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F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940) is an American novelist and short-story writer of the Roaring Twenties. He acquired the epithet “the spokesman of the Jazz Age.” His first novel, This Side of Paradise, was the first American novel to deal with college undergraduate life in the World War I era. A handsome and charming man, Fitzgerald was quickly adopted by the young generation of his time. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, is a lively but shallow book, but his third, The Great Gatsby, is one of the most penetrating descriptions of American life in the 1920s.

Edward Fitzgerald's great-great-grandfather was the brother of the grandfather of Francis Scott Key, who wrote the poem “The Star-Spangled Banner”, hence his name.

He entertained in a manner similar to his characters, with expensive liquors and entertainment. He revelled in demonstrating the antics of the crazy, irresponsible rich, and carried this attitude wherever he went. Especially on the Riviera in France the Fitzgeralds befriended the elite of the cultural world and wealthy classes, only to offend most of them in some way by their outrageous behavior

At the time of his death, he was virtually forgotten and unread. A growing Fitzgerald revival, begun in the 1950s, led to the publication of numerous volumes of stories, letters, and notebooks. One of his literary critics, Stephen Vincent Benet, concluded in his review of The Last Tycoon, “You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you had better. This is not a legend, this is a reputation—and, seen in perspective, it may well be one of the most secure reputations of our time.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure. None of his works received anything more than modest commercial or critical success during his lifetime. However, since his death Fitzgerald has gained a reputation as one of the preeminent authors in the history of American literature due almost entirely to the enormous posthumous success of The Great Gatsby. As perhaps the quintessential American novel, as well as a definitive social history of the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby has become required reading for virtually every American high school student for the past half century, and had a transportive effect on generation after generation of readers.

In much of Fitzgerald’s work there is a conflict between high society wealth and low class poor. His choice of words and use of subordinating clauses and complex sentences give his style a sense of reaching for an elevated, ‘high class’ sentiment that is unique to him. Tender is the Night examines not only the complex emotional issues of the individual, but also how complicated those emotions, specifically love, are to relate.

Fitzgerald epitomized the mindset of an era with the statement that his generation had, "grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, and all faiths in man shaken’’. Aside from being a major literary voice of the twenties and thirties, Fitzgerald was also among "The Lost Generation's" harshest and most insightful social critics. In his novels Fitzgerald blatantly criticized the immorality, materialism, and hedonism which characterized the lifestyles of America's bourgeois during the nineteen-twenties. Collectively, Fitzgerald's novels and short stories provide some of the best insight into the lifestyles of the rich during America's most prosperous era, while simultaneously examining major literary themes such as disillusionment, coming of age, and the corruption of the American Dream.




Date: 2015-12-24; view: 1095


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