Review of The Beautiful and Damned by Mary Maguire Colum (ca. April 1922)

Irish-American writer and editor Mary Maguire Colum reviewed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned along with two other novels for The Freeman magazine. Her article, titled “Certificated, Mostly,” was published on April 26. In this typescript draft, she both praises Fitzgerald and lampoons the whole of American literature in one fell swoop: “In Scott Fitzgerald's book the American novel has attained quite a notable expression of the highly intelligent commonplace: this really means that Europeans cannot much longer, with ease, look down on the gaucherie or unsophisticatedness of America, for when country begins to produce her own brand of the highly intelligent commonplace there is the death-warrant of the gauche, the naive, the wild and the wooly, is at hand . . . . 'The Beautiful and Damned' is really quite an achievement for a so young a writer, although it would seem less striking in England where they have had the highly intelligent commonplace for so long, or in France where they are the greatest masters of the highly intelligent commonplace in the world."