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The Damnation Of Bryan Dalyrimpleand Theron Ware: F. Scott Fitzgerald's Debt To Harold Frederic, William Jolliff

Faculty Publications - Department of English

F. Scott Fitzgerald's debt to the fin de siecle American naturalists is well known. Princetonian Amory Blaine gives the most famous suggestion of the influence in This Side of Paradise when he finds himself "rather surprised by his discovery through a critic named Mencken of several excellent American novels: 'Vandover and the Brute,' 'The Damnation of Theron Ware,' and 'Jennie Gerhardt'" (209). Henry Dan Piper notes that "Fitzgerald wrote this particular passage during the summer of 1919, when he revised his novel for the last time. It is likely that he had heard about all three books very recently" ("Norris …