The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Nor were his aspirations for military heroism any more successful. An indifferent student, he found his craving for recognition hampered by poor grades that interfered with his extracurricular pursuits of popularity, especially after he flunked out of Princeton University in 1917. The son of an unsuccessful businessman who had to rely upon his wife’s inheritance to support his children, Fitzgerald was sensitive to his family’s outsider status among the monied elite of his native St. His sense of defeat was the product of several formative setbacks that became the building blocks of his fiction. “Ernest with the authority of success” ( Notebooks 318). “I talk with the authority of failure,” he insisted. Whereas Hemingway’s is sparse and Faulkner’s veers toward psychological abstraction, Fitzgerald’s is intensely poetic to the point of rhapsodic, elevating his laments into veritable threnodies for the sureties and stable values that he felt modernity superannuated.īorn September 24, 1896, Fitzgerald suffered from a life-long inferiority complex that he later claimed distinguished him from Hemingway, his chief rival. Much like Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, his work is instantly recognizable due to its distinctive prose style. self-indulgence, love and romance, and money and class.

Only posthumously would critics appreciate his merits, although understanding of his talent would compete with popular interest in his life and marriage.įitzgerald’s main themes are ambition and loss, discipline vs. A half-decade later, he died in semi-obscurity, considered a failure, despite publishing 160+ short stories in his twenty-year career. By the time he completed Tender, the Depression had rendered the Roaring Twenties irrelevant, and Fitzgerald was considered a has-been. Before the age of thirty he published his masterpiece, Gatsby, but its artistic maturity was stymied for a decade by alcoholism, financial problems, and the mental illness of his wife, Zelda Sayre (1900-1948). Best known for The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934)-two keystones of modernist fiction-Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was the poet laureate of the “Jazz Age,” a term he popularized to convey the post-World War I era’s newfound prosperity, consumerism, and shifting sexual mores.įitzgerald first rose to fame at twenty-three by chronicling those changes in This Side of Paradise (1920).

The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald by F. Scott Fitzgerald