The smart set

More than any other critic, George Jean Nathan was responsible for the emergence of Eugene O'Neill to the forefront of the American theatre. He blew the trumpets for him season after season, badgered the Broadway producers to do him, shamed the Theatre Guild into sponsoring him, and then watched the momentum of all these campaigns culminate in the Pulitzer, and eventually, the Nobel Prize. It was Nathan who discovered James Joyce's Dubliners and published it in The Smart Set. F. Scott Fitzgerald was first recognized by Nathan, who published Fitzgerald's first fiction in The Smart Set. And when Fitzgerald needed a model for a lively drama critic in his novel The Beautiful and the Damned, Nathan was immediately and perfectly cast. Thomas Quinn Curtiss has reunited Nathan with his cohort, H.L. Mencken, together with the rest of their set: Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Edmund Wilson, Sean O'Casey, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alfred Knopf, Jack London, Somerset Maugham. The magnificent abandon of their enterprise and the hard drinking Bohemian wisdom of their writing propelled them and fueled generations of readers with their wit and philosophy. This is a biography of an era of men whose stories could only be written by an eyewitness.