Until very near the end of his life Fitzgerald felt that life was un-
endurable without a belief in the possibility of realizing some romantic
dream of a meaningful existence. In a letter to a friend about Catsby
he said that "the whole burden of this novel is the loss of those illusions
that give such color to the world so that you don't care whether things
are true or false so long as they partake of the magical glory." That is
why, when Daisy destroys Gatsby's faith and his dream at last breaks up,
he finds himself in "a new world, material without being real," and, in
effect, chooses to die.

In expressing these feelings -- the feeling that life is unendurable with-
out a belief in the possibility of a meaningful existence, and the feeling
that the world conspires to make such a belief impossible -- Fitzgerald
spoke for his own time and perhaps, in a broader sense, for all genera-
tions of Americans -- as the ending of The Great Gatsby, with its overt
reference to our American past, suggests he himself felt. In the twenties
writers thought it was possible to tell the truth about the inner experi-
ence of Americans, to describe "the way it was," as Hemingway put it,
and they thought American life in their time was such that, if they suc-
ceeded, their novels would be important. Their subject was the making
of Americans, in a sense very different from the merely political one --
the notion that Americans were "new men," the products of a novel
social experiment -- which had dominated men's imaginations in previous
generations.

In these feelings, and to some extent at least because he succeeded in
realizing them in his fiction with unusual intensity and that unwariness
he recommended to writers in his Notebooks, Fitzgerald was, as Glenway
Wescott said at the time of Fitzgerald's death, "our darling, our genius,
our fool." The twenties were a time of greatness in American literature
and a time of radical transformation in American society. For both these
reasons it is well worth acquiring the understanding of their most
representative writer that the essays in this book provide.

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