F. Scott Fitzgerald Essay

On September 24, 1896, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was natural to Edward Fitzgerald and Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald, the product of two vastly different Celtic strains. Edward, who came from tired, elder Maryland stock and claimed distant kinship with the composer of The Star Spangled Banner, (Spencer, 367-81) instilled in his son the old-fashioned virtues of honor and courage and taught by example the sweetie of genteel manners. Fitzgerald was smitten by the sophisticated sixteen-year-old at a St. capital of Minnesota Christmas dance in 1914 during his sopho more than year at Princeton.For the next two years, he conducted a one-sided romance both in someone and through ardent correspondence with a girl who embodied his pattern of wealth and social position. Ginevra, however, was more interested in adding to her collection of suitors than in restricting herself to one. Legend has it, moreover, that Fitzgerald overheard someone, perhaps Ginevras father, remark that poor boys sh ould neer think of marrying rich girls. (Moreland, 25-38) By 1916, the romance had ended, get ahead its effect lingered yen in Fitzgeralds psyche.Fitzgeralds greatness lies as much in the conception as in the achievement. In this way Fitzgerald and his fiction develop some essential quality of the American myth and dream that were the reduce his life historytime of ad hominem and literary effort. Without doubt, Fitzgeralds art was a receipt to his life. He immersed himself in his age and became its chief chronicler, bringing to his fiction a realism that tip overs it the quality of a photograph or, perhaps more appropriately, a documentary film.With the clothing, the music, the slang, the automobiles, the dances, the fads in the specificity of its social milieu-Fitzgeralds fiction documents a heartbeat in time in all its historical reality. Yet Fitzgerald captures more than just the physical evidence of that time. He bring ins with equal clarity the psychology (the dre ams and hopes, the anxieties and fears) reflected in that world because he lived the life he recorded.Autobiography thusly forms the basis of the social realism that is a hallmark of Fitzgeralds fiction, alone it is autobiography transmuted through the deprecative lens of both a personal and a cultural amatory sensibility, a second defining peculiarity of his art. These two strands help to place Fitzgerald within American literary history. (Hindus, 45-50) Fitzgerald came to swelling as a writer in the twenties, a period dominate by the postwar novel, and thus his fiction reflects all the contradictions of his age. World fight I was a defining event for Fitzgerald and the writers of his generation whether or non they saw action in the field.Postwar developments on the home introductory contributed as well to the sense of purposelessness, decay, political failure, and cultural emptiness that pervades the belles-lettres of the 1920s. A new conservatism dominated America. Fit zgeralds fiction of the 1920s reveals the tensions inherent in this mixture of anxious longing for the old certainties and obstinate excitement at the prospect of the new, just as his fiction of the thirties captures the human cost the wasted potential and psychic dislocation of the gay, forte spree and its subsequent crash.His critics argue that he is no more than a stylish chronicler of his age, a mere recorder of the fashions and amusements, the manners and mores of his postwar generation, and he is certainly that. Yet verisimilitude, the truthful rendering of experience, is a distinguishing feature of graphic fiction, and particularly of the novel of manners, a literary form that examines a nation and their culture in a specific time and place and a category into which much of Fitzgeralds fiction fits. Thus, Fitzgeralds ability to convey accurately his own generation is not necessarily a weakness.Fitzgeralds lyricism and symbolist mode of writing reveal an essentially roman tic sensibility that not only gives shape to his worldview, linking it to some traditional attitudes roughly the individual and human existence, but also supports his thematic preoccupations. Critics who complain of Fitzgeralds inability to evaluate the world that he so brilliantly records (and the life that he so intensely lived) need look no further than his third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), for proof of his double consciousness.Increasingly aware of the intricate social, psychic, and economic forces that were driving his generation to excess and emptiness, Fitzgerald found the literary forms to give them expression in a novel that is now considered a moderne masterpiece. Through his indirect, often ironic first-person narrative, Fitzgerald was able to give the story of Jay Gatsby, a man who reinvents himself to capture a dream, sad nobility, and the novels knotty symbolic landscape reinforces this view.Gatsby may initially be just other corrupt product of his material wo rld, but through the eyes of come off Carraway, readers gradually come to see him as a romantic dreamer who has somehow managed, despite his shadowy past and equally shady present, to anticipate uncorrupted. Fitzgeralds complex symbolic landscape also elevates Gatsbys seek to the realm of myth, the myth of the American Dream, and thus the novel offers a critical perspective on a nation and a people as well as on a generation. When E Scott Fitzgerald died in celestial latitude 1940, his reputation was that of a failed writer who had squandered his talent in inebriation and excess.He may have written the novel that defined a decade, This Side of Paradise ( 1920), and another that exposed the dreams and illusions of a nation, The Great Gatsby ( 1925), but his achievement had been overshadowed and largely blighted by his life. (Frohock, 220-28) Works Cited Frohock W. M. Morals, Manners, and Scott Fitzgerald. Southwest review article 40( 1955) 220-228. Hindus Milton. F. Scott Fitzge rald An Introduction and Interpretation. naked York Holt, 1968. 45-50 Moreland Kim. The Education of F. Scott Fitzgerald Lessons in the Theory of History. southern Humanities Review 19(1985) 25-38. Spencer Benjamin T. Fitzgerald and the American Ambivalence. South Atlantic Quarterly 66( 1967) 367-381. Appendix LITERARY WORKS BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD This Side of Paradise. new-fashioned York Charles Scribners Sons, 1920 Scribner paper-back book Fiction, 1995. Flappers and Philosophers. in the raw York Charles Scribners Sons, 1920. The Beautiful and Damned. New York Charles Scribners Sons, 1922 Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995. Tales of the Jazz Age. New York Charles Scribners Sons, 1922. The Vegetable Or, from President to Postman.New York Charles Scribners Sons, 1923. The Great Gatsby. New York Charles Scribners Sons, 1925 Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995. All the lamentable Young Men. New York Charles Scribners Sons, 1926. Tender is the Night. New York Charles Scribners Sons, 193 4 Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995. Taps at Reveille. New York Charles Scribners Sons, 1935. POSTHUMOUS PUBLICATIONS The Last Tycoon. Ed. Edmund Wilson. New York Charles Scribners Sons, 1941 The Love of the Last Tycoon. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1994.The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. New York Charles Scribners Sons, 1951. Afternoon of an Author. Ed. Arthur Mizener. New York Charles Scribners Sons, 1957. Babylon Revisited and Other Stories. New York Charles Scribners Sons, 1960. six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories. New York Charles Scribners Sons, 1960. Pat by-line Stories. New York Charles Scribners Sons, 1962. The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1909-1917. Ed. John Kuehl. New Brunswick, NJ Rutgers University Press, 1965. The Basil and Josephine Stories. Ed. Jackson R.Bryer and John Kuehl. New York Charles Scribners Sons, 1973. Bits of Paradise 21 Uncollected Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York Charles Scribners Sons, 1973. F. Scott Fitzgeralds St. Paul Plays, 1911-1914. Ed. Alan Margolies. Princeton, NJ Princeton University Library, 1978. The Price Was High The Last Uncollected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli . New York Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. The wretched Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. A New Collection. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York Charles Scribners Sons, 1989.