F. Scott Fitzgerald (1890 – 1940)

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald (1890 –1940)

2. I. Introduction: • He is best known for his novels and short stories which chronicle the excesses of America's 'Jazz Age' during the 1920s. • Born into a fairly well-to-do family in St Paul, Minnesota in 1896 Fitzgerald attended, but never graduated from Princeton University. Here he mingled with the brilliant classes from the Eastern Seaboard who so obsessed him for the rest of his life. • In 1917 he was drafted into the army, but he never saw active service abroad. Instead, he spent much of his time writing and re-writing his first novel This Side of Paradise, which on its publication in 1920 became an instant success. In the same year he married the beautiful Zelda Sayre and together they embarked on a rich life of endless parties. • Dividing their time between America and fashionable resorts in Europe, the Fitzgeralds became as famous for their lifestyle as for the novels he wrote. Fitzgerald once said 'Sometimes I don't know whether Zelda and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels'.

3. He followed his first success with The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), and The Great Gatsby (1925) which Fitzgerald considered his masterpiece. It was also at this time that Fitzgerald wrote many of his short stories which helped to pay for his extravagant lifestyle. • The bubble burst in the 1930s when Zelda became increasingly troubled by mental illness. Tender is the Night (1934), the story of Dick Diver and his schizophrenic wife Nicole, goes some way to show the pain that Fitzgerald felt. The book was not well received in America and he turned to script-writing in Hollywood for the final three years of his life. It was at this time he wrote the autobiographical essays collected posthumously in The Crack-Up and his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. He died in 1940.

4. II. His masterpiece: 1.The summary: • The entire story takes place in one summer in 1922. The novel describes the life and death of Jay Gatsby, as seen through the eyes of a narrator who does not share the same point of view as the fashionable people around him. The narrator learns that Gatsby became rich by breaking the law. Gatsby pretends to be a well-educated war hero, which he is not, yet the narrator portrays him as being far more noble than the rich, cruel, stupid people among whom he and Gatsby live.

5. Gatsby’s character is purified by a deep, unselfish love for Daisy, a beautiful, silly woman who, earlier, married a rich husband instead of Gatsby and moved into high society. • Gatsby has never lost his love for her and, in an era when divorce has become easy, he tries to win her back by becoming extravagantly rich himself. He does not succeed, and in the end he is killed almost by accident because of his determination to shield Daisy from disgrace. • None of Gatsby’s upper class friends come to his funeral. The narrator is so disgusted that he leaves New York and returns to his original home in the provinces.

6. What is Fitzgerald’s attitude toward Tom and Daisy? • He criticized them as selfish, hypocritical persons. • From The Great Gatsby, talk about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s achievement. • Fitzgerald’s greatness lies in the fact that he found intuitively in his personal experience the embodiment of that of the nation and created a myth out of American life. • The story of The Great Gatsby is a good illustration…… • Gatsby’s life follows a clear pattern: There is, at first, a dream; then disenchantment, and finally a sense of failure and despair. In this, Gatsby’s personal experience approximates the whole of the American experience up to the first few decades of this century. • America had been “a fresh, green breast of the new world, ” had pandered to the last and greatest of all human dreams and promised something like the orgiastic future for humanity.

7. Now the virgin forests have vanished and made way for a modern civilization, the only fitting symbol of which is the “valley of ashes, ” the living hell. Here modern men live in sterility and meaninglessness and futility as best illustrated by Gatsby’s essentially pointless parties. The crowds hardly know their host; many come and go without invitation. The music, the laughter, and the faces, all blurred as one confused mass, signify the purposelessness and loneliness of the partygoers beneath their masks of relaxation and joviality. • The shallowness of Daisy whose voice is “full of money”, the restless wickedness of Tom, the representative of the egocentric, careless rich, and Gatsby who is, on the one hand, charmingly innocent enough to believe that the past can be recovered and resurrected, but is on the other hand, both corrupt and corrupting, tragically convinced of the power of money.

8. However it was made – the behavior of these and other people like the Wilsons all clearly denote the vanishing of the great expectations which the first settlement of the American continent had inspired. The hope is gone; despair and doom have set in. thus Gatsby’s personal life has assumed a magnitude as a cultural-historical allegory for the nation. Here, then, lies the greatest intellectual achievement that Fitzgerald ever achieved.