He Thinks He's Wonderful

Master the 40: The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

We kick off season 2 of Master the 40 with our first foray into the series of "juveniles" Fitzgerald wrote for the Saturday Evening Post between 1928 and 1931. Actually, he wrote two coming-of-age series for the magazine, one about a boy (Basil Duke Lee) and one about a girl (Josephine Perry). The latter tend to be darker and sadder, while the former offer nostalgic glimpses of Fitzgerald's own adolescence in St. Paul in the 1910s. Chronologically, "He Thinks He's Wonderful" is the fourth of eight Basil stories and captures our hero smackdab in the middle of the awkward age. We explore Fitzgerald's treatment of American teenagers before they became rebels without a cause. On the one hand, the author's empathy for young people led him to depict the foibles of growing up with far more psychological realism than predecessors such as Booth Tarkington. At the same time, the Basil series eschews the "fall from innocence" vision of coming of age modernist contemporaries shared, which insisted that some kind of epiphany would mercilessly and irrevocably initiate young people into the hypocrisies and compromises of adulthood, forever denying them their prelapsarian naivete. In the end, Basil is no Holden Caulfield ... but he just may be a more honest depiction of adolescence, an intense but ultimately transitory stage of the life cycle. No matter how much American popular culture glamorizes the teen years, most of us are happy never to go back to that age!