Babylon Revisited and Other Stories

"[1] In an afterword to the 2000 edition, James L. W. West III of Pennsylvania State University explains of the Babylon Revisited stories, "His writings embody lessons of ambition and disappointment, idealism and disenchantment, success and failure and redemption, that are central to the American experience...His romantic readiness for life and his gift for hope have come to embody important aspects of the American experience.

A rueful, though incompleted, farewell to the Jazz Age, its setting is Paris and its tone one of anguish for past follies.

"[3] In a January 2011 essay to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Penguin's Modern Classics series, University of East Anglia's Sarah Churchwell wrote "Babylon Revisited" is at once timeless and startlingly modern in its evocation of a single father struggling with alcoholism and trying to care for his daughter, and coming to terms with the costs of extravagance...Nine years after the publication, less than a year before he would die at 44, Fitzgerald wrote his daughter Scottie a letter about the story: "You have earned some money for me this week because I sold 'Babylon Revisited', in which you are a character, to the pictures (the sum received wasn’t worthy of the magnificent story—neither of you nor of me—however, I am accepting it)."

Like [the story's hero], Fitzgerald learnt the hard way that loss is remorseless, absolute; what has been wasted is irrecoverable.

But as "Babylon Revisited" also shows, even out of the wreckage some things can be salvaged, if not everything: what Fitzgerald retrieved he bequeathed to us, the hard-won lessons of his life transformed into heartbreaking art.