F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Novels: Parallels Between His Worlds of Fiction and Reality
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about what he knew, giving readers a perfect reflection of America in the 1920’s, considering this, his fictional work is almost autobiographical in a sense. Although his topics were limited, they were written well because of his extensive knowledge of the time period, extensive knowledge of himself, and being able to express that through his writing. In his 1933 essay “One Hundred False Starts” F. Scott Fitzgerald describes how he repeatedly drew upon his own life experiences to create beautiful novels because doing so is most effective when trying to connect with the reader. He said:
“Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves, that’s the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives. Experiences so great and moving that it doesn’t seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.”
“Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories each time in a new disguise maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen” (p.132).
His works were limited, but powerful. Fitzgerald’s novels are inspired by feelings and personal experiences from his aspirations, alcohol, Princeton, Zelda Sayre, literature of the time period, and The Jazz Age, the phrase he coined himself. Fitzgerald’s fiction was never just an on the surface, factual autobiography; but a transformed memoir that applied many of his own experiences with emphasis on his feelings toward them. None of the protagonists of his novels Amor...
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Francis Scott Fitzgerald, also known under his writer’s name, F. Scott Fitzgerald, is revered as a famous American novelist for his writing masterpieces in the 1920’s and 1930’s. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about his extravagant lifestyle in America that his wife, Zelda, their friends, and him lived during that era. In fact, a lot of his novels and essays were based off of real-life situations with exaggerated plots and twists. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels were the readers looking glass into his tragic life that resulted in sad endings in his books, and ultimately his own life. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in a nice neighborhood, but growing up, he wasn’t privileged.
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Certain authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, wanted to reflect the horrors that the world had experienced not a decade ago. In 1914, one of the most destructive and pointless wars in history plagued the world: World War I. This war destroyed a whole generation of young men, something one would refer to as the “Lost Generation”. Modernism was a time that allowed the barbarity of the war to simmer down and eventually, disappear altogether. One such author that thrived in this period was F. Scott Fitzgerald, a young poet and author who considered himself the best of his time. One could say that this self-absorption was what fueled his drive to be the most famous modernist the world had seen. As The New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean mentions in her literary summary of Fitzgerald’s works, “I didn’t know till fifteen that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty” (Orlean xi). One of the key factors that influenced and shaped Fitzgerald’s writing was World War I, with one of his most famous novels, This Side Of Paradise, being published directly after the war in 1920. Yet his most famous writing was the book, The Great Gatsby, a novel about striving to achieve the American dream, except finding out when succeeding that this dream was not a desire at all. Fitzgerald himself lived a life full of partying and traveling the world. According to the Norton Anthology of American Literature, “In the 1920’s and 1930’s F. Scott Fitzgerald was equally equally famous as a writer and as a celebrity author whose lifestyle seemed to symbolize the two decades; in the 1920’s he stood for all-night partying, drinking, and the pursuit of pleasure while in the 1930’s he stood for the gloomy aftermath of excess” (Baym 2124). A fur...
Dubbed the ‘roaring 20s’, because of the massive rise in America’s economy, this social and historical context is widely remembered for its impressive parties and sensationalist attitude. However, Fitzgerald also conveys a more sinister side to this culture through numerous affairs, poverty and a rampage of organised crime. By exposing this moral downfall, Fitzgerald reveals to the responder his value of the American dream and his belief of its decline. As a writer, Fitzgerald was always very much concerned with the present times, consequently, his writing style and plot reflects his own experiences of this era. So similar were the lives of Fitzgerald’s characters to his own that he once commented, “sometimes I don't know whether Zelda (his wife) and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels”. In 1924, Fitzgerald was affected by Zelda’s brief affair with a young French pilot, provoking him to lock her in their house. A construction of this experience can be seen in the way Fitzgerald depicts the 1290s context. For example in ‘The Great Gatsby’, there are numerous affairs and at one point, Mr Wilson locks up his wife to pre...
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...at characters create for themselves and the means by which they solve them serve as a way for Fitzgerald to exemplify the decade’s signature qualities while simultaneously criticizing them. Although it was a time of improvements in the way of life for all Americans, along with that came a certain moral decadence. In a new sense of comfort and thoughtlessness, a contempt for law and order, and a desire for wealth, the Jazz Age marked a crucial turning point in America, captured precisely by Fitzgerald.
On Wednesday February 12 of 1890 F. Scott Fitzgerald's parents were married in Washington D.C. Six years later on September 24, 1896 Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born at his home 481 Laurel Ave. in St. Paul, Minnesota. His two infant older sisters had died from a violent influenza so that by the time Fitzgerald came along Mollie Fitzgerald had become the proverbial nightmare that known as an overprotective mother. Fitzgerald's mother was no traditional mother though, for she was known for her eccentricities. These eccentricities disturbed young Scott's life, "Fitzgerald later described his mother as 'half insane with pathological nervous worry'" (Bruccoli 15), but nothing worried anyone in the family so much as his father's failure to hold down a job. It was because his father lost his job as a wicker furniture manufacturer and salesman the family was forced to move from St. Paul to Buffalo in April of 1898, where his father began work for Proctor and Gamble. In January of 1901 the family moved from Buffalo to Syracuse where Edward had been transferred by his employer and where, on Sunday July 21, 1901 Scott's younger sister Annabel was born. Just two years later the family was back in Buffalo and just five years after that the family had returned to St. Paul and Grandma McQuillan's money.
Raleigh, John Henry. "F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: Legendary Bases and Allegorical Significances." F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Arthur Mizener. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963. 99-103.
Sutton, Brian. "Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby." Explicator 59.1 (Fall 2000): 37-39. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Linda Pavlovski. Vol. 157. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 15 Jan. 2014.
In 1897, consequently to the collapse of Edwards business, the family moved to New York, in order for Edward to take up a job as a salesman for Proctor and Gamble. Be that as it may, their moved was brief after Edward was let go from his employment in 1908, inciting a move back the St. Paul where the Fitzgerald’s lived off the McQuillan family fortune, (Fitzgerald, Bruccoli and Baughman, 1995). For the next 14 years, Scott invested the larger part of his time at boarding school, at Princeton University, in the army, and in New York City (Ibid, 1995). Fitzgerald’s writing career began to take off in 1920 after the publication of his first novel, This Side of Paradise (Bruccoli and Smith, 1981). The novel received glowing reviews (Ibid, 1981) and secured Fitzgerald’s place as one of the country’s most promising young
In Paris, a group of North American intellectuals comes together and they are called the Lost Generation. Fitzgerald is one of them. Fitzgerald’s stories are strongly focused on autobiographical themes such as alcoholism, mental illness, money and waste, and unstable relationships. In addition, we can see a setting that describes the decadence, virtuosity, and the madness of an unforgettable age, the one that he called “Jazz Age.” His story called Babylon Revisited is a great example of it.
Reading is an experience of art; without readers’ interaction, the meaning of any literary work is insufficient. “[Norman] Holland believes that we react to literary texts with the same psychological responses we bring to our daily life....That is, in various ways we unconsciously recreate in the text the world that exists in our mind.” (Tyson, 182) By telling a story that centers on the conflicts between two wealth young females whose personalities are distinctly different in the jazz age, Fitzgerald leads us on a journey of physical, and especially psychological transition of the protagonists through an omniscient narration. For female individuals, a tale emphasis on the youth,
In writing this book, commonly refered to as the “Great American Novel”, F. Scott Fitzgerald achieved in showing future generations what the early twenties were like, and the kinds of people that lived then. He did this in a beautifully written novel with in-depth characters, a captivating plot, and a wonderful sense of the time period.