This Side of Paradise (1920)
Debut novel of Amory Blaine at Princeton that made him an overnight celebrity
Literature · Novelists
F. Scott Fitzgerald
1896–1940 · American
Modernism; the Lost Generation
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was the chronicler of the Jazz Age, a term he popularised, whose first novel This Side of Paradise made him famous at 23. The Great Gatsby (1925), a short, lyrical portrait of wealth and longing on Long Island, sold modestly in his lifetime but is now regarded as a great American novel. His glamorous, troubled marriage to Zelda Sayre fed his fiction; he died in Hollywood at 44, believing himself a failure.
How to spot them
- ▸Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan, narrator Nick Carraway, West Egg and the green light
- ▸Coined or popularised 'the Jazz Age'; wife Zelda Sayre
- ▸Tender Is the Night: Dick and Nicole Diver on the French Riviera
- ▸Princeton; named after his distant relative Francis Scott Key
- ▸'There are no second acts in American lives'
Key works
The Beautiful and Damned (1922)
A handsome young couple waiting for an inheritance slide into dissipation in New York
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
Story collection including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, about a man who ages backwards
The Great Gatsby (1925)
Nick Carraway observes the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby's doomed pursuit of Daisy Buchanan
Tender Is the Night (1934)
The psychiatrist Dick Diver's decline alongside his mentally ill wife Nicole; title from Keats
The Crack-Up (1936 (essays); 1945 (collection))
Confessional essays on his own breakdown
The Last Tycoon (1941 (unfinished, posthumous))
Hollywood novel about producer Monroe Stahr, modelled on Irving Thalberg
Key ideas
- The American Dream as glittering, corrupt and unattainable, symbolised by Gatsby's green light
- The glamour and emptiness of the 1920s rich
- The Great Gatsby's closing image of boats beating on against the current, borne back into the past
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in St. Paul, Minnesota; named after Francis Scott Key, author of The Star-Spangled Banner, a distant relative
- •Attended Princeton but left without a degree and joined the army in 1917
- •Married Zelda Sayre of Montgomery, Alabama in 1920; she wrote the novel Save Me the Waltz (1932)
- •Working titles for The Great Gatsby included Trimalchio in West Egg
- •The Great Gatsby's eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg look over the Valley of Ashes
- •Tender Is the Night takes its title from Keats's Ode to a Nightingale
- •Died of a heart attack in Hollywood in 1940, aged 44, while working on The Last Tycoon
- •A friend and rival of Ernest Hemingway, whom he recommended to his editor Maxwell Perkins
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Sources
- Matthew J. Bruccoli — Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli — The Great Gatsby (Cambridge Edition)