Reconsiderations June 2014
Gatsby meets Macomber
Decoding the parallels between Fitzgerald’s Gatsby and Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”
Throughout his writing life Hemingway constantly criticized and satirized Fitzgerald, whom he felt had been psychologically castrated by Zelda, couldn’t hold his liquor, had no personal dignity, and publicly humiliated himself. In the magazine version of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), the dying Harry “remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe” of the rich. Twenty years later, after Fitzgerald’s death, Hemingway continued to mock him. A Moveable Feast (1964) described Fitzgerald’s pretty, effeminate, and even decadent good looks, and portrayed him as reckless, hypochondriac, and foolish. In conversation and letters, Hemingway condemned him as a self-confessed cuckold, artistic whore, and destroyer of his own talent. Fitzgerald was...
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