Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Campina
-Graduation Paper-
-MAY 2015-
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Early life and family
3. The talented 15 year-old Fitzgerald
4. War motivated Fitzgerald to write a novel
5. Fitzgerald meets Zelda
6. The first published novel
7. An extravagant lifestyle
8. Hemingway and Fitzgerald- a rocky
friendship
9. Second novel
10. Moving to France
11. The story of The Great Gatsby
12. Alcoholism and mental health issues
13. Fourth novel
14. Fitzgeralds short stories
15. The love of the last tycoon
16. Death
17.Conlusion
18.Bibliography
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1. INTRODUCTION
F.Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) is best known for his novels and short stories which chronicle
the excesses of Americas Jazz Age during the 1920s.
This work is a well documented reference on the life and work of this controversial American
writer, presenting both the bright and the dark facet of his existence.
In the same year he married the beautiful Zelda Sayre and together they embarked on a rich life
of endless parties. Fitzgerald once said : Sometimes I dont know whether Zelda and I are real
or whether we are characters in one of my novels.
Following the unsuccessful Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood and became a
scriptwriter. He died of a heart attack in 1940, at age 44, his final novel only half completed.
This work is supposed to shed light on the extravagant life of this wonderful, but somehow
gloomy writer whose work did rise both admiration and criticism.
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An exuberant child and an
unfortunate adult:
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul,
Minnesota. Fitzgerald's mother, Mary McQuillan, was from an Irish-Catholic family that had made a small fortune
in Minnesota as wholesale grocers. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, had opened a wicker furniture business in St.
Paul, and, when it failed, he took a job as a salesman for Procter & Gamble that took his family back and forth
between Buffalo and Syracuse in upstate New York during the first decade of Fitzgerald's life. However, Edward
Fitzgerald lost his job with Procter & Gamble in 1908, when F. Scott Fitzgerald was 12, and the family moved
back to St. Paul to live off of his mother's inheritance.
Fitzgerald was a bright, handsome and ambitious boy, the pride and
joy of his parents and especially his mother. He attended the St. Paul
Academy, and when he was 13, he saw his first piece of writing appear
in print: a detective story published in the school newspaper. In 1911,
when Fitzgerald was 15 years old, his parents sent him to the Newman
School, a prestigious Catholic preparatory school in New Jersey.
There, he met Father Sigourney Fay, who noticed his incipient talent
with the written word and encouraged him to pursue his literary
ambitions. Fitzgerald read widely and demonstrated early talent for
writing, but he was a lousy student who struggled to achieve passing
marks in both grade school and in college. He had a penchant for
cutting classes during his time at Princeton University, and nearly
failed out before abandoning his studies to join the military.
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After graduating from the Newman School in 1913, Fitzgerald decided to stay in New Jersey to continue his
artistic development at Princeton University. At Princeton, he firmly dedicated himself to honing his craft as a
writer, writing scripts for Princeton's famous Triangle Club musicals as well as frequent articles for the Princeton
Tiger humor magazine and stories for the Nassau Literary Magazine. However, Fitzgerald's writing came at the
expense of his coursework. He was placed on academic probation, and, in 1917, he dropped out of school to join
the U.S. Army. Afraid that he might die in World War I with his literary dreams unfulfilled, in the weeks before
reporting to duty, Fitzgerald hastily wrote a novel called The Romantic Egotist. Though the publisher, Charles
Scribner's Sons, rejected the novel, the reviewer noted its originality and encouraged Fitzgerald to submit more
work in the future.
Beautiful and unpredictable, Zelda was a major inspiration for the new
generation of liberated flapper girls Fitzgerald often wrote about in his
novels and stories. She smoked and drank in public, cracked risqu
jokes and was an accomplished painter, dancer and writer. The
couples fashionable clothes and booze-fueled antics made them the toast of the literary worldwriter Ring
Lardner even called them the prince and princess of their generationbut their glamorous lives were later
visited by tragedy in the 1930s. Fitzgerald sank into alcoholism and struggled to write, and Zelda suffered a mental
breakdown and spent the latter part of her life in and out of sanitariums.
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The novel's new incarnation, This Side of Paradise, a largely autobiographical
story about love and greed, was centered on Amory Blaine, an ambitious
Midwesterner who falls in love with, but is ultimately rejected by, two girls
from high-class families. The novel was published in 1920 to glowing reviews and,
almost overnight, turned Fitzgerald, at the age of 24, into one of the country's
most promising young writers. One week after the novel's publication, he
married Zelda Sayre in New York. They had one child, a daughter named
Frances Scott Fitzgerald, born in 1921.
7. Extravagant lifestyle
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Fitzgerald was friends with the unarguably greatest American writer, Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway and
F. Scott Fitzgerald must surely rank as one of the oddest couples in literary history. Best friends briefly and later
acrimonious rivals, they were two of their generation's pre-eminent writers, their mutual achievements obscured by
the potent legends that accrued around their names.
In ''Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald,'' Scott Donaldson, author of earlier biographies of both men, laments the cult of
celebrity that has diminished the accomplishments of artists, while putting ''every detail of their private lives''
under ''intense scrutiny.'' we are told the story of how Fitzgerald helped the young Hemingway, acting as his agent
and advocate and performing some crucial editing on ''The Sun Also Rises.'' And once again we are told the story
of how Hemingway paid Fitzgerald back by belittling him to mutual friends and creating a snide, condescending
(and probably fictionalized) portrait of him in ''A Moveable Feast.''
in one typically overwritten passage, Mr. Donaldson describes Hemingway as having ''a dark side to his nature,
blacker than Zimbabwe granite.'' ''Hemingway felt a compulsion to dominate, to lord it over others,'' he writes,
''and Fitzgerald had a complementary need to be dominated. If Ernest liked to kick, Scott wore a sign on his
backside saying 'Kick Me.'
While the friendship between Hemingway and Fitzgerald dwindled after 1926 -- they were rarely on the same
continent during the 1930's and saw each other only four times in that decade -- Fitzgerald, in Mr. Donaldson's
words, ''struggled gamely to preserve the illusion of what had once been the closest of relationships.'' His star,
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however, was falling, while Hemingway's was ascendant, and his ''eagerness to be involved in Ernest's life and
career'' was now regarded as meddling on the part of a pathetic has-been.
The relationship of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald certainly had its ups and downs during the 1930s.
While Fitzgerald was greatly troubled by his lack of success Hemingway prospered and became the more
successful of the two. Fitzgerald was perhaps Hemingway's greatest admirer; he respected his work and invited his
opinions. It's unfortunate that in this admiration Fitzgerald also became intimidated by Hemingway's success. It's
hard, actually, to view the relationship between the two during the 1930s as even really being a friendship. They
were two writers who admired each other's skill and sometimes each other's work and shared ideas about both.
Matthew Bruccoli writes in his documentary book A Life in Letters: F. Scott Fitzgerald that Fitzgerald was a
compulsive list maker who felt a strong need to keep records. He made a list in 1940 in which he wrote down all
the meetings between himself and Hemingway from 1925-37. At the bottom of the page Fitzgerald wrote: "Four
times in eleven years (1929-1940). Not really friends since '26" (206). Perhaps that really sums up their
relationship best.
''Hemingway and Fitzgerald were different, not better,'' he writes in one particularly trite passage. ''Each was great
in his own way. In that league, no one had to lose for both of them to be winners.'', Donaldson noted. Winners, it
turns out, subject to today's laws of fame, and hence the focus of yet another cheesy chronicle of calamity and
waste.
9. Second novel
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In 1922, Fitzgerald published his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, the story of the troubled marriage of
Anthony and Gloria Patch. The Beautiful and Damned helped to cement his status as one of the great chroniclers
and satirists of the culture of wealth, extravagance and ambition that emerged during the affluent 1920swhat
became known as the Jazz Age. "It was an age of miracles," Fitzgerald wrote, "it was an age of art, it was an age
of excess, and it was an age of satire."
Seeking a change of scenery to spark his creativity, in 1924, Fitzgerald moved to France, and it was there, in
Valescure, that Fitzgerald wrote what would be credited as his greatest novel, The Great Gatsby. Published in
1925, The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner who moves into the town of West Egg on
Long Island, next door to a mansion owned by the wealthy and mysterious Jay Gatsby. The novel follows Nick
and Gatsby's strange friendship and Gatsby's pursuit of a married woman named Daisy, ultimately leading to his
exposure as a bootlegger and his death.
The story itself is essentially about the moral decay the ensued in
America during the 1920s. Although other countries had class
divisions, the US had the equivalent of an upper class in the form of
patricians or members of long-established wealthy families. These New World aristocrats lorded themselves above
other people and spent much of their lives partying their way through the Jazz Age. In addition , 1920 had seen
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the prohibition of alcohol, with the result that
organized criminals had seen a way to make good
money by bootlegging or illegally selling liquor.
When both these groups came together they formed a
social order dilettantism- people who assumed and
cultivated pretentions of sophistication. The story of
The Great Gatsby spirals intro tragedy as the book
progresses with a succession of events- manslaughter,
murder and the suicide- tragedy that seems all the
more horrific in contrast to the spirited and frothy
excesses that have come before.
There is more to the popularity of the novel than its installation into the favour of the US literati by proxy- its a
book that is representative of an era. In truth, most people had little or no direct involvement with the kinds of
people described in the book, but it was a subculture that was perceived as glamorous so it caught the public
imagination.
The Great Gatsby became a curious window into a world that had been and gone. A world where elements of
US society had drowned themselves in a moral and ethical sump. It was a warning about what can happen when
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people become decadent and dishonourable. The novel served as an antithesis to the values and image that clean-
cut Americans wanted to promote in the 1950s as a new generation became the custodians of their proud nation.
Iniquity was brushed under the carpet and only allowed to exist in the land of fiction.
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In 1934, after years of toil,
Fitzgerald finally published his
fourth novel, Tender is the Night,
about an American psychiatrist in
Paris, France, and his troubled
marriage to a wealthy patient. The
bubble burst in 1930 when Zelda
became increasingly troubled by
mental illness. Tender is the
night , the story of Dick Diver and
his schizophrenic wife Nicole,
goes some way to show the pain
Fitzgerald felt. Although Tender is the Night was a commercial failure and was initially poorly received due to its
chronologically jumbled structure, it has since gained in reputation and is now considered among the great
American novels.
Published in the spring of 1934, Tender is the Night was originally to be called Doctor Diverss Holiday. The
story of the collapse of a marriage and the attempt to diagnose the sickness that money breeds, make it the most
poignant and autobiograogical of all Fitzgeralds novels. A 1962 film, Tender Is the Night, is based on the novel.
Fitzgeralds short stories remain the broadest and most comprehensive summary and analysis of the Jazz Age. He
was far more successful in his lifetime with his stories than he was with his longer fiction, and yet both have
endured the test of time as entertainment, social catalog, and reflection of their time.
Fitzgerald published over 160 stories in his lifetime, beginning in his adolescence. This collection includes stories
from the years between the wars. There are recurring themes of romantic loss, financial and social excess, the
change in family values and the effect of war upon the nation and the world which weave a thread through this
collection. That is not to say that the thirteen stories summarised here are similar. There is a diversity of setting, a
quality of description and a breadth of imagination shown in these tales that is uniquely exciting and enthralling.
There may be characters who over time have become typecast: the flapper, the petulant teenager, the innocent rose
and the dashing hero. However, within each story the characters are credible even when placed in incredible
situations. Observe characters such as Benjamin Button, who is uniquely afflicted with the curse of growing young
instead of old. His progress through life feels as human as the path the rest of us follow, and his sad condition
almost seems possible.
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The emergence of the spirited, confident and beautiful heroine of Fitzgerald's long fiction is predicted in these
stories. Ardita, Bernice, Jenny, Sally Carrol, Nancy and Stella are each individuals within a type, all unique yet
typical of an age. Our heroes such as Toby, Jim, Joel, Dexter, Charlie and Jacob exemplify the qualities of
bravery, excess, extravagance, selfishness, obsession and regret in different proportions and in different
circumstances.
After another two years lost to alcohol and depression, in 1937 Fitzgerald attempted to revive his career as a
screenwriter and freelance storywriter in Hollywood, and he achieved modest financial, if not critical, success for
his efforts. He began work on another novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, in 1939, and he had completed over
half the manuscript when he died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, at the age of 44, in Hollywood,
California. Unfortunately, once with his death, he left his last novel The Love of the Last Tycoon unfinished, but a
series of American screenwriters and directors managed to make up a successful end for the story and turned it
into a well-appreciated Hollywood movie.
16. Death
17. Conclusion
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Fitzgerald's work has inspired writers ever since he was first published. The publication of The
Great Gatsby prompted T. S. Eliot to write, in a letter to Fitzgerald, "It seems to me to be the
first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James ...". Don Birnam, the protagonist
of Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend, says to himself, referring to The Great Gatsby,
"There's no such thing ... as a flawless novel. But if there is, this is it." In letters written in the
1940s, J. D. Salinger expressed admiration of Fitzgerald's work, and his biographer Ian
Hamilton wrote that Salinger even saw himself for some time as "Fitzgerald's successor".
Richard Yates, a writer often compared to Fitzgerald, called The Great Gatsby "the most
nourishing novel he read ... a miracle of talent ... a triumph of technique". It was written in
a New York Times editorial after his death that Fitzgerald "was better than he knew, for in fact
and in the literary sense he invented a generation ... He might have interpreted them and even
guided them, as in their middle years they saw a different and nobler freedom threatened with
destruction."
Into the 21st century, millions of copies of The Great Gatsby and his other works have been
sold, and Gatsby, a constant best-seller, is required reading in many high school and college
classes.
Fitzgerald is a 2009 inductee of the New Jersey Hall of Fame. He is also the namesake of
the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, home of the radio broadcast of A Prairie Home
Companion.
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18. Bibiliography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald
http://www.gradesaver.com/short-stories-of-f-scott-fitzgerald
Some sort of epic grandeur. The life of F.S Fitzgerald Matthew J. Bruccoli
The Diamond as big as the Ritz and other stories F.S. Fitzgerald (introduction by Stuart
Hutchinson)
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