ABSTRACT

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s encounter with Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven” was one of the shocks of recognition of his Princeton years. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, is redolent of his identification with this poem. The Fitzgerald alter-ego, Amory Blaine, imagines himself going off to Mexico where “he might live a strange litany, delivered from right and wrong and from the hound of heaven”. The deep imprint of Catholicism on Fitzgerald appears from the number of religious references and significances in his works. In addition, there is the fact that as a creative writer, he made use of his own life experiences as material to be shaped into fictional art. All the terms in the relationship—Fitzgerald, his writing, his Catholicism and America—are involved in the key phrase, “escape from a small enclosure into a great labyrinth”. Fitzgerald is saying that his background, at the outset of his adult life and professional career, struck him as confining, imprisoning.