F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
Life
Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, a Catholic Midwesterner who grew up watching his richer classmates and taking notes. He got into Princeton on charm and not quite the grades, chased the right sort of girl, flunked out, got commissioned into the army near the end of World War I (but didn’t ship out), and at a training camp in Alabama in 1918 met Zelda Sayre — beautiful, reckless, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court justice. She refused to marry him until he could afford her. He wrote This Side of Paradise in a frenzy, it sold, they married a week later, and for about five years they were the most photographed couple in American literature.
He published The Beautiful and Damned, some of the best short stories in the Saturday Evening Post, and then in 1925 — living in France, drinking, quarreling with Zelda, broke despite a large income — he produced [[the-great-gatsby|The Great Gatsby]]. It sold poorly. Reviewers were condescending. He never quite recovered commercially.
The 1930s did the rest of the damage. Zelda’s schizophrenia declared itself; she spent the rest of her life in and out of sanatoria. Fitzgerald’s drinking became a full-time job. He wrote Tender Is the Night (1934), which is harder and deeper than Gatsby and was mis-received by a Depression-era audience that didn’t want to hear about sad rich people on the Riviera. He moved to Hollywood, took screenwriting work he hated, started The Last Tycoon, had a heart attack in a Los Angeles apartment at forty-four. Gatsby was out of print at his death. He thought he was a failure. The posthumous reappraisal made him the American novelist. Zelda died eight years later in a hospital fire in North Carolina.
What They Were Doing
Fitzgerald’s one great subject was American self-invention — and the price. His people — Amory Blaine, Dick Diver, Jay Gatsby, Monroe Stahr — build themselves out of money, charm, and imagined destiny, arrive at the top of whatever ladder they were climbing, and discover it was the wrong ladder. The discovery does not rescue them. It just breaks them.
The Great Gatsby is the purest case. Jay Gatsby invents a name, a war record, an Oxford education, a fortune, and a mansion, all in order to win back a girl who married somebody else five years ago — and when he finally gets to stand in front of her on his own lawn, he realizes the dream was bigger than anything the actual woman could fill. “His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him.” The line is Fitzgerald diagnosing the whole American project: you build the ladder, you climb the ladder, and at the top you realize the object you were reaching for is no longer there — if it ever was.
Stylistically he’s one of the most precise prose writers the language has. Every sentence in Gatsby is paid for. The green light, the valley of ashes, the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg, the rain at Gatsby’s funeral — these are compressed symbols doing more work per ounce than any other modernist’s. He’s also, quietly, one of the best writers of rhythm in American prose; the last paragraph of Gatsby (“So we beat on, boats against the current…”) is to twentieth-century American literature what the last sentence of Joyce’s “The Dead” is to Irish.
Underneath the glitter he was a moralist. What he hated about the rich — and he hated them while wanting to be one — was carelessness. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” That’s the line that would have gotten him blacklisted if anyone in East Hampton had understood it.
Influence
Every American novel about self-invention and the cost of reaching a dream passes through Fitzgerald. Salinger, Updike, Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road is a suburban Tender Is the Night), Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Bret Easton Ellis — all his children. Hemingway was his friend and eventually his competitor; Fitzgerald helped edit The Sun Also Rises, and Hemingway mocked him after his death. Gatsby is now taught in almost every American high school, which is both its glory and its mild injury — the book that was once for adults is read too young, too often, and still survives.
Connections
- The Great Gatsby — the centerpiece. Nick narrating, Gatsby across the bay, the green light, the crash.
- Ernest Hemingway — his friend, rival, and foil. Fitzgerald spent his way into a debt-trap; Hemingway minimalized his way into a brand. They were at the same Paris parties and wrote very different books out of them.
- The Sun Also Rises — the Lost Generation companion. Both books are 1925–26 and both are about people who can’t go home to what they were before.
- The Red and the Black — Julien Sorel is Gatsby’s French ancestor. Self-invention on a borrowed identity, class rejection, a gun at the end.
- Bel-Ami — Maupassant’s Parisian rise-by-seduction; Duroy is Gatsby without the love, Gatsby without the dream, Gatsby with all the calculation and none of the innocence.
- Nineteen Eighty-Four — different genre, same diagnosis at a deep level: a society organized around a false promise, and what it does to the people who believe the promise.
Key Works
- The Great Gatsby (1925)
- Tender Is the Night (1934)
- This Side of Paradise (1920)
- The Last Tycoon (1941, unfinished)
- Babylon Revisited and Other Stories (1931)