Fitzgerald, F. Scott

1896–1940

American Novelist and Short-Story Writer

F. Scott Fitzgerald (Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald in full) is America's best-known chronicler of the Jazz Age, a reputation that sometimes overshadows the great merit of his work, especially This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Great Gatsby (1925). In his writings from the 1920s, Fitzgerald explored the tensions besetting the ideal of self-made American manhood. This was an era that seemed to offer incredible possibility, especially for the young, but that also made manifest the growing difficulty of achieving self-made success in modern society.

For Fitzgerald, manhood meant financial success and carefree heterosexual romance. Like some of his characters, the writer found, and then lost, both. Married to Zelda Sayre, whom he met while stationed in Alabama during World War I, Fitzgerald was a celebrity by the age of twenty-four. In the mid-1920s the Fitzgeralds joined the tiny but influential American expatriate community in Paris. Unlike the characters featured [Page 173]in Ernest Hemingway's work of the same period, such as soldiers and outdoorsmen exhibiting grace under pressure, Fitzgerald's male characters typically lack opportunities for vigorous, decisive action. According to Hemingway, Fitzgerald was insecure about his manhood, even at the height of his success.

Fitzgerald dreamed of acceptance as a gentleman of taste and refinement by high society. His early fiction, particularly This Side of Paradise, is semiautobiographical. Through the character Amory Blaine, the reader sees Fitzgerald's own anxieties as a young man from the provinces seeking definition and membership in the elite at Princeton, where the writer spent three years. His characterization of the university as “lazy and goodlooking and aristocratic” exemplifies the young Fitzgerald's sense of a gentleman. This first novel was followed by The Beautiful and Damned (1922), which explored a young couple's disintegration, as well as two collections of short stories, Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922). Fitzgerald's early work portrays young men of promise and sufficient wealth chasing or enjoying romance and fulfillment, and it suggests that these markers of manhood are most easily achieved without the distractions of family or work.

Fitzgerald's most notable work is The Great Gatsby, a technically brilliant novel that explores the connection between will, reputation, and success for Americans, particularly American men. As a young man, the mysterious Jay Gatsby followed a Benjamin Franklin–like path of self-improvement (even studying electricity) as he sought to make himself an image of masculinity, but he later becomes obsessed with acquiring wealth and gaining social acceptance from his rich neighbors. In chasing the beautiful but flawed Daisy Buchanan, Gatsby finds himself caught between an idealistic pursuit of the good life and a materialistic attachment to the high life. By the end of the novel, the character and his dream of success are destroyed. The title of the book, suggesting that Gatsby was a sort of magician, informs readers that Gatsby's manhood is illusory and that the novel is a cautionary fable for believers in self-made manhood.

Fitzgerald's later life brought disappointment, as he battled financial troubles stemming from extravagant living, alcoholism, and the mental deterioration of his wife. In the 1930s, as his popularity and energies waned, he nonetheless produced insightful stories and novels. In Tender is the Night (1934), Fitzgerald traces the career of a psychiatrist destroyed by his wealthy wife and dissipation. Fitzgerald was driven by dreams of success, and he was always haunted by a suspicion that he was somehow still an outsider who, despite his apparent accomplishments, never quite achieved the American Dream. By the time he suffered a fatal heart attack in 1940, he had lost Zelda, most of his money, and much of the fame that seemed part of his earlier success. Fitzgerald and his characters dramatize the consequences of defining masculine identity in terms of economic status.

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