SOURCE: "Ernest Hemingway," in F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries, The World Publishing Company, 1963, pp. 155-216.

In the following excerpt, Goldhurst compares the figure of the failed writer in works by Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The destroyed writer is an American phenomenon and something of an American preoccupation. The fate of such literary artists as Edgar Allan Poe and Hart Crane seems more typical, to many observers at least, than the opposite image of established solidity typified by William Dean Howells. Van Wyck Brooks, for example, has commented at some length upon what he calls "the abortive career" of the American literary artist. The same theme has attracted the attention of some of our leading fictionists: Henry James remarked that the American writer seemed destined to follow a pattern of "broken careers, orphaned children, early disasters, violent deaths." James's comment is but one of many that stress...