The “Jazz Age” was a term F. Scott Fitzgerald coined to describe the ostentatious era that began after World War I during the Roaring Twenties. It was a joyous time full of great prosperity. He published many famous books during this time like The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. Fitzgerald claimed to know a great deal about the glitz and glamour of the Roaring Twenties, while he never actually experienced those aspects himself. Although F. Scott Fitzgerald had many struggles with alcoholism and his marriage, he is considered to be one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century.
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The Roaring Twenties was a time renowned for partying, drinking, and a time without war. F. Scott Fitzgerald is just one of the many writers during this time to write about such times. Fitzgerald, however, is an author that defined this era also known as the Jazz Age. Known for novels such as The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise, and The Beautiful and the Damned, and many short stories, Fitzgerald is described by famousauthors.org as “one of the greatest writers American soil has produced in the 20th century. F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.
Similarly, Gatsby amasses a great deal of wealth at a relatively young age, and devotes himself to acquiring possessions and throwing parties that he believes will enable him to win Daisy's love. As the giddiness of the Roaring Twenties dissolved into the bleakness of the Great Depression, however, Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and Fitzgerald battled alcoholism, which hampered his writing. He published Tender Is the Night in 1934, and sold short stories to The Saturday Evening Post to support his lavish lifestyle. In 1937, he left for Hollywood to write screenplays, and in 1940, while working on his novel The Love of the Last Tycoon, died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four. Fitzgerald was the most famous chronicler of 1920s America, an era that he dubbed "the Jazz Age."
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Like professional authors at the time, “Fitzgerald supplemented his income by writing short stories for the magazine Esquire.”(ProQuest) Although Fitzgerald’s passion lay in writing novels, only his first novel sold well enough to support the opulent lifestyle that he had. Fitzgerald’s work has inspired writers ever since he published his first article. He left a great legacy following his death. Fitzgerald had been an alcoholic since his college days, and became notorious during the nineteen twenties for extraordinarily heavy drinking; leaving him in poor health by the late nineteen thirties “I was drunk for many years, and then I died.”(F. Scott Fitzgerald) His first novel’s success made him famous, and he marries the woman of his dreams, but he later descended into drinking and his wife had a mental breakdown. Following the unsuccessful Tender is the Night; Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood and became a scriptwriter.
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Few American writers published as many well-received short stories in the fiction market as Fitzgerald during this time. After publication of his second short story collection in 1922, he was recognized as the eloquent spokesperson for the Jazz Age. Among his short stories that addressed the aspirations of the generation coming of age in the Roaring Twenties, many continue to appear in popular, literary anthologies today. Among these are "Bernice Bobs her Hair," "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," "The Debutante," "Absolution," and "Winter Dreams." Later works by Fitzgerald such as "Babylon Revisited" also appear frequently in modern anthologies.