The Early Genius of F. Scott Fitzgerald

 I strive to be a completionist in regard to the artists I admire and writers are no exception. Of course, this almost always leads us through a variable quality of work, even for those we hold in high regard. However, to understand the evolution of an artist it is important to study at least the bulk of their work including, maybe even especially, the failures.

In this vein, any one at all interested in the career of F. Scott Fitzgerald should read his first short story, published in St. Paul Academy Now and Then in October of 1909 when Fitzgerald was only thirteen.

The truth is “The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage” is not a very good detective story filled with lapses of narrative clarity, jerky plot turns and an abrupt resolution. It reads at best like a summation, or a draft, of the writers that inspired it, Doyle and Poe. It looks, indeed, like it was written by a thirteen-year-old. But what a thirteen-year-old!

What astounds about “The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage” is how uncannily a pre-teen understood the tropes of early detective fiction and even detected the developments of the following two decades through Chandler and Hammett (the story begins with a grizzled stranger visiting the detective in his office with some information on a case). The story fascinates not on its own merits but because the signs of a literary genius in the making are evident.

Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, was still more than a decade away and by then Fitzgerald was well on his way into becoming the writer who would be canonized as the author of The Great Gatsby with a long assortment of short stories touching many aspects of American life in the Jazz Age.

The early 20th century was a transitory time in literature so it is not at all surprising that rising writers would be influenced by forces they would later abandon as they developed their own style shaped by the world they lived in, the Great War, the vibrant 20s and the darkening clouds of the Depression being the principal factors. Mark Twain would die in 1910, though some of his as of then unpublished work would emerge into the 1960s. Six-years later Henry James would be gone but that void would be filled the following decade by Fitzgerald’s contemporary, Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway not only considered Twain the father of American literature but combined Twain’s pure, whimsical prose with the ex-pat experiences of Henry James (though James’s experiences in Europe were closer to Fitzgerald’s than Hemingway’s). Hemingway also began his literary career in the last place a rugged man of the outdoors would be expected: poetry. For Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the rest is history.


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