SOURCE: "The Flawed Text of 'Babylon Revisited': A Challenge to Editors, a Warning to Readers," in Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1981, pp. 315-18.

In the following essay, Murphy and Slattery argue that a paragraph should be deleted from the "authorized" version of "Babylon Revisited" to reflect Fitzgerald's final intentions for the story.

No one—not even F. Scott Fitzgerald himself—has ever seen "Babylon Revisited" printed in the final form intended by its author. The reason is astonishingly simple: when the "authorized" version (an extensive revision of the original 1931 Saturday Evening Post story) was printed by Scribners in Taps at Reveille, it contained a monumental editorial error, and, as far as we can determine, that error has been preserved, unremarked, in all subsequent collections and anthologies.

The error occurs early in the story, at the point where Charlie Wales leaves the Ritz Bar. We have lettered the paragraphs...