F. Scott Fitzgerald: Life, Works, and The Great Gatsby
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was one of the most important writers in the USA and a social historian who gave the Jazz Age its name.
Jazz became very popular in the 1920s with great musicians such as Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman, and with the invention of the phonograph record.
Fitzgerald’s fiction is a rich, detailed, and realistic account of American life in the 1920s. Most of his life was a struggle between the dream of a glamorous and wealthy life and a strong desire to write.
He went to Princeton University but did not graduate because he did not pay attention to his studies, but rather to soccer and the social life of the university.
He was a member of the Triangle Club, which produced original university plays.
In 1917, he left Princeton and enlisted as a second lieutenant in the army, but never saw combat.
He began writing his first novel during his military training.
The army took him to Camp Sheridan (Montgomery), where he fell in love with Zelda Sayre, a wealthy girl from the South. It was a complicated relationship, as she often wondered if he would ever earn enough money to marry her, and that influenced the importance he gave to money. In fact, they married in 1920 after he published a novel.
His first novel was very successful, but it was not considered a very good book (it revealed how young people lived in the 1920s).
Although Fitzgerald earned a lot of money, he began borrowing from his agent and his editor, and he did not control his extravagant spending habits or Zelda’s.
In the novel, he sympathizes with Jay Gatsby, since both he and his character became victims of their dreams.
On October 26, 1921, his daughter (Frances) was born, but she was a burden for her.
Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, was published in 1922, but it was not very well received. It was considered a serious book; he tried to show the meaning of the life that he and Zelda had led. But he was not able to create two beautiful and damned protagonists. On the contrary, they were pathetic and foolish.
He worked for important magazines (Saturday Evening Post) to earn more money, but they were always in debt. They went to live in France because they were told that life there was cheaper.
Zelda met a French aviator and they fell in love. When he discovered it, his reaction was very violent. In Paris, Fitzgerald met other important American writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.
November 1924 → They go to Rome (they hate it because nobody knew who they were). They drank a lot and fought. From Rome → Capri → France.
The Great Gatsby was published in April 1925 and represented the high point of Fitzgerald’s literary career. For him, it was a great disappointment.
Summer 1925 in Paris. In August, they went to Antibes. They decided to return to the US to work seriously as a screenwriter for United Artists. *At a party, he took watches and jewelry from the guests and boiled them in a saucepan.
They moved back to the Coast. As a young woman, Zelda wanted to be a ballet dancer, and at the age of twenty-eight, she decided to return to studying this discipline.
Upon their return to the United States in September, they were bankrupt. In 1930, Zelda suffered her first serious nervous breakdown.
In 1933, Fitzgerald finished Tender is the Night, despite his alcoholism and his wife’s mental illness. Zelda suffered her third serious nervous breakdown in 1934, and for the rest of her life, she never recovered. Although she returned home from time to time, she spent most of her life in a psychiatric hospital. Fitzgerald was desperate, had serious financial difficulties, and drank excessively.
Taps at Reveille, a collection of short stories, was published in the spring of 1935.
In July 1937, he traveled to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter again. He met Sheila Graham (a famous journalist) and fell in love with her.
He was not very successful as a screenwriter, and in 1939, he was discouraged because he could not find work. He wrote the first part of his last novel, The Last Tycoon, sitting in bed because he was very weak. On December 21, 1940, after a second and serious heart attack, Fitzgerald died. His last novel, although unfinished, was published in 1941. Few people attended his funeral in Hollywood – in a way, it was similar to Jay Gatsby’s. Zelda died in 1948 during a fire in the psychiatric hospital and was buried next to him.
The Great Gatsby
Main Questions
1. Who narrates the story?
It is narrated by Nick Carraway, a young college graduate who moves to Long Island, New York, in the spring of 1922 to work in the bond business. Nick is Jay Gatsby’s neighbor and becomes his friend and confidant throughout the novel.
2. Where was Jay Gatsby’s house located?
Jay Gatsby’s house is located in West Egg, Long Island, New York. West Egg is a residential area of new wealth, home to the newly wealthy who have acquired their fortune in the years following World War I.
3. What did he really do?
Gatsby actually engaged in alcohol smuggling during Prohibition in the United States, that is, he illegally sold alcohol imported or manufactured in the country, which allowed him to amass a large fortune in a short time.
Gatsby also has connections to gangster Meyer Wolfsheim, who is rumored to be involved in illegal activities. Although the novel never specifies exactly how long Gatsby engaged in bootlegging or how much money he made, it is suggested that this illicit lifestyle led to his wealth and success in 1920s New York society.
Main Characters
- Daisy Buchanan: Gatsby’s love interest, she is an attractive and frivolous woman, married to Tom Buchanan.
- Tom Buchanan: Daisy’s husband, he is a wealthy and arrogant man who has an affair with Myrtle Wilson.
- Jordan Baker: Daisy’s friend and a professional golfer, she has a cynical and disinterested personality.
- Nick Carraway: the narrator of the novel, he is a young college graduate who moves to Long Island and becomes Gatsby’s friend.
Secondary Characters
- Myrtle Wilson: Tom Buchanan’s lover, she is the wife of mechanic George Wilson.
- George Wilson: Myrtle’s husband, he is a hardworking and poor man who runs a gas station in the valley of ashes.
- Meyer Wolfsheim: Gatsby’s friend, he is a gangster who has shady business dealings with him.
- Klipspringer: a musician who lives in Gatsby’s house and stays there after Gatsby’s death.