Babylon Revisited F. Scott Fitzgerald | Elsa Nettels (essay date 1982)
Elsa Nettels (essay date 1982)
SOURCE: "Howells's 'A Circle in the Water' and Fitzgerald's 'Babylon Revisited'," in Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1982, pp. 261-67.
[In the following essay, Nettels discusses the many similarities shared by "Babylon Revisited" and a story by Howells, concluding that although the plots are alike, the perspectives on life expressed in each story are strikingly different.]
William Dean Howells was not one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's literary heroes. Fitzgerald once included Howells along with such figures as Taft, McKinley, Bryan, Carnegie, and Rockefeller in a list of prominent men of the recent past in whom "a little boy could find little that was inspiring . . . Not one of them sounded any high note of heroism, no clear and distinct call to something beyond life" ["Wait till You Have Children of Your Own!" F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time, ed. by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jackson Bryer, 1971]. When...
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