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F. Scott Fitzgerald
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940)
was an American writer of novels and short stories, whose works are
evocative of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely
regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Fitzgerald
is considered a member of the "Lost Generation" of the twenties. He
finished four novels, including The Great Gatsby, with another published
posthumously, and wrote dozens of short stories that treat themes of
youth and promise along with despair and age.
Biography
Early years
Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, to an upper-middle class Irish Catholic
household—aggressive mother, retiring father—Fitzgerald was named after
his famous relative Francis Scott Key, but was referred to as "Scott."
He spent 1898–1901 and 1903–1908 in Buffalo, New York, where he attended
Nardin Academy.[2] When his father was fired from Procter & Gamble, the
family returned to Minnesota, where Fitzgerald attended St. Paul Academy
in St. Paul from 1908–1911. His first literary effort, a detective
story, was published in a school newspaper when he was 13. He attended
Newman School, a prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey, in 1911–1912,
and entered Princeton University in 1913 as a member of the Class of
1917. There he became friends with future critics and writers Edmund
Wilson (Class of 1916) and John Peale Bishop (Class of 1917), and wrote
for the Princeton Triangle Club. His absorption in the Triangle—a kind
of musical-comedy society—led to a submitted novel to Charles Scribner's
Sons, the editor praised the writing but ultimately rejected the book.
He was a member of the University Cottage Club, which still displays
Fitzgerald's desk and writing materials in its library. A poor student,
Fitzgerald left Princeton to enlist in the US Army during World War I;
however, the war ended shortly after Fitzgerald's enlistment.
Zelda Sayre
Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, 1921
While at Camp Sheridan, Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre (1900–1948), the
"golden girl", in Fitzgerald's words, of Montgomery, Alabama youth
society. She was the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court Judge. The two
were engaged in 1919, and Fitzgerald moved into an apartment at 1395
Lexington Avenue in New York City to try to lay a foundation for his
life with Zelda. Working at an advertising firm and writing short
stories, he was unable to convince Zelda that he would be able to
support her, leading her to break off the engagement.
Fitzgerald returned to his parents' house at 599 Summit Avenue, on
Cathedral Hill, in St. Paul to revise The Romantic Egoist. Recast as
This Side of Paradise, about the post-WWI flapper generation, it was
accepted by Scribner's in the fall of 1919, and Zelda and Scott resumed
their engagement. The novel was published on March 26, 1920, and became
one of the most popular books of the year. Scott and Zelda were married
in New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral. Their daughter and only child,
Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald, was born on October 26, 1921.
Zelda
"The Jazz Age"
The 1920s proved the most influential
decade of Fitzgerald's development.The Great Gatsby, considered Scott's
masterpiece, was published in 1925. Fitzgerald made several excursions
to Europe, notably Paris and the French Riviera, and became friends with
many members of the American expatriate community in Paris, notably
Ernest Hemingway.
Hemingway looked up to Fitzgerald as an experienced professional
writer. Hemingway greatly admired The Great Gatsby and wrote in his A
Moveable Feast "If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I
was sure that he could write an even better one" (153). Hemingway
expressed his deep admiration for Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald's flawed,
self-defeating character, when he prefaced his chapters concerning
Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast with:
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust
on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the
butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later
he became conscious of his damaged wings and their construction and he
learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight
was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.
Much of what Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast helped to establish the
myth of Fitzgerald's dissipation and loss (of ability, social control,
and life) and Zelda's hand in that demise. Though the bulk of
Hemingway's text is factually correct, it is also colored by his
disappointment in Fitzgerald, as well as Hemingway's own rivalrous
response towards any competitor, living or dead. That disappointment was
most evident in The Green Hills of Africa, where he specifically
mentions Fitzgerald as an archetypal ruined American writer; Hemingway
had been both shocked and unnerved by Fitzgerald's account of his own
difficulties in his nonfiction essays and notebooks from the 1930s,
published as The Crack-Up (with Edmund Wilson as editor) in 1945.
Fitzgerald’s friendship with Hemingway was tumultuous, as many of
Fitzgerald’s relationships would prove to be. (As, indeed, were many of
the thrice-divorced Hemingway's.) Hemingway did not get on well with
Zelda, either. He claimed that she “encouraged her husband to drink so
as to distract Scott from his ‘real’ work on his novel," the other work
being the short stories he sold to magazines. This “whoring”, as
Fitzgerald, and subsequently Hemingway, called these sales, was a sore
point in the authors’ friendship. Fitzgerald claimed that he would first
write his stories in an authentic manner but then put in “twists that
made them into saleable magazine stories.”
Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda
But the marriage was mixed—both destructive and constructive.
Fitzgerald drew largely upon his wife's intense and flamboyant
personality in his writings, at times quoting direct passages from her
letters and personal diaries in his work. Zelda made mention of this in
a 1922 mock review in the New York Tribune, saying that " seems to
me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which
mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of
letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar.
In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems
to believe that plagiarism begins at home" (Zelda Fitzgerald: The
Collected Writings, 388). But the impact of Zelda's personality on his
work and life is often overstated, as much of his earliest writings
reflect the personality of a first love, Ginevra King. In fact, the
character of Daisy as much represents his inability to cultivate his
relationship with King as it does the ever-present fact of Zelda.
(Although Gatsby's economic failure to immediately wed Daisy in 1917,
with an eventual return in financial triumph, does closely mirror
Fitzgerald's own experiences with his future wife.)
Although Fitzgerald's
passion lay in writing novels, only his first novel sold well enough to
support the opulent lifestyle that he and Zelda adopted as New York
celebrities. As did most professional authors at the time, Fitzgerald
supplemented his income by writing short stories for such magazines as
The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire, and sold movie
rights of his stories and novels to Hollywood studios. Many of these
stories act as testing grounds for his novels. For example, "Absolution"
was intended as an earlier chapter in The Great Gatsby. Because of this
lifestyle, as well as the bills from Zelda's medical care when they
came, Fitzgerald was constantly in financial trouble and often required
loans from his literary agent, Harold Ober, and his editor at
Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins. When Ober decided not to continue advancing
Fitzgerald, the author severed ties with his longtime friend and agent.
(Fitzgerald offered a good-hearted and apologetic tribute to this
support in the late short story "Financing Finnegan.")
Fitzgerald began working on his fourth novel during the late 1920s
but was sidetracked by financial difficulties that necessitated his
writing commercial short stories, and by the schizophrenia that struck
Zelda in 1930. Her emotional health remained fragile for the rest of her
life. In 1932, she was hospitalized in Baltimore, Maryland. Scott rented
the "La Paix" estate in the suburb of Towson, Maryland to work on his
latest book, the story of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising
young psychiatrist who falls in love with and marries Nicole Warren, one
of his patients. The book went through many versions, the first of which
was to be a story of matricide. Some critics have seen the book as a
thinly-veiled autobiographical novel recounting Fitzgerald's problems
with his wife, the corrosive effects of wealth and a decadent lifestyle,
his own egoism and self-confidence, and his continuing alcoholism.
Indeed, Fitzgerald was extremely protective of his material (their life
together). When Zelda wrote and sent to Scribner's her own fictional
version of their lives in Europe, Save Me the Waltz, Fitzgerald was
angry and was able to make some changes prior to the novel's
publication, and convince her doctors to keep her from writing any more
about what he called his "material," which included their relationship.
His book was finally published in 1934 as Tender Is the Night. Critics
who had waited nine years for the followup to The Great Gatsby had mixed
opinions about the novel. Most were thrown off by its five-part
structure and many felt that Fitzgerald had not lived up to their
expectations. The novel did not sell well upon
publication, but like the earlier Gatsby, the book's reputation has
since risen significantly.
Hollywood years
Although he reportedly found movie work degrading, Fitzgerald was once
again in dire financial straits, and spent the second half of the 1930s
in Hollywood, working on commercial short stories, scripts for
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (including some unfilmed work on Gone with the
Wind), and his fifth and final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon.
Published posthumously as The Last Tycoon, it was based on the life of
film executive Irving Thalberg. Scott and Zelda became estranged; she
continued living in mental institutions on the east coast, while he
lived with his lover Sheilah Graham, a gossip columnist, in Hollywood.
From 1939 until his death, Fitzgerald mocked himself as a Hollywood hack
through the character of Pat Hobby in a sequence of 17 short stories,
later collected as "The Pat Hobby Stories"
Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda
Illness and death
Fitzgerald had been an alcoholic since his college days, and became
notorious during the 1920s for his extraordinarily heavy drinking,
leaving him in poor health by the late 1930s. According to Zelda's
biographer, Nancy Milford, Scott claimed that he had contracted
tuberculosis, but Milford dismisses it as a pretext to cover his
drinking problems. However, Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli
contends that Fitzgerald did in fact have recurring tuberculosis, and
Nancy Milford reports that Fitzgerald biographer Arthur Mizener said
that Scott suffered a mild attack of tuberculosis in 1919, and in 1929
he had "what proved to be a tubercular hemorrhage". It has been said
that the hemorrhage was caused by bleeding from esophageal varices.
Fitzgerald suffered two heart attacks in late 1940. After the first,
in Schwab's Drug Store, he was ordered by his doctor to avoid strenuous
exertion and to obtain a first floor apartment. He moved in with Sheilah
Graham, who lived on the first floor. On the night of December 20, 1940,
he had his second heart attack, and the next day, December 21, while
awaiting a visit from his doctor, Fitzgerald collapsed in Graham's
apartment and died.
Among the attendants at a visitation held at
a funeral home in Hollywood was Dorothy Parker, who reportedly cried and
murmured "that dirty bastard", a line from Jay Gatsby's funeral in
Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. In a strange coincidence, the
author Nathanael West, who was a friend and admirer of Fitzgerald, was
killed along with his wife Eileen McKenney in El Centro, California,
while driving back to Los Angeles to attend Fitzgerald's funeral
service.
Fitzgerald's remains were then shipped to Maryland, where his funeral
was attended by very few people. The church would not allow him to be
buried in his family's plot in Rockville and he was originally buried in
Rockville Union Cemetery. Zelda died tragically in a fire at the
Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1948. With the
permission and assistance of their only child, Frances "Scottie"
Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith, the Women's Club of Rockville had their bodies
moved to the family plot in Saint Mary's Cemetery, in Rockville,
Maryland.
Fitzgerald never completed The Love of the Last Tycoon. His notes for
the novel were edited by his friend Edmund Wilson and published in 1941
as The Last Tycoon. In 1994, the book was rereleased under the original
title The Love of the Last Tycoon, which is now agreed upon as
Fitzgerald's intended title.
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Zelda
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Tender is the Night
F.Scott Fitzgerald
1896-1940
F. Scott Fitzgerald is recognized as the ultimate chronicler of
the American post-war boom and Jazz era, drawing on his own life
to describe the extravagant nonstop, alcohol-fueled party of the
pre-Depression years. Tender is the Night sold well and was
generally well-received, attracting praise from Fitzgerald's
peers, Ernest Hemingway among them. Set in the 1920s, the book
tells the story of beautiful eighteen-year-old movie star
Rosemary Hoyt, who is on holiday with her mother on the French
Riviera when she meets Dick Diver, an American psychologist, and
his wealthy wife Nicole. Nicole had been abused by her father,
commited to a sanitarium, and subequently rescued by her doctor,
who is now her husband. Entering their sophisticated, high
society world, Rosemary falls in love with Dick, and he with
her. They are blissfully happy for a while, but tragedy soon
strikes when a friend of the Divers kills a man in a
drunk-driving accident, and Nicole has a nervous breakdown. At
this point in the novel, the Divers' idyll disintegrates as a
series of unfortunate events begins to unfold.
This is Fitzgerald's most autobiographical work, drawing on his
own experiences living with the expatriate fast set in the south
of France.The Divers were based on Gerald and Sara Murphy,a
glamorous American couple that he and his wife Zelda knew. The
novel also features the same sort of psychological treatments
that the schizophrenic Zelda sought in Switzerland; the high
costs of the treatment drove Fitzgerald away from novel-writing
and into the life of heavy drinking and Hollywood screenwriting
that led to his early death. And unlike the novel, real life
doesn't have a happy ending—in contrast to Nicole, Zelda never
recovered, remaining institutionalized until her death in 1948.
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The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
1896-1940
The Great Gatsby is an American literary classic. Nick
Carraway's enraptured account of the rise and fall of his
charismatic neighbor during a single summer came to evoke the
pleasurable excesses and false promises of a whole decade. The
novel's extraordinary visual motifs—the brooding eyes of the
billboard, the ashen wasteland between metropolitan New York and
hedonistic Long Island, the blues and golds of Gatsby's
nocturnal hospitality —combined the iconography of the "jazz
age" and its accompanying anxieties about the changing social
order characteristic of American modernism. Gatsby, infamously
created out of a "platonic conception of himself," came to be
synonymous with nothing less than the American Dream.
Gatsby's lavish and hedonistic lifestyle is a construct, we
quickly learn, erected in order to seduce Daisy, the lost love
of his youth who is now married to the millionaire Tom Buchanan.
Fitzgerald's easy conjuring of Gatsby's shimmering fantasy world
is matched by his presentation of its darker and more pugnacious
realities. The novel frequently hints at the corruption that
lies behind Gatsby's wealth, and Tom is shown to be a crude and
adulterous husband. The novel's violent climax is a damning
indictment of the careless excess of the very privileged, yet it
concludes ambivalently.
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THE GREAT GATSBY
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Type of work: Novel
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
Type of plot: Social criticism
Time of plot: 1922
Locale: New York City and Long Island
First published: 1925
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Jay Gatz changes his name to Gatsby and amasses great wealth by
dubious means solely to please Daisy, a socialite. Wooed earlier by the
penniless Gatsby, Daisy had rejected him for her social equal, Tom
Buchanan. Yet no matter how high Gatsby rises, he is doomed, for the
wealthy Buchanans are not worthy ofGatsby's sincerity and innocence.
Though Gatsby plans to take the blame for a hit-and-run murder committed
by Daisy, Tom Buchanan tells the victim's husband that Gatsby was
driving, and the husband murders Gatsby. The Buchanans retreat into the
irresponsibility their wealth allows them.
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Principal Characters
Nick Carraway, the narrator. A young midwesterner who was dissatisfied
with his life at home, he was attracted to New York and now sells bonds
there. He is the most honest character of the novel and because of this
trait fails to become deeply fascinated by his rich friends on Long
Island. He helps Daisy and Jay Gatsby to renew a love they had known
before Daisy's marriage, and he is probably the only person in the novel
to have any genuine affection for Gatsby.
Jay Gatsby, a fabulously rich racketeer whose connections outside of the
law are only guessed at. He is the son of poor parents from the Middle
West. He has changed his name from James Gatz and becomes obsessed with
a need for making more and more money. Much of his time is spent in
trying to impress and become accepted by other rich people. He gives
lavish parties for people he knows nothing about and most of whom he
never meets. He is genuinely in love with Daisy Buchanan and becomes a
sympathetic character when he assumes the blame for her hit-and-run
accident. At his death he has been deserted by everyone except his
father and Nick.
Daisy Buchanan, Nick's second cousin. Unhappy in her marriage because of
Tom Buchanan's deliberate unfaithfulness, she has the character of a
"poor little rich girl." She renews an old love for Jay Gatsby and
considers leaving her husband, but she is finally reconciled to him. She
kills Tom's mistress in a hit-and-run accident after a quarrel in which
she defends both men as Tom accuses Gatsby of trying to steal her from
him; but she allows Gatsby to take the blame for the accident and
suffers no remorse when he is murdered by the woman's husband.
Tom Buchanan, Daisy's husband. The son of rich midwestern parents, he
reached the heights of his career as a college football player.
Completely without taste, culture, or sensitivity, he carries on a
rather sordid affair with Myrtle Wilson. He pretends to help George
Wilson, her husband, but allows him to think that Gatsby was not only
her murderer but also her lover.
Myrtle Wilson, Tom Buchanan's mistress. She is a fat, unpleasant woman
who is to highly appreciative of the fact that her lover is a rich man
that she will suffer almost any degradation for him. While she is with
Rom, her pretense that she is rich and highly sophisticated becomes
ludicrous.
George Wilson, Myrtle's husband, and a rather pathetic figure. He runs
an auto repair shop and believes Tom Buchanan is really interested in
helping him. Aware that his wife has a lover, he never suspects who he
really is. His faith in Tom makes him believe what Buchanan says, which,
in turns, causes him to murder Gatsby and then commit suicide.
Jordan Baker, a friend of the Buchanans, a golfer. Daisy introduces
Jordan to Nick and tries to throw them together, but when Nick realizes
that she is a cheat who refuses to assume the elementary responsibility
of the individual, he loses all interest in her.
Meyer Wolfshiem, a gambler and underworld associate of Gatsby.
Catherine, Myrtle Wilson's sister, who is obviously proud of Myrtle's
rich connection and unconcerned with the immorality involved.
Mr. and Mrs. McKee, a photographer and his wife who try to use Nick and
Tom to get a start among the rich people of Long Island.
Mr. Gatz, Jay Gatsby's father who, being unaware of the facts of Jay's
life, thought his son had been a great man.
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The Story
Young Nick Carraway decided to forsake the hardware business of his
family in the Middle West in order to sell bonds in New York City. He
took a small house in West Egg on Long Island and there became involved
in the lives of his neighbors. At a dinner party at the home of Tom
Buchanan, he renewed his acquaintance with Tom and Tom's wife, Daisy, a
distant cousin, and he met an attractive young woman, Jordan Baker.
Almost at once he learned that Tom and Daisy were not happily married.
It appeared that Daisy knew her husband was unfaithful.
Nick soon learned to despise the drive to the city through unkempt
slums; particularly, he hated the ash heaps and the huge commercial
signs. He was far more interested in the activities of his wealthy
neighbors. Near his house lived Jay Gatsby, a mysterious man of great
wealth. Gatsby entertained lavishly, but his past was unknown to his
neighbors.
One day, Tom Buchanan took Nick to call on his mistress, a dowdy, plump,
married woman named Myrtle Wilson, whose husband, George Wilson,
operated a second-rate automobile repair shop. Myrtle, Tom, and Nick
went to the apartment that Tom kept, and there the three were joined by
Myrtle's sister Catherine and Mr. and Mrs. McKee. The party settled down
to an afternoon of drinking, Nick unsuccessfully doing his best to get
away.
A few days later, Nick attended another party, one given by Gatsby for a
large number of people famous in speakeasy society. Food and liquor were
dispensed lavishly. Most of the guests had never seen their host before.
At the party, Nick met Gatsby for the first time. Gatsby, in his early
thirties, looked like a healthy young roughneck. He was offhand, casual,
and eager to entertain his guests as extravagantly as possible.
Frequently he was called away by long-distance telephone calls. Some of
the guests laughed and said that he was trying to impress them with his
importance.
That summer, Gatsby gave many parties. Nick went to all of them,
enjoying each time the society of people from all walks of life who
appeared to take advantage of Gatsby's bounty. From time to time, Nick
met Jordan Baker there, and when he heard that she had cheated in an
amateur golf match, his interest in her grew.
Gatsby took Nick to lunch one day and introduced him to a man named
Wolfshiem, who seemed to be Gatsby's business partner. Wolfshiem hinted
at some dubious business deals that betrayed Gatsby's racketeering
activities, and Nick began to identify the sources of some of Gatsby's
wealth.
Jordan Baker told Nick the strange story of Daisy's wedding. Before the
bridal dinner, Daisy, who seldom drank, became wildly intoxicated and
kept reading a letter that she had just received and crying that she had
changed her mind. After she had become sober, however, she went through
with her wedding to Tom without a murmur. Obviously, the letter was from
Jay Gatsby. At the time, Gatsby was poor and unknown; Tom was rich and
influential.
Gatsby was still in love with Daisy, however, and he wanted Jordan and
Nick to bring Daisy and him together again. It was arranged that Nick
should invite Daisy to tea the same day he invited Gatsby. Gatsby
awaited the invitation nervously.
On the eventful day, it rained. Determined that Nick's house should be
presentable, Gatsby sent a man to mow the wet grass; he also sent over
flowers for decoration. The tea was a strained affair at first, and
Gatsby and Daisy were shy and awkward in their reunion. Afterward, they
went over to Gatsby's mansion, where he showed them his furniture,
clothes, swimming pool, and gardens. Daisy promised to attend his next
party.
When Daisy disapproved of his guests, Gatsby stopped entertaining. The
house was shut up and the bar crowd turned away.
Gatsby informed Nick of his origin. His true name was Gatz, and he had
been born in the Middle West. His parents were poor. When he was a boy,
he had become the protege of a wealthy old gold miner and had
accompanied him on his travels until the old man died. He had changed
his name to Gatsby and was daydreaming of acquiring wealth and position.
In the war, he had distinguished himself. After the war, he had returned
penniless to the States, too poor to marry Daisy, whom he had met during
the war. Later, he became a partner in a drug business. He had been
lucky and had accumulated money rapidly. He told Nick that he had
acquired the money for his Long Island residence after three years of
hard work.
The Buchanans gave a quiet party for Jordan. Gatsby, and Nick. The group
drove into the city and took a room in a hotel. The day was hot and the
guests uncomfortable. On the way, Tom, driving Gatsby's new yellow car,
stopped at Wilson's garage. Wilson complained because Tom had not helped
him in a projected car deal. He said he needed money because he was
selling out and taking his wife. whom he knew to be unfaithful, away
from the city.
At the hotel, Tom accused Gatsby of trying to steal his wife and also of
being dishonest. He seemed to regard Gatsby's low origin with more
disfavor than his interest in Daisy. During the argument, Daisy, sided
with both men. On the ride back to the suburbs, Gatsby drove his own
car, accompanied by Daisy, who temporarily would not speak to her
husband.
Following them, Nick, Jordan, and Tom stopped to investigate an accident
in front of Wilson's garage. They discovered an ambulance picking up the
dead body of Myrtle Wilson, struck by a hit-and-run driver in a yellow
car. They tried in vain to help Wilson and then went on to Tom's house,
convinced that Gatsby had struck Myrtle Wilson.
Nick learned that night from Gatsby that Daisy had been driving when the
woman was hit. Gatsby, however, was willing to take the blame if the
death should be traced to his car. He explained that a woman had rushed
out as though she wanted to speak to someone in the yellow car and
Daisy, an inexpert driver, had run her down and then collapsed. Gatsby
had driven on.
In the meantime, George Wilson, having traced the yellow car to Gatsby,
appeared on the Gatsby estate. A few hours later, both he and Gatsby
were discovered dead. He had shot Gatsby and then killed himself.
Nick tried to make Gatsby's funeral respectable, but only one among all
of Gatsby's former guests attended along with Gatsby's father, who
thought his son had been a great man. None of Gatsby's racketeering
associates appeared.
Shortly afterward, Nick learned of Tom's part in Gatsby's death. Wilson
had visited Tom and had threatened Tom with a revolver, forcing him to
reveal the name of the owner of the hit-and-run car. Nick vowed that his
friendship with Tom and Daisy was ended. He decided to return his people
in the Middle West.
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Critical Evaluation
F. Scott Fitzgerald, the prophet of the Jazz Age, was born in St. Paul,
Minnesota, to the daughter of a self-made Irish immigrant millionaire.
His father was a ne'er-do-well salesman who had married above his social
position. From his mother, Fitzgerald inherited the dream that was
America—the promise that any young man could become anything he chose
through hard work. From his father, he inherited a propensity for
failure. This antithesis pervaded his own life and most of his fiction.
Educated in the East, Fitzgerald was overcome with the glamour of New
York and Long Island. To him, it was the "stuff of old romance," "the
source of infinite possibilities." His fiction focused primarily on the
lives of the rich. With the family fortune depleted by his father,
Fitzgerald found himself in his early twenties an army officer in love
with a Southern belle, Zelda Sayre, who was socially above him. She
refused his first proposal of marriage because he was too poor.
Fitzgerald was determined to have her. He wrote and published This Side
of Paradise (1920), on the basis of which Zelda married him.
Their public life for the next ten years epitomized the dizzy spiral of
the 1920s—wild parties, wild spending— and, following the national
pattern, they crashed spectacularly in the 1930s. Zelda went mad and was
committed finally to a sanitarium. Fitzgerald became a functional
alcoholic. From his pinnacle in the publishing field during the 1920s,
when his short stories commanded as much as fifteen hundred dollars, he
fell in the 1930s to writing lukewarm Hollywood scripts. He died in
Hollywood in 1940. almost forgotten and with most of his work out of
print. Later revived in academic circles, Fitzgerald's reputation in
American letters rests primarily on a single novel—The Great Gatsby.
Fitzgerald once said, "America's great promise is that something's going
to happen, but it never does. America is the moon that never rose." This
indictment of the America Dream could well serve as an epigraph for The
Great Gatsby. Jay Gatsby pursues his dream of romantic success without
ever understanding that it has escaped him. He fails to understand that
he cannot recapture the past (his fresh, new love for Daisy Buchanan) no
matter how much money he makes, no matter how much wealth he displays.
The character of Gatsby was never intended by Fitzgerald to be a
realistic portrayal; he is a romantic hero, always somewhat unreal,
bogus, and absurd. No matter the corrupt sources of his wealth such as
bootlegging and gambling (and these are only hinted at), he stands for
hope, for romantic belief—for innocence. He expects more from life than
the other characters who are all more or less cynical. He is an eternal
juvenile in a brutal and corrupt world.
To underscore the corruption of the American Dream, Fitzgerald's
characters all are finally seen as liars. Buchanan's mistress lies to
her husband. Jordan Baker is a pathological liar who cheats in golf
tournaments. Tom Buchanan's lie to his mistress Myrtle's husband results
in the murder of Gatsby. Daisy, herself, is basically insincere; she
lets Gatsby take the blame for her hit-and-run accident. Gatsby's whole
life is a lie: he lies about his past and his present. He lies to
himself. Nick Carraway, the midwestern narrator, tells readers that he
is the only completely honest person he knows. He panders for Gatsby,
however, and in the end, he turns away from Tom Buchanan, unable to
force the truth into the open. He knows the truth about Gatsby but is
unable to tell the police. His affirmation of Gatsby at the end is
complex; he envies Gatsby's romantic selflessness and innocence at the
same time that he abhors his lack of self-knowledge.
The Great Gatsby incorporates a number of themes and motifs that unify
the novel and contribute to its impact. The initiation theme governs the
narrator Nick Carraway, who is a young man come East to make his fortune
in stocks and bonds and who returns to the Midwest sadly disillusioned.
The frontier theme is also present. Gatsby believes in the "green
light," the ever-accessible future in which one can achieve what one has
missed in the past. The final paragraphs of the novel state this
important theme as well as it has ever been stated. Class issues are
very well presented. Tom and Daisy seem accessible, but when their
position is threatened, they close the doors, retreating into their
wealth and carelessness, letting others like Gatsby pay the price in
hurt and suffering. The carelessness of the rich and their followers is
seen in the recurring motif of the bad driver.
Automobile accidents are ubiquitous. At Gatsby's first party, there is a
smashup with drunk drivers. Jordan Baker has a near accident after which
Nick calls her "a rotten driver." Gatsby is stopped for speeding but is
able to fix the ticket by showing the cop a card from the mayor of New
York. Finally, Myrtle Wilson is killed by Daisy, driving Gatsby's car.
Bad driving becomes symbolic of pervasive irresponsibility and
self-indulgence.
Settings in the novel are used very well by Fitzgerald, from the
splendid mansions of Long Island through the wasteland of the valley of
ashes presided over by the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg (where the
Wilsons live) to the New York of the Plaza Hotel or Tom and Myrtle
Wilson's apartment. Most important, however, is Fitzgerald's use of Nick
as a narrator. Like Conrad before him—and from whom he learned his
craft—Fitzgerald had a romantic sensibility that controlled fictional
material best through the lens of a narrator. Like Marlow in Conrad's
Heart of Darkness, Nick relates the story of an exceptional man who
fails in his dream. He is both attracted and repelled by a forceful man
who dares to lead a life he could not sustain. Like Marlow, he pays
tribute to his hero, who is also his alter ego. Gatsby's tragedy is
Nick's education. His return to the Midwest is a moral return to the
safer, more solid values of the heartland. Fitzgerald himself was unable
to follow such a path, but he clearly felt that the American Dream
should be pursued with less frantic, orgiastic, prideful convulsions of
energy and spirit.
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