TY - JOUR
AU - Nowlin, Michael
AB - 1226 ALH Online Review, Series XLIV James L. W. West III, Business is Good: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Professional Writer (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023), 188 pp. Reviewed by Michael Nowlin, University of Victoria Upon the desk on which F. Scott Fitzgerald finished writing Tender Is the Night (1934) sat a paperweight emblazoned with a pair of inspirational messages: “Keep Smiling,” if he had it turned one way, and “Business is Good,” if he turned it around. Fitzgerald was never without his sense of humor, even while drawing on almost legendary personal misery to write that deeply pessimistic novel. The paperweight with the cheery “bromides” as he might have called them was surely in part an expression of that humor. But James L. W. West III, in gathering his recent essays on the author, prefers to take the “Business is Good” motto without irony. Doing so fits his insistence on Fitzgerald’s being a “professional writer,” a hardworking and commercially savvy literary artist whose remarkable success in the literary marketplace gave him reason enough to stay optimistic. Describing Fitzgerald as a “professional writer” seems on the face of it so self-evidently true that one might wonder why it ever 
TI - James L. W. West III, Business is Good: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Professional Writer
JF - American Literary History
DO - 10.1093/alh/ajae097
DA - 2024-11-15
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/james-l-w-west-iii-business-is-good-f-scott-fitzgerald-professional-69AdcVFDRv
SP - 1226
EP - 1228
VL - 36
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -