F. Scott Fitzgerald - A Timeless Writer Who Was a Man of His Time
F. Scott Fitzgerald is best known today as the author of the classic novel The Great Gatsby. The novel tells the story of Jay Gatsby, a poor and obscure Midwesterner who makes his fortune as a bootlegger to win the heart of his childhood sweetheart. One character says of Gatsby that he made himself up, in other words, that through creating a false personal mythology, by wearing fancy clothes, and buying fancy houses, Gatsby unsuccessfully tried to create a new identity for himself. The same could have been said of his creator, although unlike Gatsby, Fitzgerald had a far more ironic view of the world as a writer. He ironically chronicled Ivy League and elite Long Island society observed with wonder by the narrator of Fitzgerald's greatest book.Fitzgerald was born in the American heartland, in St. Paul Minnesota on September 24, 1896. His father Edward Fitzgerald was a failed furniture salesman and his mother Mary was an Irish immigrant. (Willet, 2006) Both were Catholic and thanks to his mother's inheritance, solidly middle-class, although it is said his father drank more at the office than he worked. The young Fitzgerald excelled as a writer at the Catholic school where he studied, but always felt somewhat out of his social
He was placed on academic probation. Zelda and Fitzgerald married a week after the novel's publication. 3-18) However, because of the reality of the personalities of his characters, and also because of the truths he highlighted about the lies behind what is still called the American Dream, his work regained its popularity, and has finally garnered his name the critical respect that eluded him in life. (Willet, 2006) The novel told the story of a poor boy whose family's financial ruin leads to his failure in love and school, as he grows enamored with a rich girl and fails to succeed academically at the elite institution of Princeton. (Bruccoli, 1994)Eerily, Fitzgerald seemed to expire as a writer and as a man with the rise and fall of the Jazz Age, which, despite his popularity, initially caused critics to refer to him as a writer very much of his own time. He wrote for the Princeton Triangle Club musicals, the Princeton Tiger humor magazine and the Nassau Literary Magazine. For several years, he managed to drink less and to write more, but he had lost his audience, and seemed to be working over old material. When he later proposed, Zelda initially rebuffed Fitzgerald, whose first novel had been rejected and who was a struggling advertising executive at the time. (Bruccoli, 1994) When the army stationed him near Montgomery, Alabama in 1918, Scott met and fell in love Zelda, who was later to become his wife. (Willet, 2006) After the Great Depression put a crimp in their lavish lifestyle, and cut the public's demand for tales of gay, carefree flappers, Fitzgerald's alcoholism grew worse. He left one last, unfinished novel called The Last Tycoon, which chronicled several of his Hollywood experiences in thinly disguised fictions.
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Acceptance Essays
