F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby: Life and Work

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Background and Early Life

F. Scott Fitzgerald, born on September 24, 1896, was one of the greatest American writers, celebrated for capturing the spirit of his own era. He lived in a room covered with clocks and calendars while the years ticked away, and his career followed the pattern of the nation, with his first fiction blooming in the 1920s. As one account puts it, "his fictions did more than report on his time or on himself as a prototypical representative." He was known as both a romantic and a tragic figure, as well as a brilliant writer who achieved early success with his first novel, This Side of Paradise. He participated in the glamorous expatriate life in France during the 1920s before experiencing a series of professional and personal setbacks in the 1930s. It was the Fitzgerald legend that attracted many readers to his work; he wrote four novels between the 1920s and the 1940s, and at the time of his death he had been working on an ambitious Hollywood novel, The Last Tycoon.

Fitzgerald was not exactly a playboy of American literature, though some of his admirers liked to think of him as a careless writer. His background hardly reveals an obvious source of his success. His father came from tired, old-stock roots in Maryland, was an avid drinker, yet taught the best of manners to his only son, Scott. His mother's family had migrated from Ireland in 1843 and had managed to build an adequate grocery store in St. Paul. His sense of coming from two widely different Celtic strains had fostered an early inferiority complex in a family where half the "black Irish" had the money and looked down on the Maryland side of the family, who had the right "breeding." His feelings toward his parents were strained and complicated, and he could hardly respect his father.

At an early age, Fitzgerald developed a keen interest in the opposite sex, which was more like a game to him — one in which he counted only one winner. By the time his first novel appeared, he was already engaged to marry Zelda Sayre of Montgomery, Alabama, the daughter of a judge and a woman known for her unconventional behavior. She had famously declared that the last thing she wanted to think about were kitchen pots and pans, since her main concern was to remain in glamorous society.

Marriage to Zelda and the Road to The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald lived a colorful life with Zelda, filled with parties and extravagant spending. Their relationship proved to be a turning point in his life. At the time they met, Zelda had been an aspiring writer herself. The release of his first book brought him considerable critical attention, and the two celebrated its success extensively. The Great Gatsby, the product of a three-year effort, was published in 1925. Before releasing the novel, Fitzgerald had preceded it with short stories, using them as a way of testing his materials. The gestures, themes, and characters of the novel can be observed in earlier stories including "Dice, Brass Knuckles and Guitar" (1923), "Winter Dreams" (1922), and "The Sensible Thing" (1924). The novel was "developed with layers of draft and achieved its ultimate brilliance when Fitzgerald revised and rewrote it in the galley proofs" (The Great Gatsby, Preface, p. ix). Though the book received outstanding reviews, it did not earn the sales figures Fitzgerald had expected.

To support his expensive lifestyle with Zelda, Fitzgerald often interrupted work on his novels and wrote short stories, which brought him high fees from major magazines. Fitzgerald had almost lost Zelda because of his lack of money, but he managed to win her back. His stormy relationship with Zelda is addressed in his later work The Crack-Up (1945). He briefly worked as a Hollywood screenwriter in 1927 and returned again from 1930 to 1932.

Themes and Characters in The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby, originally conceived under the title Jay Gatsby, presents its title character as a self-made man and the embodiment of the American Dream. Nick Carraway, the narrator of the story, discovers that Gatsby's parents were poor farmers whom Gatsby had never truly accepted. This represents a notable resemblance to Fitzgerald's own life; the story has been seen as casting Nick in the role of a second self, verifying a double side of Fitzgerald's personality. While Fitzgerald's own drunken state was widely observed during this period, he did not write the book while drunk. In his short story "Winter Dreams," he had already written about his feelings of a lost youth; in the novel, he also gives voice to his sense of social inadequacy and the hurt felt when a dream is betrayed. As Fitzgerald himself stated, "the whole idea of Gatsby is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again, because I lived it" (Bruccoli, Chapter 1, p. 10).

During the period when he was drinking heavily and beginning to lose his illusions, Fitzgerald even started to believe that his books had not been first-rate. Yet he had accomplished something in The Great Gatsby that he had not achieved in any other novel. He had pushed his sense of experience away from the middle ground of probability toward two kinds of distortion. The dreamer distorted becomes Gatsby — a man whose hopelessly romantic nature allows him an eternal yearning for a meretricious beauty. The rich man distorted becomes Tom Buchanan, whose ruthlessness shields him from the discomforts of ordinary life. Both Gatsby and Buchanan are portrayed as men without conscience, each intent on keeping what the other wants. "Both caricatures are Fitzgerald's own experience, his own sense of combat — the dreamer in conflict with rigid reality; the promises of youth in conflict with the ravages of time; and the man of suspect means in conflict with the established rich" (Bruccoli, Chapter 1, p. 11).