F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940)
Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. In his own age, Fitzgerald was the self-styled spokesman of the “Lost Generation”, or the Americans born in the 1890s who came of age during World War I. He crafted five novels and dozens of short stories that treat themes of youth, despair, and age. Many admire what they consider his remarkable emotional honesty. His heroes — handsome, confident, and doomed — blaze brilliantly before exploding, and his heroines are typically beautiful, intricate, and alluring.
“The Great Gatsby”
Jay Gatsby is a young millionaire with a dubious and somewhat notorious past. He has no ties to the society of the rich in which he circulates, and no one quite knows how he made his fortune. Some believe he is a bootlegger. Rumors circulate of his “killing a man”, or being a German spy during the Great War and the possibility of his being a cousin of contemporaneous German ruler Kaiser Wilhelm. However, despite the glamorous parties he throws, with their countless gatecrashers whom he generously tolerates, Gatsby is a lonely man. All he really wants is to “repeat the past” – to be reunited with the love of his life and golden girl, Daisy. That’s why he was up to getting rich, not only, that he wouldn’t end like his father, a farmer, but also to regain Daisy. But Daisy is now Daisy Buchanan, married to the staid, respectable millionaire and famous polo player Tom Buchanan, and the couple now has a young child. For Gatsby, though, Daisy’s new status as mother and wife hardly constitutes an obstacle in conquering his love for her; and Daisy, feeling trapped and bored in her marriage with the unfaithful Tom, is flattered by the return of Gatsby’s attention.
The narrator of the novel is Nick Carraway, a young Wall Street trader at the height of the rising financial market in the 1920s, who is also Daisy’s cousin. Carraway has moved into the small bungalow next to a mansion owned by the millionaire Gatsby (a “factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy”). Eventually, Carraway cynically realizes that the rich, as respectable as they may seem superficially, are indeed “careless people,” and Tom and Daisy are no exception. Tom has a mistress, Myrtle, the wife of the gas station owner in the wasteland of ashes between the fabulous mansions on Long Island and New York City, located somewhere around present day Flushing, Queens, New York. Nick meets and quickly makes friends with Gatsby, though, and becomes his liaison with Daisy. One afternoon, after a confrontation between Tom and Gatsby over Daisy, Daisy runs over Myrtle while driving back from the city. Tom misleads Myrtle’s heartbroken husband George unintentionally, implying that the accident was Gatsby’s fault, and Gatsby is consequently shot by George Wilson. Wilson commits suicide immediately afterward. Hardly anyone, and not even Daisy, comes out to Gatsby’s funeral, and Nick, Gatsby’s sole remaining friend, must attend it alone, where he meets Gatsby’s father, a poor farmer. Gatsby is buried with the same mystery in which he suddenly appeared.
**The famous closing lines are: “He believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluted us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further… And one fine morning – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
“Babylon Revisited”
Fitzgerald’s most renowned and most considered work of short fiction. A work that intimates the times as well as revealing a personal tragedy, the short story is his most often anthologized. Fitzgerald wrote the story amidst the turmoil of his own life, and that life is in many ways drawn out in “Babylon Revisited.” Fitzgerald’s consideration of the story as intensely personal cannot be doubted; that he evolved it into something universal makes it a masterful work.
It features the characters Charlie Wales and Helen Wales. It is the story of a father’s attempt to regain the custody of his daughter after recovering from the deathof his wife and his own alcoholism.
“This Side of Paradise (1920)”
The debut novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the book examines the lives and morality of post-World War I youth. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is a wealthy and attractive Princeton University student who dabbles in literature and has a series of romances.
Excerpt from the novel (Book 1: The Romantic Egotist, Chapter 1: Amory, Son of Beatrice):
Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while. His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit of drowsing over the Encyclopedia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice O’Hara. In consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory. For many years he hovered in the background of his family’s life, an unassertive figure with a face half-obliterated by lifeless, silky hair, continually occupied in “taking care” of his wife, continually harassed by the idea that he didn’t and couldn’t understand her.
“Tender is the Night (1934)”
In 1932, Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was hospitalized for schizophrenia in Baltimore, Maryland, and the author rented the “La Paix” estate in the suburb of Towson, Maryland to work on this book, the story of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychoanalyst and his wife, Nicole, who is also one of his patients. It would be his first novel published in nine years, and the last novel that he would complete.
Vade Mecum 