F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby
The writer who gave the Jazz Age its glitter—and its melancholy
Few American writers are so closely associated with an era as F. Scott Fitzgerald is with the 1920s. His fiction captured the glamour, ambition, wealth, romance, restlessness and disappointment of a generation living through extraordinary social change.
Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896 and died in Hollywood in 1940, aged forty-four. He wrote novels, short stories, essays, plays, articles and letters, but his name is now inseparable from one particular book: The Great Gatsby. (F. Scott Fitzgerald Society)
The Great Gatsby
Published by Scribner in 1925, The Great Gatsby was Fitzgerald's third novel. It is a relatively short book, but its world is immense: Long Island estates, New York nightclubs, glittering parties, automobiles, champagne, forbidden love and the uneasy divide between old wealth and newly acquired fortune.
The story is narrated by Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner who moves to Long Island and finds himself living beside the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby. Gatsby's extraordinary parties conceal a deeply personal purpose: his determination to recover the love of Daisy Buchanan, a woman he knew before the war. (Simon & Schuster Canada)
Yet Gatsby's dream gradually becomes inseparable from questions of wealth, class, identity, memory and the American Dream. Fitzgerald's prose makes the novel simultaneously beautiful and unsettling—the glittering surface constantly giving way to something sadder underneath.
The famous cover
The original Great Gatsby dust jacket, designed by Francis Cugat, is itself a piece of literary history. The enormous eyes floating above a night-time city and the luminous face have become almost as recognizable as the novel itself.
The image's dreamlike quality is particularly appropriate to Gatsby: beautiful, seductive and slightly haunting. The original cover is now one of the most celebrated book designs of the twentieth century.
Why The Great Gatsby Endures
At its heart, The Great Gatsby asks what happens when a person builds an entire life around an ideal.
Gatsby has wealth, a magnificent house and a seemingly endless succession of guests. Yet the thing he wants most cannot simply be purchased. His longing for Daisy becomes intertwined with his longing to recreate the past.
The novel therefore moves beyond its setting in the Roaring Twenties. Its concerns remain recognizable: the pursuit of wealth, social status, romantic idealism, reinvention, nostalgia and the distance between appearance and reality.
The Library of America describes the novel's enduring themes in terms of money, class and American optimism, while the Fitzgerald Society emphasizes the breadth of his writing beyond Gatsby itself. (Library of America)
F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Literary Bibliography
Fitzgerald's literary career was considerably larger than The Great Gatsby. He published four completed novels, an unfinished fifth novel, several collections of short stories, a play, essays, articles and a substantial body of other writing. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
The Novels
1920 — This Side of Paradise
Fitzgerald's first novel follows Amory Blaine, a young man attempting to discover his identity, ambitions and place in society.
Its publication made the twenty-four-year-old Fitzgerald famous almost overnight. (Biography)
1922 — The Beautiful and Damned
A darker examination of wealth, inheritance, marriage and dissipation, centered upon Anthony and Gloria Patch.
1925 — The Great Gatsby
His most famous novel and the defining literary portrait of the Jazz Age.
1934 — Tender Is the Night
Set largely among wealthy Americans living in Europe, the novel examines marriage, privilege, ambition and psychological collapse.
1941 — The Last Tycoon
Published after Fitzgerald's death from the unfinished manuscript. Fitzgerald had been working on the novel during his Hollywood years. It follows film producer Monroe Stahr and explores the collision between artistic ambition and the machinery of Hollywood. (Biography)
Short-Story Collections
Fitzgerald was an extraordinarily productive short-story writer. The Fitzgerald Society records more than 160 short stories across his career. (F. Scott Fitzgerald Society)
1920 — Flappers and Philosophers
Among the stories are:
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“The Ice Palace”
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“Bernice Bobs Her Hair”
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“The Cut-Glass Bowl”
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“May Day”
1922 — Tales of the Jazz Age
One of his most important collections, including:
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“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”
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“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
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“The Camel's Back”
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“May Day”
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“Porcelain and Pink”
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“The Lees of Happiness”
The collection helped establish Fitzgerald's association with the phrase Jazz Age. (University of South Carolina)
1926 — All the Sad Young Men
Including:
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“The Rich Boy”
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“Winter Dreams”
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“The Baby Party”
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“Absolution”
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“The Adjuster”
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“The Sensible Thing”
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“Gretchen's Forty Winks”
1935 — Taps at Reveille
A later collection representing Fitzgerald's mature short fiction.
Some of Fitzgerald's Most Notable Stories
Beyond the collections, several stories have become particularly important to his literary reputation:
“Winter Dreams” — ambition, wealth and romantic longing.
“The Rich Boy” — privilege, emotional detachment and the difficulty of understanding another person's inner life.
“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” — a fantastical satire of extreme wealth.
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” — Fitzgerald's unusual fantasy about a man who ages in reverse.
“Babylon Revisited” — memory, loss and attempted redemption in post-Crash Paris.
“The Last of the Belles” — romance and memory against the background of the First World War.
“The Pat Hobby Stories” — comic stories drawn from Fitzgerald's experiences in Hollywood.
The Play
1923 — The Vegetable; or, From President to Postman
Fitzgerald also experimented with drama. The Vegetable was his attempt at a comic play about American politics and ordinary life. It was published in 1923. (University of South Carolina)
Essays, Journalism and Nonfiction
Fitzgerald's nonfiction is an important part of his literary legacy.
The Crack-Up
Published posthumously in book form in 1945, The Crack-Up brings together Fitzgerald's celebrated 1930s autobiographical essays, including his reflections on failure, ambition and his changing relationship with his own past.
The essays originally appeared in Esquire and generated considerable attention during his lifetime. (F. Scott Fitzgerald Society)
The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Published in 1978, the notebooks provide an extraordinary glimpse into his working life, observations, ideas and literary development.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters
Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli and published in 1994, this collection gathers Fitzgerald's correspondence and provides an important documentary record of his life and career. (F. Scott Fitzgerald Society)
Fitzgerald's Place in American Literature
Fitzgerald's achievement lies not simply in his ability to describe extravagant parties. He understood the emotional machinery underneath them.
His characters want love, beauty, youth, money, recognition and a second chance. They frequently believe that the next success, the next fortune or the next romantic conquest will finally make life complete.
That tension between the dream and reality runs throughout his work.
The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery describes The Great Gatsby as his most enduring achievement and notes the way Fitzgerald's carefully constructed prose places a modern moral story against a backdrop of luxury. (Smithsonian Institution)
His reputation also changed dramatically after his death. Although his books had made him famous during the 1920s, The Great Gatsby acquired its extraordinary canonical status largely in the decades that followed. (Biography)
A Fitzgerald Reading List
For someone discovering Fitzgerald today, a beautiful progression would be:
1. This Side of Paradise — discover the young Fitzgerald.
2. The Beautiful and Damned — enter his world of wealth and excess.
3. The Great Gatsby — experience his masterpiece.
4. All the Sad Young Men — explore his short fiction at greater depth.
5. Tender Is the Night — encounter the darker, mature Fitzgerald.
6. The Crack-Up — meet Fitzgerald the essayist.
7. The Last Tycoon — see the unfinished work of his final period.
And then return to The Great Gatsby.
It is a book that changes as its reader changes.
F. Scott Fitzgerald — At a Glance
Full name: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
Born: September 24, 1896, St. Paul, Minnesota
Died: December 21, 1940, Hollywood, California
Primary forms: Novels, short stories, essays, journalism, drama
Literary era: 1920s–1930s
Associated movement: Lost Generation / American Modernism
Famous for: The Great Gatsby
Completed novels: 4
Unfinished novel: The Last Tycoon
Short stories: More than 160
First novel: This Side of Paradise (1920)
Most famous novel: The Great Gatsby (1925) (F. Scott Fitzgerald Society)
The enduring image
Fitzgerald remains the great literary chronicler of a world that seemed to promise everything: youth, beauty, wealth, freedom and reinvention.
And beneath all that glitter, he found something much more human—the longing to make the beautiful moment last.
