This book charts Fitzgerald’s use of racial stereotypes to encode the dual nature of his literary ambition: his desire to be on the one hand a popular American entertainer, and on the
other to make his mark among the elite members of an international literary field. Taking his cue from some under-appreciated stories, Michael Nowlin argues that Fitzgerald's early use of
tropes from blackface minstrelsy anticipated his race-inflected treatment of divided artist figures in the major novels from The Beautiful and Damned to the unfinished The Love
of the Last Tycoon. At issue in all these novels, both formally and thematically, is the dynamic state of the modern, multi-faceted, and ethnically diverse American cultural
field Fitzgerald was constantly re-negotiating in order to meet his goal of long-term literary success.
