Although great books can be written at any time, in two periods of American literature remarkable concentrations of memorable books have been produced. The first was 1850-1855, which saw the publication of The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Walden, and the first edition of Leaves of Grass.

The second period was the 1920s. Associated with one of its most flamboyant and outstanding personalities, F. Scott Fitzgerald, this period also saw the flowering of many American talents. Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner published their first books in this decade. Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck and Dashiell Hammett just got in with their first books in 1929; Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, Ring Lardner, Sinclair Lewis, and Edith Wharton published outstanding volumes as well. 

Two other great American poets published in the 1920s: Wallace Stevens's first collection Harmonium came out in 1923 from Alfred A. Knopf, and T.S. Eliot published some of the work for which he is most famous. Although he had emigrated to England and perhaps could no longer be called an American, his publication of The Waste Land in 1922 earns him a niche in this pantheon.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is more famous today than he was while he was alive. The book for which he was best known in his lifetime was This Side of Paradise, an exuberant autobiographical novel of the author's years at Princeton University, which Fitzgerald made sound like a country club. Fitzgerald soon outgrew this novel, as his inscription in this copy testifies. However, like Melville's Typee, this first book was the one with which for decades afterward people associated the author. 

Fitzgerald was a poor speller, and proofreading on This Side of Paradise was notably poor. Even the name of the man to whom the book was dedicated was misspelled. Fitzgerald expected his editor at Scribners, Maxwell Perkins, to catch typos and careless errors, and Perkins thought that Fitzgerald would. Pages 228 and 229 contain three slips: ``I restless'' for ``I am restless''; "Kerenski'' for ``Kerensky'' and ``Gunmeyer'' for ``Guynemer.'' Whatever its mechanical defects, the book was a best-seller. Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, chronicled the decline of Anthony and Gloria Patch, drawn on the dust jacket to look like Fitzgerald and his erratic and troubled wife, Zelda. Capitalizing on the success of the novel, Fitzgerald's publisher issued soon afterward his first collection of short stories, Flappers and Philosophers. One of the best stories in it was ``Bernice Bobs Her Hair.'' 

[This Side of Paradise, pp. 228, 229], [The Beautiful and Damned, dust jacket]

In tune with his times—indeed, eponymous—Fitzgerald titled his next collection Tales of the Jazz Age. The cover is by a popular contemporary artist, John Held, Jr. This book contains two stories that show Fitzgerald's mature gifts in perfect form: ``The Diamond as Big as the Ritz'' and ``May Day.''

Continually in need of money, Fitzgerald tried his hand at play writing. The result was The Vegetable, which had a brief run in Atlantic City before trying Broadway. It flopped. However, Fitzgerald's real gift was for romantic impressionism in perfectly cadenced sentences: in other words, miracles.

Fitzgerald's greatest achievement was the novel that has become a signature of the time and one of the great American statements, The Great Gatsby. A drawing for the dust jacket probably inspired one of the novel's most memorable symbols, the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg. As his talents matured, his stories became more elegaically graceful. ``The Rich Boy,'' ``Absolution,'' and ``Winter Dreams'' were collected in All the Sad Young Men in 1926.

[The Great Gatsby, cover to a paperback edition]

Fitzgerald continued to support himself by short stories in The Saturday Evening Post while he was working on his next novel, Tender is the Night. His top price was $4000 per story--an enormous sum at the time, when families were living on less than that per year.

[Tender is the Night, dust jacket]

Fitzgerald was a victim as well as an exponent of his time. The craze for alcohol engendered by prohibition fueled both Fitzgerald's fiction and his private life. His most complex novel, Tender is the Night, is in a sense a complex rewriting on The Beautiful and Damned, for it is the story of a deteriorating marriage and personality, set against the backdrop of the glamorous twenties. The title comes from Keats's ``Ode to a Nightingale.'' His wife's breakdown and eventual institutionalizing provided the information for the psychiatric sections of the novel.

This inscription in a copy of Tender is the Night was probably made while Fitzgerald was drunk. He is playing with the sounds of his own name and the words "fish guster.''

[Inscription in copy of Tender is the Night]

Fitzgerald's final collection of short stories, his richest, Taps at Reveille, was also the one that sold the most poorly. It went through only one printing of 5,100 copies.

Ill and in debt, Fitzgerald faced his problems in a series of articles written for Esquire magazine. The most famous of these was ``The Crack-Up,'' widely seen as a tactical error when it appeared in 1936. After his death, The Crack-Up was issued in book form. However, it was the publication of articles on his life and Arthur Mizener's biography The Far Side of Paradise, that began the revival of his reputation.

To meet his obligations, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood in 1937. With Zelda in clinics, Fitzgerald fell in love with a gossip columnist named Sheila Graham, who has some of the attributes of the heroine of his final, incomplete, novel, The Last Tycoon.

[Early paperback printings of Fitzgerald's four novels: Tender is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby.]

These portraits of Fitzgerald were taken by the American novelist and photographer Carl Van Vechten outside the Algonquin Hotel the day Fitzgerald signed his will. He had three years to live. Years of alcohol and cigarettes resulted in a heart attack that killed him when he was only 44. He is buried in Rockville, Maryland. 

[Portraits of Fitzgerald and family taken by Carl Van Vechten outside the Algonquin Hotel]
 
 

The writer most contemporary readers in the twenties felt would most fully characterize the period was the satirist Sinclair Lewis. A Minnesotan—"Mercutio of the prairies'' as Clifton Fadiman would call him—Lewis was a singularly ugly man—gangly, uncoordinated, with an acne scarred face, and thin red hair. Yet his hideousness was a badge of his distinction. He refused to see America in the sugar-coated, idealistic terms favored at the turn of the 19th century.

Before he wrote the books that made his name, Lewis published five other novels and a boys book, as well as commercial short stories in The Saturday Evening Post. These are two of his earlier books: The Innocents, his poorest novel, and his series of articles on automobiling around the country, Free Air. Lewis's novel, The Job, not represented here, has some claim as an early feminist work. Lewis's five great novels of the 1920s, while artistically imperfect, implanted in the American imagination lasting images. They will be the focus of a special topics course next semester in the English Department.

Main Street overturned the sentimental idea that small towns were bastions of kindness and decency. Babbitt, the best of Lewis's books, satirized the American businessman and gave a scathing and still relevant picture of commercial life. The name became an icon. An early paperback printing of Babbitt makes the novel look much more risqué than most readers would find it. Dodsworth is a gentler portrait of a businessman. By the time he published it in 1929, Lewis's satirical impulse was intermittent rather than sustained.

[Main Street, dust jacket], [Babbitt, early paperback edition]

Arrowsmith, a counterpoint to the other Lewis books, set up the research scientist as hero. Although he would have protested this assertion, Lewis had little use for art; he trusted science more than aesthetics. A man of quick enthusiasms and equally quick disenchantments.

[Arrowsmith, dust jacket]

Elmer Gantry remains a true picture of the licentious, hypocritical preacher. The novel was banned and burned in 1927 when it was published.

[Elmer Gantry, dust jacket]

After winning the Nobel Prize in 1930, Lewis's career declined. He wrote many more novels, one of which, It Can't Happen Here, has a great deal of life if not much polemical substance. In the 1940s 
Cass Timberlane and an attempt to write about racial problems, Kingsblood Royal, propped up his career temporarily. At the same time as Lewis writing major novels, he produced lesser books. The Man Who Knew Coolidge is one of the best known—a kind of Babbitt narrated by a Babbitt.

[Cass Timberlane, dust jacket], [The Man Who Knew Coolidge, cover to hardback edition]

Like Fitzgerald, Lewis succumbed to alcohol, but unlike Fitzgerald he was unable to face his problems squarely and so could not surmount them. Lewis's last years were spent in Europe, mostly Italy, where a secretary he had unwisely hired encouraged his drinking, embezzled from him, and hastened his death. His final, posthumous novel, World So Wide, is set in Florence. Sam Dodsworth, from the 1929 novel, makes a cameo appearance. The secretary, Alexander Manson, wrote this account of Lewis for The Saturday Evening Post in 1951. Lewis is buried in Sauk Center, Minnesota, where he grew up, the town he satirized and made famous.

[World So Wide, dust jacket]

This photograph of Sinclair Lewis was taken by Nikolas Muray for Vanity Fair magazine in the 1920s.

[Photograph of Sinclair Lewis]

Mark Schorer's 1961 biography of Lewis is a masterly job but written out of distaste for its subject.

[Sinclair Lewis: An American Life, dust jacket]

Exhibition arrangement and World Wide Web catalog by Robert L. Vay.

The following World Wide Web links provide more information about collections in SC&A, the Library, Virginia, and from around the world: