Student companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald

This student companion is intended for the "non-specialist and general reader." As with titles in other such recent series--"Gale Study Guides to Great Literature," for example--the audience for this book is mainly undergraduates who want more substantial (but no more demanding) "companions" than the Cliff Notes of earlier times. Pelzer's study is a success in this genre. In the first two chapters, the author (Wesley College) efficiently outlines Fitzgerald's life and his shifting literary reputation. The presentation of the novelist's symbolic method and Romantic sensibility incisively anticipates the themes of the following five chapters, each of which analyzes a novel in terms of specific categories: "Genesis and Critical Reception," "Plot Development," "Character Development," and "'Thematic Issues." In addition, the discussion of each novel includes an example of a critical "interpretation": feminist, Marxist (used for two novels), mythological, and psychological. These are valuable in so far as they explain in plain language the techniques and aims of various critical methods. Finally, there is a selected bibliography of primary and secondary work. For general readers and beginning undergraduates. T. P. Riggio; University of Connecticut