Magazines which published Rosenfeld’s writing included The New Republic, Seven Arts, Vanity Fair magazine, The Nation, The Dial and Modern Music. He edited Seven Arts from 1916 to 1918, and was an editor of the American Caravan yearbooks.
Critic Paul Rosenfeld called Arthur Dove’s work as “as sort of Leaves of Grass with pigment” . In a letter to Hemingway (1927 or 1928) from his home at Ellerslie, Fitzgerald commented “…Edna Ferber is weeping the east and Paul Rosenfeld is sweeping what is left into a large ornate wastebasket, a gift which any Real Man would like Class…”
During his lifetime only a handful of serious critics conscientiously debated Fitzgerald’s artistic development, Paul Rosenfeld among them. Paul Rosenfeld wrote of Fitzgerald “Certain racehorses run for the pure joy of running, and the author of The Beautiful and Damned and Tales of the Jazz Age is such an animal. He is a born writer, amusing himself with tales and pictures; and eventually nothing is interesting except the natural bent. Salty and insipid, exaggeratedly poetical and bitterly parodistic, his writing pours exuberantly out of him. Flat paragraphs are redeemed by brilliant metaphors, and conventional descriptions by witty, penetrating turns. Ideas of diamond are somewhat indiscriminately mixed with ideas of rhinestone and ideas of window glass; yet purest rays serene are present in veritable abundance.”
“Paul Rosenfeld said “Not a contemporary American senses as thoroughly in every fiber the tempo of privileged post-adolescent America. Of that life, in all its great hardness and equally curious softness, its external clatter, movement and boldness, he is a part: and what he writes reflects the environment not so much in its superficial aspects asin its pitch and beat.” Paul Rosenfeld wrote F Scott Fitzgerald a letter in 1925 about his dissatisfaction with The Great Gatsby “[Gatsby is] extraordinarily American, like ice cream soda with arsenic flavoring.” In a letter to Hemingway (1927 or 1928) from his home at Ellerslie, Fitzgerald commented “…Edna Ferber is weeping the east and Paul Rosenfeld is sweeping what is left into a large ornate wastebasket, a gift which any Real Man would like, to be published in November under the title: The Real Leisure Class…”
“The continual cry of the modern artist and the sensitive man against the vulgarity of taste and manners imposed by a capitalist society, voiced very recently by Gilbert Canaan, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Paul Rosenberg would indicate that the middle and leisure classes are no less deficient in any real vital culture.” Rosenfeld would write an essay for the The Crack- Up: With Other Uncollected Pieces, Note-Books and Unpublished Letters a 1945 collection of that stimulated the reassessment of Fitzgerald’s work.
VWB, p 10.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Rosenfeld
The Socialist Review, volumes 8-10, reviewed The Workers Culture : The Equipment of the Workers , The St. Phillips Settlement and Education and Economics Research Society, (London, Allen and Unger, 1919.
Boats Against the Current 