SOURCE: Jolliff, William G. “The Damnation of Bryan Dalyrimple and Theron Ware: F. Scott Fitzgerald's Debt to Harold Frederic.” Studies in Short Fiction 35, no. 1 (fall 1998): 85-90.

In the following essay, Jolliff investigates the influence of Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware on Fitzgerald's “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald's debt to the fin de siècle American naturalists is well known. Princetonian Amory Blaine gives the most famous suggestion of the influence in This Side of Paradise when he finds himself “rather surprised by his discovery through a critic named Mencken of several excellent American novels: ‘Vandover and the Brute,’ ‘The Damnation of Theron Ware,’ and ‘Jennie Gerhardt’” (209). Henry Dan Piper notes that “Fitzgerald wrote this particular passage during the summer of 1919, when he revised his novel for the last time. It is likely that he had heard about all three books very recently” (“Norris and Fitzgerald...