Biographical Information and Seminal Works

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, and lived from 1896 to 1940 as an essayist, screenwriter, short-story writer, and most famously, as a novelist. He fell in love with socialite Zelda Sayre, and they were eventually married.

During his lifetime, he finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night, all of which achieved varying degrees of commercial and critical success. However, it may be surprising to know that some of his works only received critical acclaim after his death, and he died believing himself a failure because he never found more than moderate success in his life.

Expert Opinion

Milton R. Stern, a professor of literature who specialized in the works of Fitzgerald, quoted, “In the process of combining lyrical description with objective circumstance he mastered the connections between themes and narration.

“The expression itself grew from his remarkable power with evocative language”.

Additionally, according to Raymond Chandler, an American-British novelist and screenwriter, “Fitzgerald was above all, a storyteller who achieved a close relationship with the reader through the voice of his fiction, which was intimate, warm, and witty.

“He had one of the rarest qualities in all literature.”

Themes

Throughout Fitzgerald’s works, there are some recurrent and common themes.

A primary theme in Fitzgerald’s novels is the promise and failure of the American Dream. He believed in the American Dream of success and fulfillment because of his personal experiences, namely his growing up with a sense of being a poor boy in a rich man’s world, but also with a sense of having his own important destiny.

As an author, Fitzgerald expressed the ways the American Dream could be debased and distorted, in addition to how it could be fulfilled. His most reminiscent protagonists, including Jay Gatsby and Dick Diver, had the willingness of the heart defined by Fitzgerald as a quintessential American quality. While they are frequently disappointed by their pursuit of success, it is never the dream that fails them. Rather, some weakness or corruption, in themselves or in others, hinders them instead.

In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby’s hopeful dreams of wealth and love are anything but corrupt; however, as Nick Carraway says, it is “what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams” (6) that destroys him. The dust connotes Gatsby’s naiveté about the conflict between old and new money, and the adverse negligence of the Buchanans. In Tender is the Night, Dick Diver’s pursuit of the success and fulfillment of the American Dream is defeated by his weakness for wealth and the leisures that it can buy.

WEALTH AND MATERIALISM 

Next, probably more than any author of his era, Fitzgerald was conscious of the influence of wealth on life and character. He often wrote about the lives of the rich upper class, but his awareness of money’s effects on character was complex. Some of his seminal works expertly reflect his attraction to and his simultaneous distrust of the rich.

In Fitzgerald’s eyes, money was also an important part of the American Dream. Not only did it provide luxuries and opulence, but money also opened up opportunities that were unavailable to less affluent people. He was greatly disappointed by the wealthy who wasted the opportunities that their money gave them, and also disapproved of those who perverted their privilege. 

He explains these ideas in both The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night when he describes how “the Buchanan’s money makes them careless, hard and directionless” (10) and details how “Dick Diver has been swallowed up like a gigolo, and somehow permitted his arsenal to be locked up in the warren safety-deposit vaults” (209). Fitzgerald had a clear understanding that just as money has the potential to fulfill people who possess it, it has the power to corrupt them.

DISILLUSIONMENT OF LOVE

For Fitzgerald, one prominent life shaping experience was the romance and devastating misfortune of his relationship with Zelda Sayre. In fact, virtually all of his important female characters are a reflection of Zelda and his connection with her. The early stages of their relationship intensified Fitzgerald’s sense of being excluded from opportunities money provides, when Zelda initially rejected him because of his poor prospects. 

His fictional treatment of the roles of love and money in his life is extensive and profound. Love can be powerful, passionate, and intense, but also has a way of being fleeting, fickle, and short-lived. In This Side of Paradise, Amory’s handsomeness and charisma attract many women, but although he yearns to be fulfilled by falling in love, he only finds himself increasingly heartbroken. When his fiancée Rosalind leaves him for another man who is only more wealthy, Amory descends into a spiral of despair. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby reinvents himself entirely, believing he will be good enough for Daisy once he is wealthy. Unfortunately, his absolute devotion to her results in his demise, and she chooses another man who offers her a life secure in both wealth and society.

Style

Fitzgerald also utilizes many writing techniques to draw the reader in and create his own unique style. He uses imagery, diction, and symbolism to convey his message. 

Fitzgerald uses an impressionistic writing style in all of his works, the details of which evoke mood. In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway starts his first description of one of Gatsby’s parties when he hears “music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars” (43). The diction and rhythm of these lines establish a romantic mood. Through the speaker’s narration, Fitzgerald employs diction that suggests both the magical and corrupt qualities that exist within the world of the novel.  

Another primary element in Fitzgerald’s novels is symbolism. One specific example in The Great Gatsby is “the green light that burns all night the end of Daisy’s dock. This represents both Gatsby’s devotion to her and the dream she personifies for him. The green light is symbolic of not only Gatsby’s dreams, but also the grand American Dream that all readers presumably share.

We also identified various distinctive elements of Fitzgerald’s style, including his dramatic use of verbs. One example is in The Great Gatsby, when Nick describes Wilson’s car that “crouched in a dim corner” (25, Great Gatsby). There was also a clear pattern of linking adjectives that seem contradictory to create various antitheses. This is evident in Tender is the Night’s description of “Nicole Diver’s hard and lovely and pitiful face” (10). His use of incompatible nouns and adjectives produces thematically evocative effects: again in The Great Gatsby, the “triumphant hatboxes” (64) of Gatsby’s car and the “blue garden” (43) of his home both indicate the grandeur but unreality of how Gatsby sees himself. 

Impact

Upon publication, Fitzgerald’s first novel This Side of Paradise sold more than fifty thousand copies. The instant commercial success was in large part because of the way Amory’s thwarted ambitions are depicted as generational dilemmas: his failures in love and university are not simply due to personal shortcomings, but are impacted by the sweeping changes of modern life, which quickly caused young people to grow up “to discover all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths shaken” (260). 

The novel gave a voice to the post WWI youth by offering a realistic portrait of adolescent estrangement. In doing so, Fitzgerald’s work established the template for later 20th-century coming-of-age novels, for example, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Slyvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Fitzgerald also had impacts on Ernest Hemingway’s works, who was a longtime friend. 

Timelessness

To me, F. Scott Fitzgerald is a great author. 

Although his original audience was limited to a postwar generation with comparably vast societal differences between genders, Fitzgerald is still one of the most renowned authors of the 20th century because of his masterful use of language, complex characters and timeless themes. Many people still feel ostracized by a larger culture, bound by limitations they cannot understand and cannot escape. Class and accompanying opportunities continue to create disparities in society. Even today, growing up has many disillusions that phase the bravest of us. 

After almost a century, love and wealth have not become any less attractive or corruptive, and we continue to grasp on whatever fleeting and great hopes they offer. Fitzgerald’s novels endure, generation after generation, because every time a reader returns, they discover new revelations, insights, and bits of language that light another spark within them.