Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Barbara Tepa Lupack

Critical Essay by Barbara Tepa Lupack

SOURCE: Lupack, Barbara Tepa. “F. Scott Fitzgerald's ‘Following of a Grail’.” Arthuriana 4, no. 4 (winter 1994): 324-47.

In the following essay, Lupack chronicles the inclusion of Arthurian motifs, the wasteland, and the Grail quest in many of F. Scott Fitzgerald's works, remarking that the author's interest in these stories also carried over into his personal life.

The Arthurian legends appealed not only to T. S. Eliot, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and other American poets of the early twentieth century but also to some of the most prominent American novelists as well. F. Scott Fitzgerald, the great chronicler of the Jazz Age, found special vitality and contemporaneity in the legends and incorporated aspects of them into much of his best work. Like his contemporary Ernest Hemingway, who (in The Sun Also Rises and in several of the Nick Adams tales in In Our Time) used the story of the Fisher King...
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