Among its many enlightenments, Andrew Turnbull's biography Scott Fitzgerald establishes a truth essential to understanding the life of its subject: ‘With Europe and the Murphys, Fitzgerald came as close as he ever would to finding perfection in the real world, and in a way the rest of his life was a retreat from this summit’ (176). By the sands of Antibes in the home they built and named Villa America, the Murphys created a salon – the centre, as Dirk Bogarde was to describe it, ‘of a gorgeous, glittering carousel […] Looking back at them today sprawled in the sun, laughing and dancing, is a little like turning the pages of old bound copies of Vanity Fair and Tatler. Scintillating, beautiful, remote and far out of reach’ (8). For Archibald MacLeish, too, ‘there was a shine to life wherever they were […] a kind of inherent loveliness’ (Vaill 7), and wherever in Tender Is the Night Fitzgerald provides a vision of graceful expatriation, there the Murphys are, shining still as the very spirit of expatriate style. They were the creators of those ‘many fêtes’ that the novel's winsome dedication seems to gift and bless them with, as though in a deed of reciprocal generosity. In a letter to Gerald Murphy, Fitzgerald acknowledged both extensive debts and a profound entente: ‘the book was inspired by Sara and you, and the way I feel about you both and the way you live, and the last part of it is Zelda and me because you and Sara are the same people as Zelda and me’ (Tomkins 5).

Among its many enlightenments, Andrew Turnbull's biography Scott Fitzgerald establishes a truth essential to understanding the life of its subject: ‘With Europe and the Murphys, Fitzgerald came as close as he ever would to finding perfection in the real world, and in a way the rest of his life was a retreat from this summit’ (176). By the sands of Antibes in the home they built and named Villa America, the Murphys created a salon – the centre, as Dirk Bogarde was to describe it, ‘of a gorgeous, glittering carousel […] Looking back at them today sprawled in the sun, laughing and dancing, is a little like turning the pages of old bound copies of Vanity Fair and Tatler. Scintillating, beautiful, remote and far out of reach’ (8). For Archibald MacLeish, too, ‘there was a shine to life wherever they were […] a kind of inherent loveliness’ (Vaill 7), and wherever in Tender Is the Night Fitzgerald provides a vision of graceful expatriation, there the Murphys are, shining still as the very spirit of expatriate style. They were the creators of those ‘many fêtes’ that the novel's winsome dedication seems to gift and bless them with, as though in a deed of reciprocal generosity. In a letter to Gerald Murphy, Fitzgerald acknowledged both extensive debts and a profound entente: ‘the book was inspired by Sara and you, and the way I feel about you both and the way you live, and the last part of it is Zelda and me because you and Sara are the same people as Zelda and me’ (Tomkins 5). The way the Murphys lived would indeed become the luminous blueprint for an American arcadia in Tender, and though Fitzgerald would often create permutations on the theme of paradise lost in his life and writing, only here in his final completed novel does he succeed in tracing fully the tragic arc of sublimity declining to ruin.

‘Please do not use the phrase “Riviera” […] not only does it sound like the triviality of which I am so often accused, but also […] its very mention invokes a feeling of unreality and unsubstantiality’ (Life in Letters 247).

In the opening chapter of his study of American myth, Jeffrey D. Mason accepts that America's foundation myth of itself as a space of limitless promise, of agrarian plenitude evolving into material abundance, was one which could neither survive its own internal contradictions, nor its trial by the actualities of time's passage:

In more recent years, the Vietnam war has led to ‘the destruction, not of [America], but of the myth that gave it life and in which [Americans] once believed’ (Roth 349). This was the central thesis informing John Hellmann's study, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (1986). Yet Hellmann also considered the afterlife of that destroyed mythology, asking perhaps the most fundamental question raised by the defeat of American myth in Vietnam: ‘what possibilities may remain for the aspiring American hero separated in Vietnam from the ideal self-concept of his culture?’ (161). He concluded that the most important Vietnam works ‘that have been most widely received as important literature have been less interested in a sustained portrait of the war than in an exploration of its implications for American myth’ (167). Published in 1986, Hellmann's conclusion could only be tentatively optimistic with regard to the rebirth of American myth. Yet in the years since, a good deal of American fiction that has the war as subject suggests instead a confident determination to move beyond such impoverishment towards what Marc Chénetier has recognized to be a widespread ‘revision of myth in contemporary [American] fiction’ (164).

Northrop Frye, perhaps the twentieth-century's most influential writer on the topic of mythology and literature, remarked: ‘The word myth is used today in such a bewildering variety of contexts that anyone talking about it has to say first what his context is’ (3). More recently Eric Gould has suggested that the concept of myth has become a new omnibus term for our times, a term that may mean both everything and nothing. He writes of myth as ‘a synthesis of value which uniquely manages to mean most things to most people. It is allegory and tautology, reason and unreason, logic and fantasy, waking thought and dream, origin and end’ (5). Establishing a guiding context for this collection of critical essays on contemporary American literature and its relationship to mythology must also consider the notion that myth is essentially a reliquary of stories and tales bearing no proximate connection to imaginative literature or literary criticism, or even that the articulation of myth has been entirely replaced by such literature (Segal 2).

Yet contemporary American writing is clearly engaged with mythologies, however varied their origins or applications, and is aware of the seeming paradox and difficult resolutions inherent in combining modern-day events and social circumstances with the kinds of universal associations and cultural depth usually associated with myth. Also, especially since the second half of the twentieth-century, literary theorists and critics have frequently attempted to reconcile modern literary production and its largely secular subject matter with mythological symbols, patterns and structures – Northrop Frye, Richard Chase and Roland Barthes being but some of the most prominent examples.