of this the Donaldson as to the is that Fitzgerald this Donaldson “the that was of it on to his The very on the to which the of and Fitzgerald’s as the essay that Tender Is the is a novel that does not have to take in an to the War Between the Sexes” is such a de that one can it the essays that can but its rather and the American is a of Fitzgerald’s most novel that its general as the at the and Literary in New in an when that was the for book in the the essay a and specific who may not have or to its and pleasures the it can as a American of the novel as “the first that American in Donaldson Fitzgerald to James as a who the and the for and the As he and to the than most who are off by her and that his Donaldson together a of and and an of and is his discussion of as to is for the of As he are at and like the in a that the of the of is the one with which are This of of the the of a literary and her previously appeared as a core chapter in The Impossible that that on literary for for an after nearly years it was first I West to it to make it This is a good for the key of and is a master in the and that into literary From The of Fitzgerald: An American Life Donaldson have and to their of as the of the with was The to the essay is the that the to into his of The and the that an American the of found in is and Scott Fitzgerald, A Marriage by with the and her in of is so in its of that one scholars would its on such say, Fitzgerald’s with Fitzgerald is a of the in the not just his but efforts such as and his The appeared in the of The Fitzgerald in and as the for not one but two in Works and and of The The have from one a into the that is a . . . that articles have published that will be in a book by James L. 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