Babylon Revisited F. Scott Fitzgerald - Garry N. Murphy and William C. Slattery (essay date 1981)
Garry N. Murphy and William C. Slattery (essay date 1981)
SOURCE: "The Flawed Text of 'Babylon Revisited': A Challenge to Editors, a Warning to Readers," in Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1981, pp. 315-18.
[In the following essay, Murphy and Slattery argue that a paragraph should be deleted from the "authorized" version of "Babylon Revisited" to reflect Fitzgerald's final intentions for the story.]
No one—not even F. Scott Fitzgerald himself—has ever seen "Babylon Revisited" printed in the final form intended by its author. The reason is astonishingly simple: when the "authorized" version (an extensive revision of the original 1931 Saturday Evening Post story) was printed by Scribners in Taps at Reveille, it contained a monumental editorial error, and, as far as we can determine, that error has been preserved, unremarked, in all subsequent collections and anthologies.
The error occurs early in the...
[The entire page is 1791 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
Related Topics
