The Life and Literature of F Scott Fitzgerald

ABOUT THE agent The Life and Literature of F. Scott Fitzgerald By Jillian Thompson May 16, 2012. English newspaper, The Guardian, erstwhile asked Jonathan Franzen, the Pulitzer prise nominated author of The Corrections, to contri scarcee what he believed were the bulkyest rules to abide by for aspiring fiction writers. His response was Fiction that isnt an authors personal adventure into the excite or the unknow isnt worth paternity for anything but money (Franzen). The newfangleds of Francis Scott Fitzgerald declare that he would agree wholeheartedly with Franzen.In his Notebooks, Fitzgerald wrote, There never was a swell career of a legal novelist. There couldnt be. Hes too worldy people if hes any good (Fitzgerald 61). Fictionalizing emotions and oscilloscopes are an unparalleled resource to writers, and somewhat of the great stories in literary works strike d take in a penny grown from the personal lives of novelists. Dickens David Copperfield, Hemingways A go od-by To Arms, and Kerouacs On the Road are famed illustrations of autofiction techniques, featuring a patron that has been modeled by and by the author, and a central plot landmark that mirrors the events of their lives.A sozzled examination of the known facts of Scott Fitzgeralds bearing is enough to establish that in that location is a silent relationship between his personal dispositions and the subject matter of his novels. It is also join to conclude that he was deeply concerned with class, wealth, and their effect on the rot of The American Dream. The novels and piddling stories of Scott Fitzgerald are documents that illustrate the hazy and glamorous neck get along, and had Fitzgeralds own brio been any less hazy and glamorous, some of Americas greatest literature may not pretend come to pass. THE LIFE OF SCOTT FITZGERALDFrancis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born September 24th, 1896 in St Paul, Minnesota, the save son to middle class parents, Edward and Mary Fitzge rald. His parents instilled him with a fear of failure, and an obsession with wealth that would haunt his lifes ambitions. At an early age, he proved himself an imaginative and talented writer, and despite some academic struggles, he was accepted to Princeton in 1913. Intent on following his familys advice, Fitzgerald utilize himself to the pursuit of social and intellectual attainments, the path he believed would lead him to fame and fortune.He get together any extracurricular activity that he believed would increase his social standing(a) on campus, but the beginning of WWI put an end to any doable fruition of his efforts. He left Princeton for the army in 1917, and was stationed at campsite Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama, where he began work on a novella called The romanticist Egotist. It was also there that he met the woman who would change the course of his life unendingly. Her name was Zelda Sayre, the golden girl, and in her, Fitzgerald met his match in both(prenomina l) ambition and extravagance.They had a whirlwind romance, but in the summer of 1919, Zelda grew tired of delay for his victor, and ended their relationship. Devastated by her rejection, he moved back to St. Paul, more situated than ever to become rich enough to win Zelda back. He rewrote The romanticistic Egotist and in a letter to his publisher wrote, I have so many things dependent on its successincluding of course a girl (Bryer and Barks 149). In 1920 This cheek of Paradise was published. The novel was an overnight thaumaturge with postwar younker, and two weeks later Fitzgerald and Zelda were married.They became the icons of success and youth, the first it couple if there ever was one, but the tumultuous beginning of their relationship never quite a faded away. He and Zelda lived far outside their means, and Fitzgerald continually sunk into debt. Zeldas impulsiveness, once interpreted as charming, had become erratic, and emotionally draining for Fitzgerald and his writi ng suffered. While living in Europe, Zelda overdosed on sleeping pills, and flung herself down a flight of stairs in a jealous fit. Fitzgerald had Zelda institutionalized, and she was diagnosed with schizophrenia.Fitzgeralds ambition of his muse had become a nightmare, and he worked through and through his emotions the way he always had, through writing, and irritable is the Night was the result. Fitzgerald died of a heart fall upon in 1940, while writing his final novel, The Last Tycoon. Zelda died not persistent after, locked in a room awaiting treatment as the sanitarium arrange fire. They are buried together, with a shared headstone that quotes the final lecture of Fitzgeralds masterpiece, The spacious Gatsby. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the historical (172). FITZGERALD AND THE JAZZ AGEPerhaps the most vivid and poetic character of any Fitzgerald novel is The Jazz board itself. The historical backdrop of the glamorous world of F lappers and speakeasies thats envisioned when one thinks of the Roaring Twenties, make the perfect test for Fitzgerald to place his characters, who share Fitzgeralds own conflicted feelings on Jazz Age morals. The great(p) Gatsby and This position of Paradise both center on the news report of revel warped by status seeking. They can be use up as harsh criticisms of 1920s America, and its disintegration during an era defined by material excess.With the end of WWI the American economy soared and brought about an era, from 1920-1931, which was marked by unprecedented national wealth and prosperity. The rise of the stock market and the transgress of the war left America with a generation that compensated for the nut house by creating a society centered on materialism. People began to spend and consume standardized never in advance. The conservatism and modest values of niminy-piminy society that marked the previous generation were too suffocating for the youth who grew up fas t during the Great Crusade. A person from any background now had the opportunity to earn a fortune, especially if they were helping to tote up the demand for bootleg liquor, such as Jay Gatsby was. But this giddiness was short lived, and after the stock market crash, those that had enjoyed the rapid succession from penniless to millionaire as a bootlegger, quickly lost everything as the economy crumbled. Even before the stock market crash, Fitzgerald portrayed the decay of the Jazz Age as the self-consuming society of excess that couldnt possibly be sustained through its greed and cynicism. Fitzgerald always idolized the luxurious lifestyle of the rich.As the Fitzgeralds fame rise in the early 1920s, he found himself slowly being seduced by the opulence of his newfound life. But despite the excitement of his new life, Fitzgerald struggled with the mixed feelings of hypocrisy associated with falling in love with a girl who was everything hed ever dreamed of, but who led him toward the materialism he had once despised. Fitzgerald developed his characters as representations of these inner conflicts. Arthur Mizener, Fitzgeralds most historied biographer, wrote that Fitzgeralds work so perfectly defined the Jazz Age because Fitzgerald nfused both sides of himself into what Mizener called the middle-western Trimalchio and the spoiled priest (297). The symbol of the green light on Daisy Buchanans dock in The Great Gatsby represents Fitzgeralds hope for the future, but also the awareness that it may never be realized. Writing The Great Gatsby allowed Fitzgerald to confront his feelings on the superficiality of his world and its inhabitants. Even the title The Great Gatsby is a reflection on the Jazz Age as a masterful illusion. THE AUTHOR AND THE HERO The heart of any study on Scott Fitzgerald is of course his work.However, Fitzgerald wrote only about himself and the people and places with which he was familiar, therefore his life and his work are inextricably boun d together. There were four or five Zeldas and at least eight Scotts, as James Thurber once put it in his book Credos and Curios, so that their living room was forever tense with the presence of a dozen desperate personalities, even when they were merely in it. Some of these Fitzgeralds were characters out of a play or a novel, which made the lives of the multiple pair always theatrical, sometimes unreal, and often disadvantageously overacted (63).In fact, reading This lieu of Paradise is like reading a biography of Fitzgerald. A young man from the midwestern United States serves in the army, falls in love with a rich socialite, and they break up, leading him to search for success by any means available. Jay Gatsby and Amory Blaine, the young dandy athletic supporters of The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise, pursue and glorify wealth to win the affections of the woman they love, much like Fitzgerald himself did to win Zelda Sayre.Gatsby and Blaine are perpetually romantic adolescents whose lives are based on the mistaken idea that enough money and fame can keep the love and beauty of the past crystallized forever. The romanticism of Gatsby and Blaine, which at first rises higher up the frivolity Fitzgerald associated with Jazz Age society, eventually disintegrates to unveil the corruption wealth causes. The Great Gatsbys narrator, Nick Carraway, is a young man from the Midwest with an Ivy League education, exactly like Fitzgerald.Nicks background makes him an idol narrator because he is able to see past Gatsbys superficialities to the man underneath. Fitzgerald uses Nick to express his opinion that an ideal based on a materialistic foundation is a self-defeating and ultimately destructive goal. wherefore lastly, theres the girl. The object of all-consuming affection. Fitzgeralds muse for his female protagonist was of course his wife, Zelda. In fact, she was more than just a muse. afterward manduction her personal diaries with Fitzgerald, he used verbatim quotes to write the character of Rosalind Connage in This Side of Paradise.He wrote, all criticism of Rosalind ends in her beauty (Bryer and Barks 201) and told Zelda the heroine does resemble you in more ways than four (230). Like Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, Zelda never took to motherhood and was never particularly domestic. According to Fitzgeralds Notebooks, the famous line from The Great Gatsby, I hope shell be a foolthats the go around thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool (Fitzgerald 22), is based on what Zelda said after her daughter, Scottie, was born. The most accurate portrayal of Zelda is most likely in Tender is the Night, Fitzgeralds last completed novel.This is a story of a man of almost limitless potential who makes the fatal decision to marry a beautiful but mentally ill woman, and who ultimately sinks into despair and tipsiness when their doomed marriage fails. He wrote it about their time in Europe, and the helpless Generat ion community of writers, a term coined by Fitzgeralds close friend Ernest Hemmingway to describe those who came of age during World War 1, including Gertrude Stein, T. S Eliot and Waldo Peirce. In the novel, he chronicled the decline of Zeldas mental health, and his discovery that she would never requite to the way she was.The Zelda in this novel not was the glorified beauty of This Side of Paradise or The Great Gatsby, and she a wrote a semi-autobiographical account of her own as a form of revenge against Fitzgerald after their marriage dissolved. After she was committed, Fitzgerald wrote in his Notebook, In an odd way, perhaps incredible to you, she was always my child (it was not reciprocal as it often is in marriages) I was her great reality, often the only liaison agent who could make the world genuine to her (478). SO WE BEAT ON (Fitzgerald, 172)The beginning of The Great Gatsby is prefaced by a poem written by a fictional character from This Side of Paradise. It reads, T hen wear the gold hat, if that will move her If you can jump high, bounce for her too, Till she cry Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you (6) If the language of Jonathan Franzen are true, then it can be assumed that Fitzgeralds greatest adventure into the unknown was his relationship with Zelda. Their relationship became the basis of his lifes work, which made him one of the greatest storytellers American literature has known to date.