SOURCE: "Howells's 'A Circle in the Water' and Fitzgerald's 'Babylon Revisited'," in Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1982, pp. 261-67.

In the following essay, Nettels discusses the many similarities shared by "Babylon Revisited" and a story by Howells, concluding that although the plots are alike, the perspectives on life expressed in each story are strikingly different.

William Dean Howells was not one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's literary heroes. Fitzgerald once included Howells along with such figures as Taft, McKinley, Bryan, Carnegie, and Rockefeller in a list of prominent men of the recent past in whom "a little boy could find little that was inspiring . . . Not one of them sounded any high note of heroism, no clear and distinct call to something beyond life" ["Wait till You Have Children of Your Own!" F. Scott Fitzgerald in His Own Time, ed. by Matthew J. Bruccoli and Jackson Bryer, 1971]. When his editor...