Babylon Revisited Summary / Study Guide

Babylon Revisited | Introduction

When ‘‘Babylon Revisited’’ was first published in the Saturday Evening Post in February, 1931 F. Scott Fitzgerald had already written three of his major novels—This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Great Gatsby—and he was finally making a good living as an author. The story of a recovering alcoholic's return to Paris after the start of the Depression and his attempt to win back custody of his daughter, "Babylon Revisited'' is a portrait of a man trying to get his life back in order after having made several bad mistakes in the years following his rise to riches during the heyday of the stock market in the 1920s. Fitzgerald came to regard "Babylon Revisited'' as one of his most important stories. He gave it pride of place as the last story in his 1935 collection Taps at Reveille; he called it a ‘‘magnificent story’’ in a 1940 letter to his daughter; and to another correspondent he described it as one of the benchmarks in his evolution as a writer: "You see, I not only announced the birth of my young illusions in This Side of Paradise, but pretty much the death of them in some of my last Post stories like 'Babylon Revisited'."

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