A survey of Fitzgerald criticism demonstrates how aesthetic values vary from age to age. The reasons why some reviewers celebrated The Great Gatsby in 1925 as an improvement on his previous novels are not the same ones that led the succeeding generation to pronounce it a classic. Nor do the criteria by which Fitzgerald was reclaimed from obscurity in the 1940s bear much relation to those currently employed to gauge his canonicity. In his lifetime the main question surrounding him concerned his “sensibility” – specifically, his maturity. In the immediate decades after his death, sensibility as a literary quality was considered too subjective, so critics focused on the work instead of the author's personality. These “formalist” readings (so called because they are concerned with the text's form or design) remained popular for another twenty years, after which they were criticized for ignoring the historical context. Today most Fitzgerald scholars read his work against the backdrop of the 1920s and 1930s, arguing that they have much to teach us about those eras.

Contemporary reviewers: admirers, detractors, and the problem of maturity

Fitzgerald entered the public spotlight as much as a pundit as a littérateur. Although his métier was fiction, many reviewers were more interested in what he had to say about his generation's sociology. Headlines of This Side of Paradise (1920) reviews tell the story: “A Chronicle of Youth By Youth” read The Bookman, while the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger announced “Youth Writes About Youth” and the Boston Herald opted for an even more basic description: “About Flappers.”