The smart set

George Jean Nathan did more than any other critic to bring Eugene O'Neill to the front rank of American theatre. Season after season he championed the playwright, pressed Broadway producers to stage his work, and pushed the Theatre Guild to back him. Those efforts eventually led to a Pulitzer and, later, the Nobel Prize. Nathan also found James Joyce's Dubliners and printed it in The Smart Set, and he was the first to recognize F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose early stories appeared in the same magazine. When Fitzgerald wanted a lively drama critic for The Beautiful and the Damned, he based the character on Nathan.

Thomas Quinn Curtiss places Nathan back among his longtime colleague H.L. Mencken and the wider circle around them: Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Edmund Wilson, Sean O'Casey, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alfred Knopf, Jack London, and Somerset Maugham. The book traces their bold undertakings and their hard-drinking, Bohemian approach to writing, which shaped the wit and ideas that reached generations of readers.

The result is a biography of a generation of men, written by someone who saw much of it firsthand.