In the spring of 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald took his family to the French Riviera, rented a villa, and wrote The Great Gatsby in a sustained burst of concentration that he described, afterward, as the best work he had ever done and would probably ever do. He was twenty-seven years old, newly wealthy from stories he considered inferior to his novels, married to a woman whose brilliance and instability would define and eventually consume the next decade of his life, and possessed of an awareness of his own gifts so precise and so unsparing that it functioned simultaneously as inspiration and torment. The novel he produced that summer is still, a century after its publication, the closest thing American literature has to a perfect object: 180 pages of prose so carefully weighted and so perfectly pitched that every rereading finds something the last one missed. What the manuscript drafts reveal, and what James L. W. West III has spent years recovering from the archives, is that the effortlessness was entirely constructed. The sentences that feel inevitable were fought for, line by line, in a process of revision so exacting that the gap between the writer Fitzgerald was and the writer he was determined to become is visible in the crossings-out themselves.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) is one of American literature's most instructive paradoxes: a writer whose greatest strength was self-awareness and whose greatest weakness was precisely the same thing. He understood the Roaring Twenties from the inside, moved through its parties and its money and its particular variety of beautiful carelessness as both participant and diagnostician, and managed to write about its glamour and its moral vacancy simultaneously, in prose of such seductive precision that readers have been falling for both the surface and the critique ever since. The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, the stories collected in his best years: these are not merely portraits of an era but arguments about it, sustained meditations on the relationship between desire and illusion, between the self one performs, and the self one actually inhabits, that remain as urgently relevant as the morning they were written.
What the myth of Fitzgerald too often obscures is the craftsman. The legend, with its Jazz Age glamour, its spectacular marital drama, and its trajectory of decline so steep it reads like a cautionary tale composed by someone with a taste for irony, has tended to crowd out the writer at the desk: revising obsessively, reading voraciously, wrestling with the gap between his ambitions and his execution with a critical intelligence that his letters and manuscripts document in almost painful detail. He knew when he was coasting, and he knew when he was reaching, and the distinction mattered to him enormously, even in the years when alcohol and circumstance and the enormous psychic cost of Zelda's illness made the reaching harder and harder to sustain. To understand Fitzgerald fully means following him into the drafts, the variants, the abandoned experiments, and the marginalia where the real work of becoming a serious writer gets done.
James L. W. West III has spent more time in that archive than perhaps any living scholar, and what he has found there has permanently deepened our understanding of how Fitzgerald's art was made. The general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the author of The Perfect Hour, West brings to his subject both a textual scholar's forensic precision and a biographer's feel for the emotional stakes behind the craft. His approach is humane without being reverential, rigorous without losing sight of the human being revising under pressure, doubting himself, and persisting anyway. In this conversation, he helps us move past the legend and into the far more compelling story it has been obscuring: a writer who, in seeking to articulate the desires and delusions of his age, discovered something about the human condition that the age alone cannot contain, and left it on the page in sentences that refuse, a century later, to dim.
Charles Carlini: Fitzgerald has been canonized as the poet laureate of the Jazz Age, but do you think that label has helped or hindered a more complex understanding of his literary legacy?
James L. W. West III: Fitzgerald invented the label. He thought of himself as the “Prophet of the Jazz Age.” He celebrated the exuberance and energy of the post-World War I era, but warned against its excesses and self-indulgences. During the latter part of his career, the label (if that’s what it was) probably hindered his efforts to be thought of as a serious artist. Today, with the benefit of historical hindsight, we can appreciate his prescience.
CC: You’ve spent decades editing Fitzgerald’s work at a granular level. What surprised you most in the manuscripts—was there a moment that fundamentally changed how you viewed him as a craftsman or thinker?
JW: I began working with Fitzgerald’s manuscripts in 1970. The way he planned out his novels and stories before he began work on them immediately impressed me. His first drafts, however, were often rather pedestrian. He got his best results during revision.
CC: Fitzgerald once said, “Action is character.” Do you believe he lived by that principle, or was it more a piece of literary bravado than personal truth?
JW: It’s good advice for any writer. Character is created by action, by having people move and interact, not by having them talk and talk and talk. The same goes for narration. Not too much explanation for the reader, please! Let the reader watch the characters operate. This is what we do in real life: we trust action, not speech.
CC: In your view, how much of Fitzgerald’s struggle was really with the market—Hollywood, the magazines, Scribner’s—and how much with his own self-destructive tendencies? Where do you draw the line between context and character?
JW: There is no line between the two. Fitzgerald didn’t struggle with the literary marketplace until late in his career, when he grew weary of manufacturing romantic fantasies for the Saturday Evening Post. As for his worst tendencies, he was certainly aware of them. He observed and understood his behavior and used it in his fiction.
CC: Your work on Trimalchio, the earlier version of The Great Gatsby, has opened a new window onto Fitzgerald’s revision process. What does that process tell us about the novel’s ultimate tone and intention? Did he sand off some of its rougher, more radical edges or sharpen them?
JW: In transforming Trimalchio into The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald created a different novel, similar to the earlier version, but with a depth of myth and idealism that even he could probably not have predicted. That’s what appeals to us about the final version—the author’s understanding of human desire and longing. Trimalchio was a good little novel about some unpleasant people who live on Long Island. The Great Gatsby is a national scripture.
CC: There’s often a temptation to see Zelda as a femme fatale in Fitzgerald’s narrative, or conversely, as his misunderstood victim. From your archival and biographical work, how would you reframe the Zelda question beyond myth and melodrama?
JW: Fortunately, they found each other. If they hadn’t, Scott would probably have wasted his talents on the advertising business, and Zelda would have become a peculiar old Southern lady who painted china for her friends. Together, they became an iconic couple. The inner workings of their marriage are still a mystery. I don’t think the relationship can be parsed, despite the letters, photographs, and testimony that survive.
CC: Fitzgerald’s Catholic upbringing gets mentioned far less than his Princeton years or literary friendships. Do you think his religious background played a deeper role in shaping the moral undercurrents of his fiction than we typically acknowledge?
JW: Probably so. Fitzgerald was a moralist at heart, and he had a confessional streak. He certainly understood symbolism, how to create it with language, and incorporate it into his stories. Like many people, he was probably uncomfortable with the emphasis on sin and expiation in all versions of Christianity, but he must have seen the need for moral guidance and forgiveness.
CC: You’ve said elsewhere that Fitzgerald is more than just a lyrical stylist; he’s also a writer of ideas. Could you elaborate on that? What ideas do you think he was most urgently wrestling with, especially later in his career?
JW: He wasn’t a novelist of ideas in the usual sense, but he did have some good insights. His understanding of “emotional bankruptcy” was acute; he also believed that the “golden moment” only arrives a few times in life and then is brief and evanescent.
CC: If Fitzgerald had lived another twenty years, long enough to see postwar America, the Beats, and the rise of television, how do you think his work would have evolved? Do you see the seeds of a late style in his final stories?
JW: He was always a good observer. He would have compared the WWII generation to his own and would have been interested in the rearrangement of the social classes that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. As for the styles of dress, music, and dance—who knows? What would he have made of Elvis?
CC: Finally, on a personal level, what keeps you coming back to Fitzgerald after all these years? Is there a line, a scene, a biographical detail that still haunts or animates your understanding of him?
JW: I very much enjoy working with Fitzgerald’s manuscripts, typescripts, and correspondence—documents in which he reveals quite a lot about himself. That kind of scholarship has always come naturally to me. And I have also never grown tired of reading Fitzgerald’s writing. I reread “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” the other day. It’s an early story from 1922. It still seemed fresh to me. I suspect that other people have this same reaction to Fitzgerald’s work. It stands up well over time.
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