Greater Than Gatsby: The Struggles and Travails of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Question

Jared Levy 2023

The Jazz Age and The Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald and Zelda were married in 1920, and became one of the most famous couples of the “Roaring Twenties,” or “The Jazz Age.” They gained notoriety for their extravagant lifestyle and their wild parties, which became the inspiration for many of Fitzgerald's most famous writings. Writer Ring Lardner even called them “the prince and princess of their generation.”

“The two of them together, working in tandem, were so highly symbolic of everything that was bright and white and light in New York City at the time,” says literary critic and biographer Anne Margaret Daniel. “And they were going to remain frozen in that golden moment forever.”

Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, drew on his experiences as part of the wealthy elite, and was published in 1922.

“Fitzgerald was his own best material, and he knew it,” says West. “He consciously lived the kind of life that could be transformed into fiction, and then he wrote the fiction, and then he continued to live it out in his life. It’s a kind of cyclical, complex relationship between the life and the writings that’s really difficult to trace out now.”

As the strain of living such an opulent lifestyle grew, he moved to Europe and joined a generation of other notable expat American writers like Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. His next novel, The Great Gatsby, became his most famous. Released in 1925, The Great Gatsby is now considered one of the greatest works of American literature, though at the time it was considered a flop. And as with his previous works, Fitzgerald drew on his own life, and his increasingly turbulent relationship with Zelda, to write the novel.

“The novel borrowed their marriage for its central tensions,” remarks McInerny. “It posed a question at the very heart of their marriage: did its continued existence depend upon things that inevitably perish?”

The Great Gatsby tells the story of Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire who throws lavish parties in the hopes of winning back his lost love, Daisy Buchanan. “In the novel Daisy fails Gatsby, but Gatsby struggles to recapture what they’ve lost, just as his author hoped that this new book would recharge him in his wife’s eyes,” says McInerny.

The novel is widely taught as a critique of the decadence and moral decay of the 1920s, and has been adapted numerous times into plays and films — most recently The Great Gatsby stage musical that premiered in 2023.

“That sense of up, and up, and up, that magic, giddy quality — [the Fitzgeralds] conveyed it, his novel was partly about it, and New York made them a symbol of that,” says Ann Douglas, a historian and former English professor at Columbia University. “And as Fitzgerald would later realize, he also became a symbol of that old saying, ‘what goes up must come down.’”

Fitzgerald…

avoided writing about his personal life.

used his life as a model for much of his writing.

wished to maintain his privacy while living in New York.

presented a different image publicly than through his writing.

Answer 1

Fitzgerald used his life as a model for much of his writing. This is evident in how he drew on his experiences and personal relationships, particularly with his wife, Zelda, to create the characters and themes in his novels, especially in The Great Gatsby.