In this collection of critical chapters, critic and novelist Kermit Wonders Moyer seeks to extend rather than to challenge preceding studies. Instead of taking a biographical point of view toward Fitzgerald’s writing, he has chosen to treat him primarily as a novelist of ideas. Consequently, the chief focus of A Child of the Last Days is upon the relation between Fitzgerald’s ideas about history and the national character—always the central issues of his fiction—and the reading that helped shape those ideas.