the great gatsby author biography

F. Scott Fitzgerald

(1896-1940)

Who Was F. Scott Fitzgerald?

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a short story writer and novelist considered one of the pre-eminent authors in the history of American literature due almost entirely to the enormous posthumous success of his third book, The Great Gatsby . Perhaps the quintessential American novel, as well as a definitive social history of the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby has become required reading for virtually every American high school student and has had a transportive effect on generation after generation of readers.

At the age of 24, the success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise , made Fitzgerald famous. One week later, he married the woman he loved and his muse, Zelda Sayre. However by the end of the 1920s Fitzgerald descended into drinking, and Zelda had a mental breakdown. Following the unsuccessful Tender Is the Night , Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood and became a scriptwriter. He died of a heart attack in 1940, at age 44, his final novel only half completed.

Family, Education and Early Life

Fitzgerald's mother, Mary McQuillan, was from an Irish-Catholic family that made a small fortune in Minnesota as wholesale grocers. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, had opened a wicker furniture business in St. Paul, and, when it failed, took a job as a salesman for Procter & Gamble. During the first decade of Fitzgerald's life, his father’s job took the family back and forth between Buffalo and Syracuse in upstate New York. When Fitzgerald was 12, Edward lost his job with Procter & Gamble, and the family moved back to St. Paul in 1908 to live off of his mother's inheritance.

Fitzgerald was a bright, handsome and ambitious boy, the pride and joy of his parents and especially his mother. He attended the St. Paul Academy. When he was 13, he saw his first piece of writing appear in print: a detective story published in the school newspaper. In 1911, when Fitzgerald was 15 years old, his parents sent him to the Newman School, a prestigious Catholic preparatory school in New Jersey. There, he met Father Sigourney Fay, who noticed his incipient talent with the written word and encouraged him to pursue his literary ambitions.

After graduating from the Newman School in 1913, Fitzgerald decided to stay in New Jersey to continue his artistic development at Princeton University. At Princeton, he firmly dedicated himself to honing his craft as a writer, writing scripts for Princeton's famous Triangle Club musicals as well as frequent articles for the Princeton Tiger humor magazine and stories for the Nassau Literary Magazine.

However, Fitzgerald's writing came at the expense of his coursework. He was placed on academic probation, and, in 1917, he dropped out of school to join the U.S. Army. Afraid that he might die in World War I with his literary dreams unfulfilled, in the weeks before reporting to duty, Fitzgerald hastily wrote a novel called The Romantic Egotist . Though the publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons, rejected the novel, the reviewer noted its originality and encouraged Fitzgerald to submit more work in the future.

Fitzgerald was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry and assigned to Camp Sheridan outside of Montgomery, Alabama. The war ended in November 1918, before Fitzgerald was ever deployed. Upon his discharge, he moved to New York City hoping to launch a career in advertising lucrative enough to convince his girlfriend, Zelda, to marry him. He quit his job after only a few months, however, and returned to St. Paul to rewrite his novel.

'This Side of Paradise' (1920)

This Side of Paradise is a largely autobiographical story about love and greed. The story was centered on Amory Blaine, an ambitious Midwesterner who falls in love with, but is ultimately rejected by, two girls from high-class families.

The novel was published in 1920 to glowing reviews. Almost overnight, it turned Fitzgerald, at the age of 24, into one of the country's most promising young writers. He eagerly embraced his newly minted celebrity status and embarked on an extravagant lifestyle that earned him a reputation as a playboy and hindered his reputation as a serious literary writer.

'The Beautiful and Damned' (1922)

In 1922, Fitzgerald published his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned , the story of the troubled marriage of Anthony and Gloria Patch. The Beautiful and Damned helped to cement Fitzgerald’s status as one of the great chroniclers and satirists of the culture of wealth, extravagance and ambition that emerged during the affluent 1920s — what became known as the Jazz Age. "It was an age of miracles," Fitzgerald wrote, "it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire."

'The Great Gatsby' (1925)

The Great Gatsby is considered Fitzgerald's finest work, with its beautiful lyricism, pitch-perfect portrayal of the Jazz Age, and searching critiques of materialism, love and the American Dream. Seeking a change of scenery to spark his creativity, in 1924 Fitzgerald had moved to Valescure, France, to write. Published in 1925, The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway, a Midwesterner who moves into the town of West Egg on Long Island, next door to a mansion owned by the wealthy and mysterious Jay Gatsby. The novel follows Nick and Gatsby's strange friendship and Gatsby's pursuit of a married woman named Daisy, ultimately leading to his exposure as a bootlegger and his death.

Although The Great Gatsby was well-received when it was published, it was not until the 1950s and '60s, long after Fitzgerald's death, that it achieved its stature as the definitive portrait of the "Roaring Twenties," as well as one of the greatest American novels ever written.

'Tender Is the Night' (1934)

In 1934, after years of toil, Fitzgerald finally published his fourth novel, Tender is the Night , about an American psychiatrist in Paris, France, and his troubled marriage to a wealthy patient. The book was inspired by his wife Zelda’s struggle with mental illness. Although Tender is the Night was a commercial failure and was initially poorly received due to its chronologically jumbled structure, it has since gained in reputation and is now considered among the great American novels.

'The Love of the Last Tycoon' (unfinished)

Fitzgerald began work on his last novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon , in 1939. He had completed over half the manuscript when he died in 1940.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Short Stories

Beginning in 1920 and continuing throughout the rest of his career, Fitzgerald supported himself financially by writing great numbers of short stories for popular publications such as The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire . Some of his most notable stories include "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "The Camel's Back" and "The Last of the Belles."

Fitzgerald’s Wife Zelda

F. Scott Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre on April 3, 1920, in New York City. Zelda was Fitzgerald’s muse, and her likeness is prominently featured in his works including This Side of Paradise , The Beautiful and the Damned , The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night . Fitzgerald met 18-year-old Zelda, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge, during his time in the infantry. One week after the publication of Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise , the couple married. They had one child, a daughter named Frances “Scottie” Fitzgerald, born in 1921.

Beginning in the late 1920s, Zelda suffered from mental health issues, and the couple moved back and forth between Delaware and France. In 1930, Zelda suffered a breakdown. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and treated at the Sheppard Pratt Hospital in Towson, Maryland. That same year was admitted to a mental health clinic in Switzerland. Two years later she was treated at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. She spent the remaining years before her death in 1948 in and out of various mental health clinics.

Later Years

After completing his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby , Fitzgerald's life began to unravel. Always a heavy drinker, he progressed steadily into alcoholism and suffered prolonged bouts of writer's block. After two years lost to alcohol and depression, in 1937 Fitzgerald attempted to revive his career as a screenwriter and freelance storywriter in Hollywood, and he achieved modest financial, if not critical, success for his efforts before his death in 1940.

Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, at the age of 44, in Hollywood, California. Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure, since none of his works received more than modest commercial or critical success during his lifetime.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Birth Year: 1896
• Birth date: September 24, 1896
• Birth State: Minnesota
• Birth City: St. Paul
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: American short-story writer and novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald is known for his turbulent personal life and his famous novel 'The Great Gatsby.'
• World War I
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Libra
• St. Paul Academy
• Newman School
• Princeton University
• Interesting Facts
• Fitzgerald’s namesake (and second cousin three times removed on his father's side) was Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to the "Star-Spangled Banner."
• Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure, since none of his works received more than modest commercial or critical success during his lifetime.
• Although 'The Great Gatsby' was well-received when it was published, it was long after Fitzgerald's death that it was regarded as one of the greatest American novels ever written.
• Death Year: 1940
• Death date: December 21, 1940
• Death State: California
• Death City: Hollywood
• Death Country: United States

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: F. Scott Fitzgerald Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/f-scott-fitzgerald
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: July 9, 2020
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• What little I've accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I'd never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: 'I've found my line—from now on this comes first.'
• Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.
• In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.
• It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess and it was an age of satire.
• Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.
• My characters are all Scott Fitzgerald.
• I didn't know till 15 that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty.
• I never at any one time saw [Gatsby] clear myself—for he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself—the amalgam was never complete in my mind.
• Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy.
• There are no second acts in American lives.
• Riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.
• I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda's sanitarium.
• Isn't Hollywood a dump—in the human sense of the word. A hideous town ... full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.
• I was in love with a whirlwind and I must spin a net big enough to catch it.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896-1940

Best known for The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934)—two keystones of modernist fiction—Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was the poet laureate of the “Jazz Age,” a term he popularized to convey the post-World War I era’s newfound prosperity, consumerism, and shifting sexual mores.

Fitzgerald first rose to fame at twenty-three by chronicling those changes in This Side of Paradise (1920). Before the age of thirty he published his masterpiece, Gatsby , but its artistic maturity was stymied for a decade by alcoholism, financial problems, and the mental illness of his wife, Zelda Sayre (1900-1948). By the time he completed Tender , the Depression had rendered the Roaring Twenties irrelevant, and Fitzgerald was considered a has-been. A half-decade later, he died in semi-obscurity, considered a failure, despite publishing 160+ short stories in his twenty-year career. Only posthumously would critics appreciate his merits, although understanding of his talent would compete with popular interest in his life and marriage.

Fitzgerald’s main themes are ambition and loss, discipline vs. self-indulgence, love and romance, and money and class. Much like Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, his work is instantly recognizable due to its distinctive prose style. Whereas Hemingway’s is sparse and Faulkner’s veers toward psychological abstraction, Fitzgerald’s is intensely poetic to the point of rhapsodic, elevating his laments into veritable threnodies for the sureties and stable values that he felt modernity superannuated.

Born September 24, 1896, Fitzgerald suffered from a life-long inferiority complex that he later claimed distinguished him from Hemingway, his chief rival. “I talk with the authority of failure,” he insisted. “Ernest with the authority of success” ( Notebooks 318). His sense of defeat was the product of several formative setbacks that became the building blocks of his fiction. The son of an unsuccessful businessman who had to rely upon his wife’s inheritance to support his children, Fitzgerald was sensitive to his family’s outsider status among the monied elite of his native St. Paul, Minnesota. An indifferent student, he found his craving for recognition hampered by poor grades that interfered with his extracurricular pursuits of popularity, especially after he flunked out of Princeton University in 1917.

Nor were his aspirations for military heroism any more successful. Although commissioned as a second lieutenant during the Great War, he described himself as the “army’s worst aide-de-camp” ( Crack-Up 85)—largely because he preferred writing his first novel to tactics and training. As his 1936 story “I Didn’t Get Over” suggests, the fact that he never saw combat—the Armistice arrived as his infantry regiment was preparing to ship abroad—was an additional lifelong regret.

Of even greater influence were his early romantic disappointments. Fitzgerald’s desire for acceptance in the haute monde led him to court debutantes from whose circles he was doomed to be rejected. At nineteen, while dating Ginevra King, the daughter of a wealthy Illinois banker, he overheard a family member of hers (accounts differ as to whom) remark, “Poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls” ( Ledger 17). Two years later, while he was stationed at Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama, Zelda Sayre declined his initial marriage proposal because of his poor career prospects.

These snubs combined to become his most characteristic plotline, which typically revolves around the efforts of young men of humble backgrounds to prove themselves worthy of the daughters of a wealthier class. That Fitzgerald explored this theme both farcically (“The Offshore Pirate” [1920]) as well as tragically (“Winter Dreams” [1922], Gatsby ) is indicative of how thoroughly his perceived unworthiness stamped him.

Because Fitzgerald promoted his fiction as autobiographical, early critics tended to dismiss him as a “facile” writer. Yet he never would have attracted the wide audience he did during his peak years of popularity (1920-1925) had he not possessed a talent for presenting personal milestones as representative of peers’ collective experience. This Side of Paradise sold upwards of fifty thousand copies because protagonist Amory Blaine’s thwarted ambitions are depicted as generational dilemmas: his failures in love and college are attributed not simply to personal shortcomings but to the sweeping changes of modern life, which caused young people to grow up “to discover all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths shaken” (260). With its unflattering portraits of adults and unrepentant vignettes of teenage initiation rituals—drinking and petting, most notoriously— Paradise gave voice to postwar youth by offering a realistic treatment of adolescent disaffection. In doing so, the book established the template for such 20th-century coming-of-age novels as J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963)—works that, like Paradise , resist the traditional Bildungsroman model by declining to conclude with their heroes entering adulthood.

More immediately, both the novel and Fitzgerald’s earliest short stories—most published in The Saturday Evening Post —popularized a character type with which he remains inexorably associated: the flapper. With their bobbed hair, knee-baring skirts, and unapologetic coquetry, heroines such as Paradise ’s Rosalind Connage, Marcia Meadow in “Head and Shoulders,” Ardita Farnam in “The Offshore Pirate,” and Sally Carrol Happer in “The Ice Palace” (all 1920) modeled for female readers a self-consciously rebellious subcultural identity that freed them from the strictures of Victorian femininity. Nowhere is that freedom more obvious than when a character invokes Louisa May Alcott in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (also 1920): “Oh, please don’t quote Little Women !” Marjorie Harvey responds. “What modern girl could live like those inane females?” ( Short Stories 33).

Fitzgerald capitalized upon adult worries over “flaming youth” by entitling his first story collection Flappers and Philosophers (1920), his second Tales of the Jazz (1922), and by opining on adolescent mores in interviews and articles. Even after the vogue for flappers faded, he remained fascinated with youth. Between 1927 and 1931, he wrote a series of thirteen “juveniles” for the Post that follow Basil Duke Lee and Josephine Perry through their late teens. Although nowhere near as well-known as Gatsby or Tender , these pieces, posthumously collected as The Basil and Josephine Stories (1973), offer as nuanced a portrait of the paysage moralisée as one will find on any shortlist of “young-adult” classics.

Despite his fixation with youth, Fitzgerald knew that to be regarded as more than a “flapper novelist” he must reach beyond his immediate generational focus to address broader cultural concerns. One interest that allowed him to do this was money. Keenly aware of the expanding consumer market, he examined the ways in which the Victorian values of hard work and frugality were losing their moral valence to a new mindset of abundance and leisure-time indulgence. At times he parodied the previously unimaginable wealth amassed by barons such as John D. Rockefeller. “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922) tells the fantastical story of the world’s richest man, who lives on a mountain-sized diamond in the Montana Rockies. The irony is that Braddock Washington’s net worth is far from stable, for his diamond is so large that “if it were offered for sale not only would the bottom fall out of the market, but also, if the value should vary … there would not be enough gold in the world to buy a tenth of it” ( Short Stories 193). Washington must thus keep the diamond’s existence secret, which in turn requires him to either imprison or kill anyone who trespasses upon his Xanadu-like estate—a commentary both on the cutthroat extremes men like Rockefeller were said to go to protect their fortunes from the volatility of commodity markets but also the increasingly abstract and transitory nature of monetary values themselves.

In other cases, Fitzgerald preferred to moralize rather than satirize. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), traces the decay of an upperclass New York couple, Anthony and Gloria Patch, as they await an inheritance from Anthony’s wealthy grandfather. Without any guiding motivation in life, Anthony and Gloria succumb to drink, concupiscence, and adultery, their degeneration only accelerating after they discover themselves excluded from their patriarch’s will. Heavily influenced by naturalist fiction, The Beautiful and Damned is marred by didactic authorial intrusions and a confusing ending whose irony escaped many contemporary readers. (The Patches win a legal battle that recovers their lost fortune, but only after a breakdown that renders Anthony an invalid). Yet, despite its flaws, the novel captures the fear that prosperity encouraged laxity and dissipation.

Fitzgerald would explore this theme more successfully in his most anthologized short story, “Babylon Revisited” (1931). Charles Wales is a more sympathetic character than Anthony Patch because he recognizes how the extravagance afforded by the bull market cost him his family and landed him in a sanitarium. Even if his nostalgia for reckless living undermines his insistence that he has regained his moorings, his regret inspires incisive criticism of how affluence distorted his sense of reality: “The snow of twenty-nine wasn’t real snow,” Charlie concludes. “If you didn’t want it to be snow, you just paid some money” ( Short Stories 633). In still other efforts, Fitzgerald trumpeted the Protestant work ethic as intently as any Babbittesque Rotarian that Sinclair Lewis might skewer. One of his most widely read stories during his lifetime, “George Jackson’s Arcady” (1924), concerns a disillusioned businessman who discovers how many lives he has benefited by epitomizing the virtues of honorable effort and civic giving. Although virtually forgotten today, this proto- It’s a Wonderful Life tale was deemed so inspirational that in 1928 it was republished in pamphlet form as part of a series promoting public readings of motivational texts.

One reason that Fitzgerald’s critiques of Roaring Twenties mores continue to resonate has to do with what critics call his “dual perspective” or “double vision.” His work does not merely sermonize against easy money and irrational exuberance. Instead, it acknowledges their appeal with great empathy, allowing readers to experience their allure rather than condemning them from a distance. The result, as Malcolm Cowley observed, is a mixture of a “maximum of immersion” combined with a “maximum of critical attachment” that creates a beguiling aura of ambiguity (“Double Man” 9).

The pinnacle of this trait is The Great Gatsby , in which narrator Nick Carraway stands both inside and outside of the action, at once enabling the enigmatic, nouveau riche Jay Gatsby in his quest to win back lost love Daisy Fay Buchanan with a fortune built from bootlegging and shady bonds while recognizing the unlikelihood of its success. Whether attending Gatsby’s lavish Long Island parties, traveling into New York City with Daisy’s philandering husband, Tom, or lending Gatsby his cottage for a rendezvous with Daisy, Nick is implicated in the intrigue in ways he cannot admit, especially when he is prone make statements such as, “Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known” (59). Whether such comments are meant sincerely or ironically is impossible to determine, suggesting that the dramatis personae are so caught in the flux of uncertainty that pragmatism and willful blindness have become their survival mechanism. In the end, Gatsby conveys a world so prone to cynical expedience and plausible deniability that the optimism of its titular hero can only seem tragically naïve.

Gatsby is considered Fitzgerald’s crowning achievement because of its stylistic and structural concision. Both This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned suffer from episodic forms that dilute their drama, while characterization is frequently conveyed through omniscient exposition rather than organic development. By narrowing the temporal scope of his timeline (the story occurs over the summer of 1922) and employing Nick Carraway as an observer-narrator, Fitzgerald was able to both intensify and internalize the tensions surrounding Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy. At once imagistic, dream-like, and profoundly sad, the novel contains several of the most evocative symbols in all of American literature, including the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, the valley of ashes that separates Long Island from New York City, and the disembodied eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg that peer out from an abandoned billboard. The plot, moreover, asks to be read on different thematic levels: ostensibly a love story, Gatsby explores the limits of self-making, the delusions of materialism, and the intangibility of aspiration in a supposedly classless society. In the final paragraphs—Fitzgerald’s most cited passage—Gatsby’s ambition is even elegized as an expression of the American Dream:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.… And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (189)

Fitzgerald’s other major novel, Tender Is the Night , is the obverse of Gatsby in almost every imaginable way. Written over the course of a tempestuous nine-year period that saw the author handicapped by alcoholism and Zelda’s descent into mental illness, the book is chaotic, non-chronological, and fraught with “ruminations” and rhetorical “sideshows” that expound upon the historical, cultural, and philosophical import of its action ( Life in Letters 467). Nevertheless, the story of the degeneration of a promising psychologist, Dr. Dick Diver, and his unstable wife, Nicole Warren, explores how the ruptures of modernity render past ideals of character obsolete. On one level, the book refutes the “Great Man” theory of historical progressivism, showing how the moral fiber of Romantic destiny in which Fitzgerald wanted to believe had given way to fashionable decadence and self-destruction. It also captures the peculiar placelessness of the 1920s’ globalization, depicting the drift of privileged Americans who expatriated to Europe (much as Fitzgerald and Zelda did throughout the second half of the decade).

Although Tender was at best a middling success when first published, its stature has grown over the years, with critics looking to its tangled subplots to appreciate how diverse phenomena shaped the era’s sense of fragmentation. Based closely on Zelda’s hospitalization in various Swiss sanitariums, Nicole’s treatment for schizophrenia invites exploration of the psychoanalytic concepts of transference and counter-transference in her and her husband-doctor’s mutual dependency. Dick Diver’s infatuation with ingénue actress Rosemary Hoyt, meanwhile, illustrates the role of the cinema in fostering the unreality of modern life. Even the leitmotif of romantic warfare is illustrative, suggesting how the Great War militarized everyday interaction—including the battle between the sexes.

After Tender, Fitzgerald only attempted one more novel. The Last Tycoon remained unfinished at the time of his December 21, 1940, death, however. Posthumously published a year later, it is notable for its treatment of the Hollywood studio system in which the author had intermittently toiled since the mid-1920s. As such, it is the culmination of several notable stories that explore his ambivalence toward both the industry and the medium, including “Jacob’s Ladder” (1927), “Magnetism” (1928), and a series of 1939-1940 tales featuring failed PR flak Pat Hobby.

Fitzgerald’s nonfiction is also considered a major part of his oeuvre, in particular the Esquire triptych “The Crack-Up,” which ignited controversy in 1936 for its beguiling confessions of squandered talent. His more commercial short stories—once derided as distractions from his “serious” work—are increasingly recognized for their craft and wit. Although Fitzgerald will remain best known for the elegiac melancholy of The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night , his short fiction reveals that he was as adept at comedy and fantasy as at tragedy—a testament to the breadth and range of his talent.

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Cowley, Malcolm. (1951). “The Double Man.” Saturday Review of Literature 34 (February 14), 9-10, 42-44. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. All the Sad Young Men . (1926, 2007). (ed.) James L. W. West III. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. _____. The Basil and Josephine Stories . (1973). (ed.) Jackson R. Bryer and John Kuehl. New York: Scribner’s, 1973. _____. The Beautiful and Damned . (1922, 2008). (ed.) James L. W. West III. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. _____. The Crack-Up . (1945). (ed.) Edmund Wilson. New York: New Directions. _____. Flappers and Philosophers . (1920, 1999). (ed.) James L. W. West III. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. _____. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Ledger: A Facsimile . (1973). (Intro.) Matthew J. Bruccoli. Washington D. C.: NCR Microcard Books/Bruccoli Clark. _____. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters . (1994) (ed.) Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Scribner’s. _____. The Great Gatsby . (1925, 1991). (ed.) Matthew J. Bruccoli. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. _____. The Last Tycoon . (1941). Republished (1993) as The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western . Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. _____. The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald . (1979). (ed.) Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. _____. The Pat Hobby Stories . (1962). (ed.) Arnold Gingrich. New York: Scribner’s. _____. The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A New Collection . (1989) (ed.) Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Scribner’s. _____. Tales of the Jazz Age . (1922, 2002). (ed.) James L. W. West III. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. _____. Taps at Reveille . (1935). New York: Scribner’s. _____. Tender Is the Night . (1934). New York: Scribner’s. _____. This Side of Paradise . (1920, 1995). (ed.) James L. W. West III. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. _____. The Vegetable . (1923). New York: Scribner’s.

SELECTED RESOURCES Criticism Berman, Ronald. (1994). The Great Gatsby and Modern Times . Urbana.: University of Illinois Press. Bruccoli, Matthew J. (2002). Some Sort of Epic Grandeur . 2nd rev. ed. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2002. Bryer, Jackson R. and Cathy W. Barks (eds.) (2002) Dear Scott/Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald . New York: Scribner’s. Curnutt, Kirk. (2007). The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald . New York: Cambridge University Press. Curnutt, Kirk. (ed). (2004). An Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald . New York: Oxford University Press. Donaldson, Scott. (1983) Fool for Love . New York: Congdon and Weed. Prigozy, Ruth. (ed). (2002) The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald . New York: Oxford University Press.

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald 1900-1948

Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (1900-1948) was an artist, writer, and personality who helped to establish the Roaring Twenties image of liberated womanhood embodied by the “flapper.” She and her husband, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), became icons of the freedoms and excesses of the 1920s Jazz Age and symbols of the emerging cultural fascination with youth, conspicuous consumption, and leisure. Best known for her extravagant public persona and descent into mental illness, she is also remembered as an artist and author in her own right, and both her vivacity and tragedy live on in the many characters she inspired in her husband’s novels and short stories.

Born on July 24, 1900, in Montgomery , Zelda Sayre was the youngest child of Alabama Supreme Court Justice Anthony Dickson Sayre and Minnie Buckner Machen Sayre, a prominent middle-class couple with roots in both Montgomery and Confederate history. (Judge Sayre’s uncle William was a prominent Montgomery merchant whose home eventually became Jefferson Davis’s first White House; Minnie Sayre’s father was a Kentucky senator in the Confederate Congress). By her early adolescence, Zelda—named after the gypsy heroine of an obscure 1874 novel—was already a formidable presence in Montgomery social circles, starring in ballet recitals and basking in the glow of elite country club dances. At such a dance in July 1918, barely a month after graduating from Sidney Lanier High School, Zelda met F. Scott Fitzgerald, a 21-year-old army second lieutenant stationed at nearby Camp Sheridan . Despite Scott’s claim that he was on the verge of literary fame, Zelda doubted his financial prospects and entertained several other suitors, much to the chagrin of the aspiring author, who continued to press for an engagement. Zelda’s tactics fueled Scott’s insecurities, and the motif of a young man pursuing an elusive and conniving woman would later come to define his fiction.

In early 1920 prominent New York publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons accepted Scott’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, and Zelda finally accepted his proposal of marriage. The couple wed in New York on April 3, 1920, just as the book began to ignite a scandal for its portrayal of the free-wheeling lifestyle and relaxed morals of what became known as the “Lost Generation.” As the presumed inspiration for character Rosalind Connage, Zelda became an instant celebrity; and for the first half of the 1920s, she frequently contributed her opinions on modern love, marriage, and childrearing to an eager media. In 1921, Zelda gave birth to the couple’s only child, Frances “Scottie” Fitzgerald. Her reaction to the birth is purported to have been used by Scott in The Great Gatsby, in which Daisy Buchanan states in response to the birth of her daughter: “I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

Zelda’s influence on Scott’s fiction in this period is inestimable. In addition to inspiring his major heroines, she supplied him with many other memorable lines, including an evocative description of Montgomery’s Oakwood Cemetery that appears in his short story “The Ice Palace.” When Scott’s novel The Beautiful and Damned was published, the New York Tribune hired Zelda to review it, she hinted that a passage in the book was lifted straight from her missing diary. Such statements have fueled scholarly debate that Zelda was Scott’s de facto collaborator and that he appropriated her personal experiences in his work. Such charges were given additional weight by the frequent addition of his name to her bylines on nearly two dozen stories and articles she produced between 1922 and 1934. In fact, Scott’s agent or editors added his name in several instances without his knowledge because the joint byline increased the price that these works received from leading magazines. Claims that Zelda “co-authored” her husband’s writing certainly are exaggerated, but few would deny that her personality was (and remains) key to its appeal.

By the late 1920s, the Fitzgeralds’s highly publicized and often stormy relationship began to break down as Zelda sought outlets for her own creativity. In addition to writing, she returned to two childhood passions—art and dance. In 1930, stress resulting from her frustrated attempts to become a professional ballerina led to the first of what would be many psychological breakdowns. (Although Zelda was treated for schizophrenia, mental-health experts later would contest both the diagnosis and recovery regimen prescribed by her main physician, Dr. Oscar Forel). From June 1930 to September 1931, Zelda lived at Les Rives de Prangins Clinic in Nyon, Switzerland. After her release, the couple returned to Montgomery and rented a home in the city’s Old Cloverdale neighborhood (the home is now the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum ).

Scott soon left for Hollywood, and in February 1932 Zelda entered Johns Hopkins University’s Phipps Clinic, where she completed her only novel, Save Me the Waltz, an autobiographical recounting of her unstable marriage. Scott deeply resented the book, blaming the financial burden of her hospitalization for his inability to complete Tender Is the Night , and he also accused Zelda of poaching its plot for her novel. When her novel failed to garner critical or commercial interest (royalties amounted to a paltry $120), Zelda abandoned her literary aspirations. She then tried writing for the stage and produced the unsuccessful comedy Scandalabra , mounted by an amateur drama troupe in Baltimore in 1933. It was her last public writing effort. Zelda next turned to painting, but she fared no better. A 1934 show of her work in New York inspired a condescending notice in Time magazine that described the event as her “latest bid for fame” and her canvases as “the work of a brilliant introvert.”

Morgan Le FayThe Fitzgeralds parted ways in 1934, although they never divorced. (Their daughter was largely raised by nannies before entering boarding school). From 1936 to 1940, Zelda resided at Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, and Scott descended into alcoholism and literary obscurity, eventually relocating to Hollywood in the hope of establishing himself as a screenwriter. He died of a heart attack there on December 21, 1940. That year, Zelda returned to Montgomery, where she lived under the care of her mother. In addition to painting, she took occasional dance lessons and began a second novel entitled Caesar’s Things, which remains unpublished. She returned occasionally to Highland Hospital when her depression became debilitating and was one of nine women killed on the night of March 10–11, 1948, when a fire swept through the hospital’s main wing.

Zelda’s final years coincided with her husband’s posthumous rediscovery as a significant American writer. Early F. Scott Fitzgerald biographers and critics tended to depict Zelda as equal parts liability and inspiration. Negative opinion culminated with the 1964 publication of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast , in which he portrays a fictionalized Zelda as a harridan who derailed her husband’s career. In Nancy Milford’s 1970 bestselling biography Zelda , she is a symbol of thwarted artistry, however—a theme echoed by many feminists, who see her frustrated attempts to establish herself as an artist as exemplifying the struggle women face in finding outlets and acceptance for their creativity. In recent years, scholars have both taught and written about Save Me the Waltz with increasing frequency, and exhibitions of Zelda’s surviving artwork regularly travel the United States. The Fitzgeralds’ story—of which Alabama is an indelible part—continues to fascinate scholars and the general public and has inspired an array of academic studies, movies, documentaries, and even musicals.

Additional Resources

Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991.

Cline, Sally. Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2003.

Kurth, Peter, Jane S. Livingston, and Eleanor Lanahan, eds. Zelda: An Illustrated Life: The Private World of Zelda Fitzgerald. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.

Milford, Nancy. Zelda: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: An American Woman’s Life. London: Palgrave, 2004.

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• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Biography

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was an American writer famous for his works dedicated to describing the Jazz Age. His most outstanding novel is The Great Gatsby . His unique style is appreciated all around the world. Despite his rather short and tragic life, he brought some masterpieces to us.

Read the full F. Scott Fitzgerald’s biography prepared by our editorial team to find out more!

❗ 9 Interesting Facts about F. Scott Fitzgerald

• 👪 Early Life
• 💑 Francis Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald
• 👨 Later Years & Death
• 🗺️ Study Guide: Navigation

🎓 References

📈 f. scott fitzgerald: timeline.

Below is the timeline of F.S. Fitzgerald. It reflects the key events of the writer’s life.

We have prepared some interesting facts about F. Scott Fitzgerald that you probably had no idea about!

• He was weirdly obsessed with recording his life in detail . The journal mainly was related to his writing career. However, some records are dedicated to describing his early years. Fitzgerald would note down all the details, like his height to the very first word he said and the time he fell in love with his future wife.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald never settled down . Every few years, he would move to a different city and even country, changing hotel rooms and rented places. It was affected by his wife’s health issues (the fresh air in Switzerland helped her). But also, Fitzgerald was trying to find a peaceful place for writing.
• He worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood . He worked for the MGM film studio and was helping with Gone with the Wind for two years. However, he was only credited once.
• The Great Gatsby wasn’t so successful at the beginning . Even his other two novels were perceived as better ones. The book only hit the readers after World War II.
• Zelda, Fitzgerald’s wife, was a flapper girl . She wasn’t afraid to smoke, joke, and drink in public. She was quite successful as a painter.
• He was named after a famous relative . Francis Scott Key is a very distant cousin of the author, though. He was also a writer but worked as a lawyer as well. He composed the text of The Star-Spangled Banner song and the creator of the National Anthem.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald struggled as a student . He was constantly getting low grades in both school and college. Not only was he skipping classes in Princeton, he almost dropped out once.
• He quit Princeton to serve in World War II but never made it to the battle . Just before he was supposed to be sent there, the war was over. However, he used that chance and produced another masterpiece, which would later become The Side of Paradise.
• He had a short and weird friendship with Hemingway . The two geniuses of writing spent a few years in the 1920s being friends. Later, though, they cut the connection and would even comment on each other with disgrace.

👪 F. Scott Fitzgerald: Early Life

There is no doubt about where F. Scott Fitzgerald was born since he was an American writer. However, to clear things up, it would be fair to note that his birthplace is St. Paul in Minnesota , where he would spend his childhood. And he was named in honor of his three times removed cousin on the father’s side, Francis Scott Key, a famous writer.

Now the only question is when F. Scott Fitzgerald was born. September 24, 1989 , is the day that brought us such a talented novelist.

Even though his father was a businessman, most of the family’s income was due to his mother’s relatives. Mollie came from an Irish family. They owned a successful business. Thanks to them, when F. Scott Fitzgerald was young, his family could afford to live in an upscale neighborhood.

After his father’s failed business, Fitzgerald moved the family to New York, where he started working as a salesman in 1898. A decade later, he was fired, and they all returned to St. Paul.

Scott Fitzgerald: Education

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s education started with prep school. He wasn’t the brightest student, despite his writing talent. In 1908, he was published for the first time in a school magazine. Due to his poor scores, his parents sent him to the Catholic school in New Jersey. With him dropping out of Princeton, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s education journey ended.

💑 Francis Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald

Some facts from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s biography remind one of the life of Gatsby quite a lot. The same can be said about the story of his relationship with Zelda.

They met in 1918 when Fitzgerald was based in Alabama . He fell in love with her and was ready for marriage. She refused, however. After being sent home from the army, he went to New York to earn some money. This way, the novelist was hoping to win Zelda as with enough money, he could provide her a lifestyle she was used to.

It appeared, though, that the lady was tired of such a long wait and broke their engagement. The same year, Fitzgerald worked on redoing the piece he started in the war times. A bit later, it was published as This Side of Paradise . Only after that, Zelda Sayre agreed to marry the writer.

As the couple was leading a typical Roaring Twenties’ lifestyle, Zelda Fitzgerald was enjoying her image of a flapper girl. They were drinking, attending parties, and traveling. In particular, they enjoyed their trips through Europe.

They had to say goodbye to their fun lives without children. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda welcomed their daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, in 1921 . However, it didn’t stop the young parent from heavy drinking, which later affected the writer’s reputation. The family faced issues with alcoholism and finances. To earn some money to keep their lifestyle going, the novelist was creating short stories. Popular magazines usually published them.

Everything became even worse when Zelda started having mental breakdowns in 1930. By that time, it had already become an issue. That seizure was so severe that she needed professional help. The next few years she would spend in specialized institutions in France, Switzerland, and the US.

Zelda’s last breakdown left her hospitalized until the end of her life. She died in a fire in 1948 in one of the hospitals.

Fitzgerald didn’t leave his wife and tried his best to make her life more comfortable. At the same time, he was sacrificing his career because Zelda required much more attention in her state. Most of the family’s financial issues were also due to the treatment’s costs.

F Scott Fitzgerald’s First Novel

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel was This Side of Paradise . It met with huge success immediately. Published in 1920, it became F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first book that made him widely famous. Thomas Parke D’Invilliers appearing in the novel is also the writer’s pseudonym. He used it in the epigraph to The Great Gatsby .

👨 Later Years & Death

Up until F. Scott Fitzgerald’s death, he would stick to his writing. But, at the same time, he picked up some jobs in Hollywood. From 1927 to 1937, he was going there to work for different studios as a screenwriter. He needed that income to keep paying for Zelda’s care.

In 1937, he worked for MGM Studios on a contract, which was renewed for a year. Next time, Fitzgerald wasn’t so lucky, and they rejected him. Despite being married and taking care of Zelda, the novelist fell in love with Sheilah Graham . She was a columnist and stayed with him during his last years of life. It seems like Sheilah was the one who inspired Fitzgerald to continue writing.

He stayed in Hollywood and worked for the most famous and important film studios from time to time on a freelance basis. Also, he started working on the final novel, which he never finished. Unfortunately, when F. Scott Fitzgerald died, his fame was fading. The world had forgotten about him as a writer for a while until World War II.

How Did F. Scott Fitzgerald Die?

The way how F. Scott Fitzgerald died wasn’t as dramatic as Gatsby’s but was definitely caused by his lifestyle. At the age of 44, in 1940, the novelist fell dead from a heart attack. Many people suppose it was due to his heavy drinking since he developed many health issues in the previous years.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 27, 2023 | Original: June 1, 2010

American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) rose to prominence as a chronicler of the jazz age . Born in St. Paul, Minn., Fitzgerald dropped out of Princeton University to join the U.S. Army. The success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), made him an instant celebrity. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), was highly regarded, but Tender is the Night (1934) was considered a disappointment. 

Struggling with alcoholism and his wife’s mental illness, Fitzgerald attempted to reinvent himself as a screenwriter. He died before completing his final novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), but earned posthumous acclaim as one of America’s most celebrated writers.

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota , Fitzgerald had the good fortune—and the misfortune—to be a writer who summed up an era. The son of an alcoholic failure from Maryland and an adoring, intensely ambitious mother, he grew up acutely conscious of wealth and privilege—and of his family’s exclusion from the social elite. After entering Princeton in 1913, he became a close friend of Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. He spent most of his time writing lyrics for Triangle Club theatrical productions and analyzing how to triumph over the school’s intricate social rituals.

He left Princeton without graduating and used it as the setting for his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920). It was perfect literary timing. The twenties were beginning to roar, bathtub gin and flaming youth were on everyone’s lips, and the handsome, witty Fitzgerald seemed to be the ideal spokesman for the decade . 

With his stunning southern wife, Zelda, he headed for Paris and a mythic career of drinking from hip flasks, dancing until dawn, and jumping into outdoor fountains to end the party. Behind this façade was a writer struggling to make enough money to match his extravagant lifestyle and still produce serious work. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), which recounted an artist’s losing fight with dissipation, was flawed. His next, The Great Gatsby (1925), the story of a gangster’s pursuit of an unattainable lost love, was close to a masterpiece.

The Fitzgeralds’ frenetic ascent to literary fame was soon tinged with tragedy. Scott became an alcoholic and Zelda, jealous of his fame (or in some versions, thwarted by it), collapsed into madness. They crept home in 1931 to an America in the grip of the Great Depression —a land no longer interested in flaming youth except to pillory them for their excesses. 

The novel with which he had grappled for years, Tender Is the Night , about a psychiatrist destroyed by his wealthy wife, was published in 1934 to lukewarm reviews and poor sales. Fitzgerald retreated to Hollywood . He made a precarious living as a scriptwriter and struggled to control his alcoholism. Miraculously he found the energy to begin another novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), about a complex gifted movie producer. He had finished about a third of it when he died of a heart attack. Obituaries generally dismissed him.

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Not until the early 1950s did interest in Fitzgerald revive, and when it did, it became a veritable scholarly industry. A closer look at his life and career reveals a writer with an acute sense of history, an intellectual pessimist who doubts Americans’ ability to survive their infatuation with material success.

At the same time, he conveyed in his best novels and short stories the sense of youthful awe and hope America’s promises created in many people. Few historians have matched the closing lines of The Great Gatsby , when the narrator reflects on how the land must have struck Dutch sailors’ eyes 300 years earlier: “For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity to wonder.”

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section F. Scott Fitzgerald

Introduction, general overviews.

• Bibliographies
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• This Side of Paradise
• The Beautiful and Damned
• The Great Gatsby
• Tender Is the Night
• The Last Tycoon
• Short Fiction
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• Women in Fitzgerald’s Works
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F. Scott Fitzgerald by Jackson R. Bryer LAST REVIEWED: 18 March 2021 LAST MODIFIED: 25 September 2023 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0001

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (b. 1896–d. 1940), named after his distant relative, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and educated at private schools there and in the East. He attended Princeton University, dropping out to join the army after the United States entered World War I. While in the service, he began his first novel, This Side of Paradise , which he revised twice before its publication in 1920. It is a highly autobiographical account of its author’s teenage and college years; its frank descriptions of adolescent behavior and its unique literary form brought Fitzgerald literary success and made him and his glamorous young wife, Zelda, celebrities as the prototypical couple of the 1920s and its Jazz Age culture. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), which, again partially autobiographically, follows the lives of a young couple through the tumultuous early years of their marriage, was not nearly as successful with the critics and the public as his first had been, but after a failed attempt at writing a play, The Vegetable (1923), he produced in The Great Gatsby (1925) the intricately patterned, poetic, and concise novel that is generally acknowledged as his masterpiece and one of the greatest American works of fiction. Thereafter, he struggled to complete his fourth novel, continuing to write short stories to offset his constant money problems, which were increased in the early 1930s by his wife’s mental illness. When Tender Is the Night appeared in 1934, its focus on wealthy young Americans on the Riviera was not received well by an America struggling through the Great Depression, but increasingly it has come to be regarded as, if not equal to The Great Gatsby , certainly a major literary work. Similarly, some of Fitzgerald’s short stories, which he tended to dismiss as potboilers written to support his often-extravagant lifestyle, are now thought to be among the best of that genre. Fitzgerald is admired for the skill and accuracy with which he depicted his era, for the beauty and artistry of his style, and for what his first biographer, Arthur Mizener, described in the introduction to Afternoon of an Author ( Fitzgerald 1958 , cited under Selected Works: Reprinted Material ) as “the curious way in which he combined the innocence of complete involvement with an almost scientific coolness of observation” (p. 3).

Paradoxically, despite the abundance of critical and scholarly commentary on Fitzgerald, there remains a dearth of worthwhile full-length comprehensive studies. Mizener 1965 , the critical biography that upon its original publication in 1951 essentially began a rediscovery of Fitzgerald’s work a decade after his death, remains the single best critical overview and can be read with profit by beginner and specialist alike, while Lehan 1966 , Miller 1964 , Perosa 1965 , and Sklar 1967 —all published within a four-year period—still are similarly useful overviews. Each has a slightly different emphasis, but they all are written in an accessible style and can serve as informed introductions to Fitzgerald’s work, as can Stern 1970 and Way 1980 . Of the more recent books, Donaldson 2009 is slightly more appropriate for advanced students; Curnutt 2007 is ideal for someone relatively unfamiliar with Fitzgerald’s work; and Irwin 2013 , while perhaps more suited for those well versed in Fitzgerald’s fiction, is the best critical book on Fitzgerald so far in the early twenty-first century.

Curnutt, Kirk. The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511611032

Excellent general introduction to Fitzgerald’s life and writing; authoritative and clearly written account that covers biography, historical context, and critical reception, with a thematically arranged analysis of the fiction.

Donaldson, Scott. Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days . New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

DOI: 10.7312/dona14816

Reprints eleven uniformly worthwhile “substantially revised” (p. 5) articles and book chapters. Focus is on “the interconnectedness between biography and criticism” (p. 6) and on well-researched close readings of a variety of Fitzgerald’s writings.

Irwin, John. T. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction: “An Almost Theatrical Innocence.” Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.

Wide-ranging and very personal reading that deals with the “compensating visions” (chapter 1) that enable Nick and Gatsby to tell their stories; Fitzgerald’s southern roots; “repose” (chapter 3) as a theatrical performance of class identity in Fitzgerald’s work; theatricality in Fitzgerald’s fiction after the failure of The Vegetable ; the influence of T. S. Eliot and the mythical method; Fitzgerald’s use of popular music in his work; and Fitzgerald’s “engagement with Platonic idealism” (p. 194).

Lehan, Richard D. F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction . Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966.

One of the best early books on Fitzgerald by one of his most astute critic-scholars. Excellent explications of the novels and some perceptive comparisons among Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway.

Miller, James E., Jr. F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Art and His Technique . New York: New York University Press, 1964.

Originally published in 1957 in a shorter version titled The Fictional Technique of Scott Fitzgerald (The Hague: M. Nijhoff), Miller’s early study remains one of the best for its focus on the development of Fitzgerald’s literary technique and on the literary influences on the work (H. G. Wells, H. L. Mencken, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Willa Cather, John Keats, and Edith Wharton). Includes worthwhile analyses of each of the five novels.

Mizener, Arthur. The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald . Rev. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.

Originally published in 1951. Remains the single best comprehensive critical study, with extensive and informed text-based analyses of each of the five novels. Less attention is paid to the Short Fiction and Nonfiction , but virtually all the writing is mentioned.

Perosa, Sergio. The Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald . Translated by Charles Matz and Sergio Perosa. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965.

Originally published in Italian in 1961. Deals chronologically with the full range of Fitzgerald’s fiction, stressing its “interdependent links.” Important for its early coverage of the Short Fiction , The Vegetable , and The Last Tycoon . Emphasis on thematic resemblances often neglects relative literary merit.

Sklar, Robert. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoön . New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Thesis is that Fitzgerald was the last important American novelist “to grow up believing in the genteel romantic ideals that pervaded late nineteenth-century American culture” (p. 3). Worthwhile primarily for sections on the influence of Booth Tarkington, James Joyce, and Mark Twain on Fitzgerald’s female characters (see Women in Fitzgerald’s Works ), and on the relation of the Short Fiction to the Novels .

Stern, Milton R. The Golden Moment: The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970.

Important in-depth study of Fitzgerald’s first four novels that strikes an effective balance between viewing the fiction through the life and seeing it as “the ‘identity crisis’ of our American time” (p. xi). Valuable as a series of individual, original, and provocative readings.

Way, Brian. F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Art of Social Fiction . New York: St. Martin’s, 1980.

The best full-length study of the full range of Fitzgerald’s work in the context of the social, historical, and literary contexts of his day. Informed close readings of the Short Fiction and Novels that do not eschew distinctions based on literary quality.

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Curious about the man who created The Great Gatsby ? Did you know that some of the events of this novel are actually based on things that happened to F. Scott Fitzgerald himself? This article will give you a broad overview of Fitzgerald’s life, with a focus on the autobiographical details that he later worked into The Great Gatsby . 

Use this background on The Great Gatsby author to further deepen your understanding of the novel, to connect it with the historical period that it's describing, and to better analyze the motivations of the characters.

Fitzgerald’s Early Life: Echoes of The  Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. When he was 15, Fitzgerald was sent to the Newman School, a prestigious boarding school in New Jersey. He stayed on the East Coast to attend Princeton University , an Ivy League school. 

Fitzgerald was popular at Princeton. He did lots of creative writing for various student publications, including articles for the Princeton Tiger humor magazine and scripts for Triangle Club musicals. However, Fitzgerald’s extracurricular commitments caused him to neglect his studies, and even be placed on academic probation.

Traveling home to St. Paul from Princeton in 1915, Fitzgerald met socialite Ginevra King . Beautiful, wealthy, and effortlessly charming, Ginevra was arguably the primary inspiration for Daisy Buchanan . Indeed, a recently unveiled collection of letters reveals how much Ginevra cared for Scott, but also knew that she couldn’t marry a middle-class boy . In 1917, Fitzgerald dropped out of Princeton completely to join the army and fight in World War I (although he never actually saw action). A year later, Ginevra King wrote him a letter to tell him that she was engaged to marry another man.

Fitzgerald was stationed in Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama. That’s where he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre , the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. Zelda was another popular socialite, a free spirit who loved dancing, swimming, and partying. She also cared for Fitzgerald, but, like Ginevra, was wary of marrying a middle-class man without much money.

The war ended in 1918 before Fitzgerald was ever deployed to Europe. He moved to NYC hoping to have a successful career in advertising and make enough money to convince Zelda to marry him . A few months later, he went back to St. Paul to work on a novel. He also took a job repairing car roofs to help pay the bills.

Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise , published in 1920, was a semi-autobiographical account of his Princeton years, featuring the main character Amory Blaine, who is rejected by two wealthy girls. The novel was an overnight success , making 24-year-old Fitzgerald one of the country’s most promising young writers.

With his novel published and income assured, Scott married Zelda in NYC. They had a daughter named Frances soon after, in 1921, who would be their only child. Zelda remarked upon her birth “I hope she’s a fool, a beautiful little fool."

Scott loved his new celebrity status and started living a really expensive lifestyle, which included lots of partying and traveling. In October 1922, the Fitzgeralds moved to Great Neck, a town on Long Island which served as the inspiration for West Egg in The Great Gatsby . Their neighbors were also wealthy, famous, and very “new money.” Their contrast to the families in Port Washington, which sat across the bay from Great Neck, gave Fitzgerald the idea for the contrast between West Egg and East Egg in the novel.

Ginevra King (left) and Zelda Fitzgerald (right)

Biographical Similarities to Events in The Great Gatsby 

• Like Fitzgerald, the novel's narrator Nick Carraway also grows up in the Midwest and then goes to college to an East Coast Ivy League school (although in Nick's case, it's Yale). Fitzgerald wrote for humorous publications at Princeton, while Nick describes a series of “solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News” (1.12).
• Gatsby's initial romance with Daisy is almost exactly what happened to Fitzgerald and Ginevra King. Gatsby meets Daisy Fay, a wealthy socialite, is unable to marry her because he is too poor, and leaves to fight in WWI only to have her marry Tom Buchanan. However, the way that Gatsby meets Daisy is similar to the way Fitzgerald met Zelda - while stationed at a military camp awaiting transfer orders to Europe.
• Unlike Nick and Jay, Fitzgerald never actually experienced fighting in WWI.
• After the war, Fitzgerald spent several months in New York trying to make it in the advertising business before coming back to St. Paul to write. Similarly, Nick spends a summer in New York trying to make it as a bond trader before coming back to the Midwest to write his memoir about Gatsby.
• Fitzgerald worked as a car mechanic while writing his first novel, which may have given him some insight into what George Wilson's life might be like.
• Zelda's comment on the birth of Frances Fitzgerald became one of Daisy Buchanan’s most famous lines in The Great Gatsby almost verbatim: "I'm glad it's a girl. And I hope she'll be a fool - that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool." (1.118)
• Fitzgerald's life on Long Island had shades of Gatsby's parties and extravagant lifestyle, as well as his feelings of inferiority when thinking about the old money crowd across the bay in East Egg.

Remember: art only imitates, but doesn't duplicate life.

The High Life: Writing The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald continued to work on his novels in between partying and writing short stories. In 1922, he published his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned , about a socialite waiting to come into his fortune. This novel, with its meditations on morality, love, and decadence, officially marked Fitzgerald as one of the great writers of the wealth, ambition, and extravagance of the Jazz Age .

Fitzgerald began work on The Great Gatsby , his third novel, in June 1922. However, he was slowed down by debts, a move to the French Riviera, and conflicts with his wife . He really buckled down in 1924, telling his editor that Gatsby would be “a consciously artistic achievement” and a “purely creative work.”

During this period, Fitzgerald fell in with a famous group of modernists in Paris, including the novelist Ernest Hemingway and writer Gertrude Stein .  

The Great Gatsby was finally published in 1925. Despite Fitzgerald’s efforts, it was not as warmly received by critics as his previous two novels. It also failed to take off commercially. (Read our history of The Great Gatsby   for more on how Gatsby was received in the 1920s.)

End of Life: Fitzgerald's Unraveling

After the publication of The Great Gatsby , Fitzgerald suffered from alcoholism, something he had struggled with since Princeton, and writer’s block. Meanwhile, Zelda suffered from mental health problems and was often institutionalized. (She was diagnosed as schizophrenic, though many modern historians believe she could have also suffered from bipolar disorder.)

In 1934, Fitzgerald finally published Tender is the Night , his fourth novel, about an American psychiatrist living in Paris. He continued to struggle with alcoholism and depression. In 1937, he moved to Hollywood to be a screenwriter and revive his career. Though he made some money, he was never a critical success (there aren’t any must-see Fitzgerald films).

Fitzgerald began the novel Love of the Last Tycoon while in Hollywood but died in 1940, at age 44, from a heart attack, before he could finish it. An unfinished version was eventually published in 1941.

What to Take From the Life of  The Great Gatsby  Author

If you’ve already read The Great Gatsby , you’ll notice pretty big parallels in the story to Fitzgerald’s real life: the Midwestern upbringing and education of Nick, with the military experience and love life of Gatsby.

Fitzgerald makes Nick Carraway the narrator, not Gatsby. This may suggest that Fitzgerald saw himself as someone like Nick – someone observing a much more extravagant lifestyle from the outside , rather than participating like Gatsby.

It’s also important to understand Gatsby was written during the precarious peak of Fitzgerald’s life – while he was famous and living an extravagant lifestyle but before the most serious struggles with alcoholism, depression, and debt . You can't really tie any of Fitzgerald’s (or Zelda’s) most intense struggles with alcoholism or mental illness to Gatsby – you’d have to focus on Tender is the Night or Love of the Last Tycoon to do that.

Instead, Gatsby is the book that came at the height of the 1920s and Fitzgerald’s life before he began to seriously struggle with alcoholism and depression – but it still has a melancholy undertone that strongly hints at the struggles to come.

Further Reading

• Biography.com: Get a more detailed overview of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life , especially the later years.
• The New York Times: A feature that explores Scott and Zelda’s connection to Long Island and the possible Gatsby mansion inspiration. 
• Princeton Alumni Weekly: Read more about Ginevra King , the possible inspiration for Daisy.

What’s Next?

Learn more about how The Great Gatsby was received when it first came out , and also read up about the 1920s so you can understand the economic, political, and cultural context of Gatsby .

Excited to dive in? Check out our articles on  Gatsby ’s title , its opening pages and epigraph , and its  first chapter .

Or, zoom out first to a summary of The Great Gatsby , along with links to all our great articles analyzing this novel!

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A Summary and Analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The Great Gatsby is the quintessential Jazz Age novel, capturing a mood and a moment in American history in the 1920s, after the end of the First World War. Rather surprisingly, The Great Gatsby sold no more than 25,000 copies in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lifetime. It has now sold over 25 million copies.

If Fitzgerald had stuck with one of the numerous working titles he considered for the novel, it might have been published as Trimalchio in West Egg (a nod to a comic novel from ancient Rome about a wealthy man who throws lavish parties), Under the Red, White and Blue , or even The High-Bouncing Lover (yes, really).

How did this novel come to be so widely acclaimed and studied, and what does it all mean? Before we proceed to an analysis of Fitzgerald’s novel, here’s a quick summary of the plot.

The Great Gatsby : plot summary

Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel, is a young man who has come to New York to work on the stock exchange. He lives on the island of West Egg, where his neighbour is the wealthy Jay Gatsby, who owns a mansion.

One evening, Nick is dining with his neighbours from East Egg, Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Tom is having an affair, and goes to answer the phone at one point; Daisy follows him out of the room, and their fellow guest, a woman named Jordan Baker, explains to Nick about Tom’s mistress.

A short while after this, Nick is with Tom when Tom sets up a meeting with his mistress, Myrtle, the wife of a garage mechanic named Wilson. Nick attends a party with Tom and Myrtle; Tom hits his mistress when she mentions Daisy’s name.

In the summer, Gatsby throws a number of lavish parties at his mansion. He meets Jordan Baker again and the two are drawn to each other. Nobody seems to know the real Gatsby, or to be able to offer much reliable information about his identity. Who is he?

Gatsby befriends Nick and drives him to New York. Gatsby explains that he wants Nick to do him a favour: Jordan Baker tells him that Daisy was Gatsby’s first love and he is still in love with her: it’s the whole reason Gatsby moved to West Egg, so he could be near Daisy, even though she’s married to Tom. Gatsby wants Nick to invite both him and Daisy round for tea.

When they have tea together, Gatsby feels hopeful that he can recover his past life with Daisy before she was married. However, he knows that Daisy is unlikely to leave Tom for him. When she expresses a dislike for his noisy parties, he scales down his serving staff at his house and tones down the partying.

When they are all at lunch together, Tom realises that Daisy still loves Gatsby. Tom goads Gatsby as he realises he’s losing his mistress and, now, his wife. While staying together in a suite at the Plaza Hotel, Daisy tells Tom that she loves both men.

On their way back home, Gatsby’s car accidentally hits and kills Myrtle Wilson, Tom’s mistress, who has rushed out into the road after her husband found out about her affair. Tom finds her body and is distraught. Nick learns that Daisy, not Gatsby, was driving the car when Myrtle was killed.

Gatsby also tells Nick that he had built himself up from nothing: he was a poor man named James Gatz who made himself rich through the help of a corrupt millionaire named Dan Cody.

The next day, Nick finds Gatsby dead in his own swimming pool: Wilson, after his wife was killed by Gatsby’s car, turned up at Gatsby’s mansion to exact his revenge. Wilson’s body is nearby in the grass. The novel ends with Nick winding up Gatsby’s affairs and estate, before learning that Tom told Wilson where he could find Gatsby so he could take revenge.

The Great Gatsby : analysis

The Great Gatsby is the best-known novel of the Jazz Age, that period in American history that had its heyday in the 1920s. Parties, bootleg cocktails (it’s worth remembering that alcohol was illegal in the US at this time, under Prohibition between 1920 and 1933), and jazz music (of course) all characterised a time when Americans were gradually recovering from the First World War and the Spanish flu pandemic (1918-20).

One reason The Great Gatsby continues to invite close analysis is the clever way Fitzgerald casts his novel as neither out-and-out criticism of Jazz Age ‘values’ nor as an unequivocal endorsement of them. Gatsby’s parties may be a mere front, a way of coping with Daisy’s previous rejection of him and of trying to win her back, but Fitzgerald – and his sympathetic narrator, Nick Carraway – do not ridicule Gatsby’s behaviour as wholly shallow or vacuous.

Fitzgerald’s choice to have a first-person narrator, rather than a more detached and impersonal ‘omniscient’ third-person narrator, is also significant. Nick Carraway is closer to Gatsby than an impersonal narrator would be, yet the fact that Nick narrates Gatsby’s story, rather than Gatsby telling his own story, nevertheless provides Nick with some detachment, as well as a degree of innocence and ignorance over Gatsby’s identity and past.

Nick Carraway is both part of Gatsby’s world and yet also, at the same time, an observer from the side-lines, someone who is not rich and extravagant as many in Gatsby’s circle are, yet someone who is ushered into that world by an enthusiastic Jay Gatsby, who sees in Carraway a man in whom he can confide.

Nevertheless, Fitzgerald deftly sets the world of West Egg, with Gatsby’s mock-chateau and swimming pool, against the rather grittier and grimier reality for most Americans at the time. If Gatsby himself symbolises the American dream – he has made himself a success, absurdly wealthy with a huge house and a whole retinue of servants, having started out in poverty – then there are plenty of reminders in The Great Gatsby that ‘the American dream’ remains just that, a dream, for the majority of Americans:

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.

This is the grey, bleak, industrial reality for millions of Americans: not for them is the world of parties, quasi-enchanted gardens full of cocktails and exotic foods, hydroplanes, and expensive motorcars.

Yet the two worlds are destined to meet on a personal level: the Valley of Ashes (believed to be modelled on Corona dump in Queens, New York, and inspired by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land ) is where Wilson’s garage is located. The dual tragedy of Gatsby’s and Wilson’s deaths at the end of the novel symbolises the meeting of these two worlds.

The fact that Gatsby is innocent of the two crimes or sins which motivate Wilson – his wife’s adultery with Tom and Daisy’s killing of Myrtle with Gatsby’s car – hardly matters: it shows the subtle interconnectedness of these people’s lives, despite their socioeconomic differences.

What’s more, as Ian Ousby notes in his Introduction to Fifty American Novels (Reader’s Guides) , there is more than a touch of vulgarity about Gatsby’s lifestyle: his house is a poor imitation of a genuine French chateau, but he is no aristocrat; his car is ‘ridiculous’; and his very nickname, ‘the Great Gatsby’, makes him sound like a circus entertainer (perhaps a magician above all else, which is apt given the magical and enchanted way Carraway describes the atmosphere and detail at Gatsby’s parties).

And ultimately, Gatsby’s lavish lifestyle fails to deliver happiness to him, too: he doesn’t manage to win Daisy back to him, so at the same time Fitzgerald is not holding up Gatsby’s ‘success’ uncritically to us.

Is Gatsby black? Although he is known for having been played in film adaptations by Robert Redford and Leonardo DiCaprio, and the novel does not state that Gatsby is an African American, the scholar Carlyle V. Thompson has suggested that certain clues or codes in the novel strongly hint at Gatsby being a black American who has had to make his own way in the world, rising from a poor socio-economic background, and not fully accepted by other people in his social circle because of racial discrimination.

Whether we accept or reject this theory, it is an intriguing idea that, although Fitzgerald does not support this theory in the novel, that may have been deliberate: to conceal Gatsby’s blackness but, as it were, hide it in plain sight.

In the last analysis, The Great Gatsby sums up the Jazz Age, but through offering a tragedy, Fitzgerald shows that the American dream is founded on ashes – both the industrial dirt and toil of millions of Americans for whom the dream will never materialise, and the ashes of dead love affairs which Gatsby, for all of his quasi-magical properties, will never bring fully back to life.

10 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby”

I regret the several hours wasted in slogging through this low-prole distraction.

You might want to start with something like Dick and Jane.

One of my favorite novels. I have always loved this book. No matter how may times I read it, more is revealed.

The Great Gatsby is one of my favorite novels. Thank you for the detailed analysis! I can also add that Fitzgerald includes lots of symbols in the novel. To my mind, one of the most vivid symbols is a giant billboard with the face of Doctor TJ Eckleburg which is towering over the Valley of Ashes. These eyes are watching the dismal grey scene of poverty and decay. I guess the billboard symbolizes the eyes of God staring at the Americans and judging them. In case seomeone is interested in symbols in The Great Gatsby, there is a nice article about it. Here: https://custom-writing.org/blog/symbols-in-the-great-gatsby

While I could imagine and accept a modern film version of Gatsby as black, I really can’t espouse the notion that Fitzgerald had that in mind. If you know anything about American society in the 1920s, you’d know that you didn’t have to be black or of some other minority to be outside the winner’s circle. US society may still have tons of problems accepting that all people are created equal, but back then, they weren’t even thinking about blacks et al very much. They were quite happy to ostracize Italians, Irish, Catholics, etc, without batting an eye.

This is such a widely misunderstood book, by scholars as well as regulars.

Daisy was the victim of love. She would’ve married Jay while he was in the army. Also, Jay’s so-called symbolic “reaching” is nothing more than him trying to understand self love, to attain it, to unravel the “mystery! ” of it. But he never realizes he’s totally in love with himself, which is his biggest issue other than preying on Daisy’s real love.

And Nick ” Carraway” …. Care-a-way, care-a-way… What self-appointed moral man witnesses nakedly two married plotters sceam against a neighbor they like, or any person in serious need of legal, emotion aid, AND DOES NOTHING. Yeah, care a way, Nick, just not your way! And Come On!! who the hell doesn’t judge others….that’s the ENTIRE POINT OF EVERY BOOK AND LIFE.

WHAT preyed on Gatsby preys upon every person everywhere. Influences of life and choices we make because if them. Gatsby’s such an interesting, centralized , beloved character because he represents everyone’s apparent embracement of the childhood notion, ” we can have it all and make our own consequences, and if not, let’s see if I can manipulate time successfully. Gatsby’s us the full human demonstration of self love at all costs and quite deliberately finding a way disguise and masquerade and mutate and thus deny this very fact while simultaneously trying to make it MAGICAL AND MYSTICAL.

ARTISTS, from geniuses to so-called laypeople, are all simple people with very basic emotions. That’s where ALL starts. They are not Gods, nor do they desire misunderstanding. Frankly, they just wanna see if you have any common sense. Once you get passed that, all literature resembles EVERY aspect of life.

A terrific novel and not bad adaptation as a movie by DiCaprio, I thought! While some of the comments on here are a little excessive, there is much to be said for the symbolism in the book. I rather like the fact that ‘West Egg’ and ‘East Egg’ surely hints at questioning who is the ‘good egg’ and who is ‘the bad egg’. The place names are so unusual that this must be deliberate (‘bad egg’ has been around since at least 1855) and we’re left to wonder just what is good and bad here. No character comes out smelling of roses in this story, which – for me – makes the novel utterly compelling.

Well said, Ken. It’s the subtlety of the characterisation which makes it for me – I know a lot of critics and readers praise the prose style, but I think it’s the way Fitzgerald uses Carraway’s narration to reveal the multifaceted (and complex) nature of Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, and even himself that is so masterly. I’ve just finished analysing the opening paragraphs of the novel and will post that up soon!

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Home — Guides — The Great Gatsby — An Intriguing Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Brilliant Mind Behind The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald

In 1917, Fitzgerald left Princeton without graduating to join the United States Army during World War I. However, he never saw combat and was stationed at Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama, where he met and fell in love with a young woman named Zelda Sayre. Fitzgerald proposed to Zelda in 1919, but she refused him due to his financial insecurity.

Determined to win Zelda's hand, Fitzgerald moved to New York City and began working on his writing career. In 1920, his first novel, "This Side of Paradise," was published to critical acclaim. The book became an instant bestseller and made Fitzgerald an overnight sensation.

With his newfound fame and success, Fitzgerald married Zelda in 1920 and the couple embarked on a glamorous and decadent lifestyle. They became the epitome of the "flapper" era, attending parties, drinking heavily, and spending lavishly. Fitzgerald's second novel, "The Beautiful and Damned," was published in 1922 and further cemented his reputation as a leading voice of the Jazz Age.

Throughout the 1920s, Fitzgerald continued to produce works of fiction, including "The Great Gatsby" (1925), which is widely considered to be his masterpiece. The novel is a scathing critique of the excesses and moral decay of the Roaring Twenties, and it has become a staple of high school and college curricula around the world.

However, despite his literary success, Fitzgerald struggled with personal demons. He and Zelda had a tumultuous relationship, and her mental illness often left him feeling helpless and frustrated. Additionally, Fitzgerald was plagued by alcoholism, which had a profound impact on his health and creative output.

By the 1930s, Fitzgerald's literary career was in decline, and he struggled to maintain his lifestyle and support his family. He turned to writing screenplays and short stories for Hollywood studios, but his work was often unappreciated and poorly compensated. Fitzgerald's final novel, "The Last Tycoon," was left unfinished at the time of his death in 1940 at the age of 44.

Fitzgerald's legacy as one of the most important writers of the 20th century is secure. His works are celebrated for their elegant prose, vivid characterizations, and acute social commentary. Fitzgerald's life, too, has become the stuff of legend, as he embodied the spirit of the Jazz Age while also grappling with the darker aspects of fame and fortune. Today, Fitzgerald is remembered not only as a writer but also as an icon of American culture.

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The Great Gatsby

F. scott fitzgerald, everything you need for every book you read..

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

The Great Gatsby: Introduction

The great gatsby: plot summary, the great gatsby: detailed summary & analysis, the great gatsby: themes, the great gatsby: quotes, the great gatsby: characters, the great gatsby: symbols, the great gatsby: literary devices, the great gatsby: quizzes, the great gatsby: theme wheel, brief biography of f. scott fitzgerald.

Historical Context of The Great Gatsby

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• Full Title: The Great Gatsby
• Where Written: Paris and the US, in 1924
• When Published: 1925
• Literary Period: Modernism
• Genre: Novel
• Setting: Long Island, Queens, and Manhattan, New York in the summer of 1922
• Climax: The showdown between Gatsby and Tom over Daisy
• Point of View: First person

Extra Credit for The Great Gatsby

Puttin' on the Fitz. Fitzgerald spent most of his adult life in debt, often relying on loans from his publisher, and even his editor, Maxwell Perkins, in order to pay the bills. The money he made from his novels could not support the high-flying cosmopolitan life his wife desired, so Fitzgerald turned to more lucrative short story writing for magazines like Esquire. Fitzgerald spent his final three years writing screenplays in Hollywood.

Another Failed Screenwriter. Fitzgerald was an alcoholic and his wife Zelda suffered from serious mental illness. In the final years of their marriage as their debts piled up, Zelda stayed in a series of mental institutions on the East coast while Fitzgerald tried, and largely failed, to make money writing movie scripts in Hollywood.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Inspiration for 'The Great Gatsby'

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The Great Gatsby is a classic American novel written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published in 1925. Though it sold poorly at first—readers bought only 20,000 copies in 1925—the publisher Modern Library has called it the best American novel of the 20th century. The novel is set in the fictional town of West Egg on Long Island in the early 1920s. Indeed, Fitzgerald was inspired to write the book by the grand parties he attended on prosperous Long Island, where he got a front-row view of the elite, moneyed class of the 1920s, a culture he longed to join but never could.

Decade of Decadence

The Great Gatsby was first, and foremost, a reflection of Fitzgerald's life. He put pieces of himself into two of the book's major characters —Jay Gatsby, the mysterious millionaire and namesake of the novel, and Nick Carraway, the first-person narrator. After World War I, when Fitzgerald's debut novel— This Side of Paradise —became a sensation and he became famous, he found himself among the glitterati that he had always wanted to join. But it was not to last.​

It took Fitzgerald two years to write The Great Gatsby , which was actually a commercial failure during his lifetime; it did not become popular with the public until well after Fitzgerald's death in 1940. Fitzgerald struggled with alcoholism and money troubles for the rest of his life and never did become part of the gilded, moneyed class that he so admired. He and his wife Zelda had moved, in 1922, to Long Island, where there was a clear division between the "new money" and the old guard elite. Their geographic divisions as well as social strata inspired Gatsby 's division between the fictional neighborhoods of West Egg and East Egg.

Ginevra King, of Chicago, has long been considered the inspiration for Daisy Buchanan, Gatsby's elusive love interest. Fitzgerald met King in 1915 at a snow-sledding party in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was a student at Princeton at the time but was on a visit to his home in St. Paul. King was visiting a friend in St. Paul at the time. Fitzgerald and King were immediately smitten and carried on an affair for more than two years.

King, who went on to become a well-known debutante and socialite, was part of that elusive moneyed class , and Fitzgerald was just a poor college student. The affair ended, reportedly after King's father told Fitzgerald: "Poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls." This line eventually made its way into The Great Gatsby and was included in several movie adaptations of the novel, including one made in 2013. King's father shared several traits with the closest thing Gatsby has to a villain, Tom Buchanan: both were Yale alumni and outright white supremacists. Tom also shares a few references with William Mitchell, the man who ultimately married Ginevra King: he's from Chicago and has a passion for polo.

Another figure from King's circle reportedly appears in fictionalized form in the novel. Edith Cummings was another wealthy debutante and an amateur golfer who moved in the same social circles. In the novel, the character of Jordan Baker is clearly based on Cummings, with one notable exception: Jordan is suspected of having cheated to win a tournament, while no such accusation was ever launched at Cummings.

World War I

In the novel, Gatsby meets Daisy when he is a young military officer stationed at the army's Camp Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, during World War I. Fitzgerald was actually based at Camp Taylor when he was in the army during World War I, and he makes various references to Louisville in the novel. In real life, Fitzgerald met his future wife, Zelda, when he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the infantry and assigned to Camp Sheridan outside of Montgomery, Alabama, where she was a beautiful debutante. 

Fitzgerald actually used a line Zelda spoke while she was under anesthesia during the birth of their daughter, Patricia, to create a line for Daisy: "That the best thing for a woman to be was a 'beautiful little fool,'" according to Linda Wagner-Martin in her biography,  Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald , who further noted that the author "knew a good line when he heard it."

Other Possible Tie-Ins

Different men have been postulated to have inspired the character of Jay Gatsby, including bootlegger Max Gerlach, an acquaintance of Fitzgerald, though authors typically have characters be a fictionalized amalgam .

In the book Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of ‘The Great Gatsby, ’ author Sarah Churchwell theorizes inspiration for the murder in the book from the 1922 double murder of Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills , which happened contemporaneously to when he was starting work on the novel.

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F Scott Fitzgerald's books: a guide to The Great Gatsby author

Whether you're yet to discover this american great, or have read or seen the great gatsby and want to know what to pick up next, here's our guide to f scott fitzgerald's books..

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896-1940) is one of America’s best-known authors. He wrote novels, short stories and screenplays, captivating readers across the world. But his journey to literary success and posthumous recognition was riddled with setbacks. 

Fitzgerald’s first story appeared in a school publication when he was thirteen. Ten years later, his debut novel This Side of Paradise was published. Fitzgerald had started at Princeton by then but left to join the army. The book’s success confirmed his long-standing ambitions and won him back his fiancée, since Zelda Sayre had refused to marry Fitzgerald with no money. He wrote magazine stories to support his family: a daughter, Frances Scott, was born in 1921. But as they moved around the world – New York City, Long Island, France – his relationship with Zelda deteriorated, fueled by quarrels and heavy drinking. Zelda spent most of her later life in hospital after being diagnosed with schizophrenia, and Fitzgerald himself was hospitalised for alcoholism. The couple became estranged, and Fitzgerald died in 1940.

As well as depicting the passion and chaos of the Jazz Age, F Scott Fitzgerald's books explore failing relationships and the American Dream’s key ingredients: money, ambition, success and social class.

This Side of Paradise

By f. scott fitzgerald.

Published to instant acclaim, this semi-autobiographical novel charts the coming-of-age of young, proud Amory Blaine. Amory spends his childhood travelling around with his charming but eccentric mother, eventually landing in Princeton as a handsome, naive student who joins the army after graduating. The second part of the book deals with his life and relationships after returning to America. This is a vastly funny novel with many moments of bittersweet, beautiful description. Amory’s character is extremely entertaining throughout: he is cocksure yet self-aware, flirtatious yet bashful.  

The Beautiful and Damned

Fitzgerald mixes fiction with autobiography once again in this story of a couple whose whirlwind lifestyle brings catastrophic consequences. Anthony and Gloria are madly in love: she is a 1920s flapper and he is a listless young man awaiting a vast inheritance from a wealthy grandfather. But years of extravagant partying lead them nowhere, and Anthony’s grandfather refuses to pass on any money when he learns of his grandson’s reckless cavorting. Anthony is drafted during the First World War and upon his return nothing remains of his previous happiness with Gloria. Though he stands to get the inheritance, was it all worth it? 

The Great Gatsby

Though now considered one of the greatest American novels, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby sold badly compared to his previous books. It pieces together the story of millionaire Jay Gatsby from the perspective of narrator Nick Carraway, who rents a house near Gatsby one summer. Gatsby is known for his lavish parties, but who is he, really? Nick finds himself thrown into a strange circle of acquaintances, where secrets, enemies and old loves lurk just beneath the surface. 

Tender is the Night

This was the final novel Fitzgerald completed, and he thought of it as his masterwork. The story begins with an American couple enjoying their sojourn on the French Riviera. Dick is a young, talented psychiatrist and Nicole is his wife and sometime patient. The relationship is examined through flashbacks to their first meetings, when Nicole was receiving treatment at a psychiatric clinic in Zurich. As the narrative returns to the present day, a shocking series of events pulls Dick and Nicole further and further apart.

Tales of the Jazz Age

Plunge into the 1920s with this volume of short stories, dedicated “quite inappropriately”, writes Fitzgerald, “to my mother.” In ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’, a man ages backwards, starting life as a pensioner. ‘The Camel’s Back’ features two characters on a mission to gatecrash a circus-themed ball in a camel costume. ‘Tarquin of Cheapside’ is a layered and enigmatic story written during Fitzgerald’s time at Princeton. In ‘May Day’, a reunion of old friends swiftly morphs into a case of blackmail. And Zelda Fitzgerald wrote part of ‘The Jelly Bean’, a story set in the American South about an idler’s hopeless love.

Here’s something a bit different: On Booze is a collection of Fitzgerald’s writing about alcohol, something that features in almost all his short stories. An evocation of Prohibition-era life, and the rambunctious Jazz Age, this collection brings together material from across Fitzgerald’s career. There are excerpts from notebooks and letters, along with four autobiographical short stories, all richly portraying a seductive, rowdy and roaring period in literature and history.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald: Biography and Writing Style

• The Albert Team
• Last Updated On: March 1, 2022

What We Review

About the Author of The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald is considered one of the most influential American novelists, primarily due to the success of his novel, The Great Gatsby . But what makes this novel so successful? It is likely the closeness of his character’s experiences to his own personal experience — particularly in relation to the pursuit of the American Dream. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Childhood and Adulthood

As a child and young adult, Fitzgerald’s experience is similar to James Gatz’s experience of coming from an unsuccessful family and trying to fashion a new name for himself. Fitzgerald often imagined himself attaining wealth and prosperity, much like Gatsby . Also like Gatsby, Fitzgerald never really experienced true happiness and died at a very young age. Fitzgerald did have the opportunity to attend Princeton University, and he even found influence within the Triangle Club until he flunked out of Princeton after being rejected by a girl.

After failing Princeton, much like Gatsby, Fitzgerald enlisted in the army and met his future wife, Zelda, while stationed in Montgomery, Alabama. Even though Zelda broke off her engagement with Fitzgerald once due to his lack of financial stability, Fitzgerald still managed to marry Zelda and saw success in publishing his first novel,  This Side of Paradise . This is where Gatsby’s story diverts from Fitzgerald’s, as Gatsby was unsuccessful in recapturing Daisy from Tom’s grip. 

Much like Gatsby, Fitzgerald and Zelda enjoyed their newfound wealth and success in seeing this first novel published; however, the Fitzgeralds were uncomfortable with their new roles in the upper crust of society and fled to the French Riviera. Here he wrote and published a string of successful novels, including  The Great Gatsby.  Soon, the Fitzgeralds’ lives began to fall apart, both as Fitzgerald became an alcoholic and Zelda suffered a mental breakdown. Eventually, Zelda was committed to a sanitarium, and Fitzgerald suffered a heart attack at 44 and died.

Even though  The Great Gatsby  was published during the prime of Fitzgerald’s life, there is an eerie resemblance between Fitzgerald and Gatsby’s fate. While Fitzgerald dies an alcoholic struck by a heart attack, Gatsby is similarly drunk with his obsession over Daisy and is killed by an outsider. Even though Fitzgerald “got the girl” and Gatsby did not, neither man experienced a fulfilling relationship with the woman of their dreams. Even though Fitzgerald tells the story of  The Great Gatsby  through the voice of Nick Carraway, readers cannot help but imagine Fitzgerald retelling his own story through the character of Jay Gatsby. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Greatest Influences

Fitzgerald was influenced by writers such as Jon Keats and Joseph Conrad. He is most similar to Keats through his simultaneous use of “romantic lyricism” and “realistic determinism” in his work (Blazek). The poetic nature of Fitzgerald’s work is evident in his carefully crafted character and setting descriptions. While some novelists enjoy writing pages and pages of descriptive details, Fitzgerald refrains from doing so and instead provides two or three carefully chosen words for his descriptions.

These brief yet visually rich phrases also describe characters and settings on a much deeper level, moving past beautiful phrases to expose the reality of the people and places within his novels. For example, Daisy’s voice is described as “full of money”. This brief phrase accurately captures Daisy’s character on multiple levels. Daisy is not only glamour and luxury embodied, but she is aloof to and ignorant of the struggles of the middle or lower class. Because Daisy has only ever known wealth, even her voice overflows with evidence of her being born with a silver spoon in her mouth.

One can see Joseph Conrad’s influences on Fitzgerald’s writing style through Fitzgerald’s use of Nick Carraway as both a character and an observing narrator, much like the character Marlow in Conrad’s  Heart of Darkness . Fitzgerald looked to both influences, Keats and Conrad, as landmarks of achievement. By emulating both styles, he felt confident in his ability to reach similar levels as these great authors through the success of his own works. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Writing Style in The Great Gatsby

While Fitzgerald’s work is inspired by the writing styles of both Conrad and Keats, Fitzgerald is still a remarkable novelist in his own right. Fitzgerald uses vivid imagery and metaphors to provide a visual picture of his characters and settings and incorporate deeper meaning beyond just physical appearance. Additionally, his sentence structure mirrors the characters and settings by consisting primarily of compound-complex sentences. These sentences are mostly spoken through the narrator, Nick, as he attempts to make sense of the people and places around him.

Figurative Language and Imagery

Fitzgerald reveals key details about his characters when he first describes the mansions that sit across the water from one another. Gatsby’s mansion is described as a “factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy,” which, at first glance, is simply a way for the reader to visualize his mansion by using a point of reference. However, as the reader learns more about Gatsby, the mansion becomes a mirror image of its resident: both are posers, copies, or fakes lacking personality or uniqueness.

On the other hand, the Buchanan mansion is metaphorically described as a fashionable white palace glittering along the water (Fitzgerald 5). The elaborate house was decked in French windows, a Georgian Colonial mansion, surrounded by overflowing gardens (Fitzgerald 6). These details imply that this house is not only incredibly expensive, but it has existed for many years and was likely passed down from wealthy relatives. These details further distinguish the Buchanans from Gatsby and amplify their “old money” status.

Fitzgerald also infuses emotional meaning into his descriptions of his characters: Tom Buchanan is described as having “two shining arrogant eyes” and his body “capable of enormous leverage–a cruel body” (Fitzgerald 7). The author doesn’t simply state, “Tom is arrogant and cruel”; rather, he incorporates these vices into the physical description of Tom’s outward appearance. By doing so, Fitzgerald encapsulates Tom’s presence in the novel to an extent where we can almost predict his words and actions. As readers, we can safely assume that Tom’s presence in a room feels threatening to at least one person, and we can also assume that he is judging everyone around him.

Conversely, his wife, Daisy Buchanan, is described as wearing a white dress that was “rippling and fluttering”, her laugh is both absurd and charming, and her face is simultaneously sad and lovely (Fitzgerald 9). These details reveal Daisy’s internal conflict with her life choices; part of Daisy wishes she had run away with a young soldier instead of marrying an abusive and unfaithful husband. However, the other part of her finds security and comfort in her marriage because of the money and status it provides. Additionally, her clothes are a reflection of her nature to float innocently through life, free of responsibility, whether it comes to raising her daughter or owning up to murdering Myrtle.

Sentence Structure

As the narrator, Nick Carraway speaks in a series of compound-complex sentences. These tumbling, nearly rambling sentences mirror the narrator’s unfruitful attempts to understand the motivations of the characters around him. One example is Nick’s first impression of the Buchanans when he enters their home. While attempting to make sense of the Buchanan’s move to East Egg, Nick explains that “this was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it — I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrevocable football game” (Fitzgerald 6). Within this compound-complex sentence, Nick reveals his own distrust of the Buchanans, not able to discern whether their past decisions or current words contain the truth.

Why is Nick the narrator of The Great Gatsby?

Nick comes to the East from a humble yet respected background in the Midwest to learn more about the bond business. Daisy is a distant cousin, and Nick innocently chooses to visit one day before becoming entangled irrevocably in the upheaval of their lives, especially once Gatsby gets involved. Nick is the only character not embroiled in the rebellious and ostentatious lifestyle of 1920s New York, and he can therefore describe his interactions with these characters through fresh eyes.

Nick begins the novel with a frank tone and is amused by watching the people interact around him but not necessarily with him. However, as the novel continues, Nick becomes annoyed and describes himself as both “within and without”; while he is physically present with these other characters, they act as if he does not exist and merely use him when it is convenient. By the end of the novel, Nick moves from annoyance to disgust as the expensive outer layers of each character disintegrate to reveal their ugliness inside.

Conclusion 

Fitzgerald makes many intentional choices throughout his concise novel, whether through creating complex character descriptions, in fabricating complicated sentences to mirror character actions, or even through his choice of narrator. 

It is interesting that Fitzgerald chose to speak through Nick Carraway, as the character of Jay Gatsby is most similar to his own life experience. However, if you had the chance to reflect on your own life as an outsider, wouldn’t you do it, too? 

Works Cited

Blazek, William. “Literary Influences (Chapter 5) – F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context.” Cambridge Core , Cambridge University Press, www.cambridge.org/core/books/f-scott-fitzgerald-in-context/literary-influences/A7D9FB8960AA05E530C0D207D61D6197/core-reader . “F. Scott Fitzgerald.” Encyclopædia Britannica , Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., www.britannica.com/biography/F-Scott-Fitzgerald . Fitzgerald, F. Scott, et al. The Great Gatsby . Scribner, 2018.

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Rediscovered: the long-lost script that helped The Great Gatsby become a classic

F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel was a flop until a 1926 staging became a Broadway smash

It is the quintessential novel of the hedonistic jazz age, a roaring 20s story about the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan. The Great Gatsby became an enduring classic , inspiring films and musicals, but received such mixed reviews in 1925 that its disappointed author, F Scott Fitzgerald, was all the more excited when it inspired a Broadway adaptation.

The 1926 dramatisation by Owen Davis, a Pulitzer prizewinner, opened to rave reviews and became a hit that contributed to the novel’s success, bringing Fitzgerald substantial royalties and fame.

But the original script had long since been lost. Now a copy has been rediscovered and will be published for the first time by Cambridge University Press – and it reveals that Davis took many liberties with Fitzgerald’s storyline.

Nick Carraway is no longer the narrator, new characters are invented, and Jay Gatsby’s past, which is revealed gradually throughout the novel, is presented all at once near the start. “Davis made some interesting changes,” said Anne Margaret Daniel, co-editor of the new publication. “He introduces some of the gangster characters who are in Gatsby’s underworld. He makes it very clear that Gatsby is in the business of organised crime, which is an apt reading of the book and, of course, it makes it more dramatic on stage.

“It’s a fascinating version of Gatsby. It absolutely captures the Jazz Age heat.”

The script had lain unnoticed for almost 100 years in a US archive. Daniel began searching for it after finding a fragment among Fitzgerald’s papers at Princeton University, along with unpublished production photographs. She eventually unearthed the complete script at Colorado State University, among papers from a study of Davis’s work that was never completed.

The script, which belonged to an actor in the Broadway staging, will be published for the first time on 25 April in the forthcoming book The Great Gatsby – The 1926 Broadway Script , edited by Daniel and James L W West III.

“It’s significant because this is the first time that The Great Gatsby was put on the Broadway stage, and thousands of people encountered the story for the first time,” said West.

“I would like to see it restaged – though The Great Gatsby is right now in the works as a Broadway musical and there’s also been an opera, a ballet and three movies at least.”

He added that, while Fitzgerald had been “protective” of the novel, he was excited by the staging, having seen an early draft and telling his agent in 1926 that it “put in my pocket seventeen or eighteen thousand without a stroke of work on my part”.

Fitzgerald had kept extensive material relating to Gatsby, and his archive at Princeton includes reviews of the novel and the Broadway production, sent to him by Max Perkins, his great editor at Scribner, and his agent, Harold Ober, as the writer was in Europe at the time.

Daniel said: “In his correspondence with Perkins, you can see that he was thrilled that it was being done. He was disappointed with the critical reception to Gatsby . He knew how good it was, but it got some stinky reviews. Some reviewers complained about the morality.”

In their introduction, she and West write that, if Fitzgerald had been allowed to attend rehearsals, “he would undoubtedly have been a pain in the neck”.

“In fact, anyone who reads the script today will probably react as Fitzgerald would have. The Great Gatsby has become a secular scripture, a verbal icon,” she said. “Many of us have read … the novel so often that we have it almost by heart. We should remember that, in 1926, The Great Gatsby was not yet a classic.”

• F Scott Fitzgerald
• The Observer
• The Great Gatsby

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The Great American Novels

In 1868, a little-known writer by the name of John William DeForest proposed a new type of literature, a collective artistic project for a nation just emerging from an existential conflict: a work of fiction that accomplished “the task of painting the American soul.” It would be called the Great American Novel, and no one had written it yet, DeForest admitted. Maybe soon.

A century and a half later, the idea has endured, even as it has become more complicated. In 2024, our definition of literary greatness is wider, deeper, and weirder than DeForest likely could have imagined. At the same time, the novel is also under threat, as the forces of anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism seek to ban books and curtail freedom of expression. The American canon is more capacious, more fluid, and more fragile than perhaps ever before. But what, exactly, is in it? What follows is our attempt to discover just that.

In setting out to identify that new American canon, we decided to define American as having first been published in the United States (or intended to be—read more in our entries on Lolita and The Bell Jar ). And we narrowed our aperture to the past 100 years—a period that began as literary modernism was cresting and contains all manner of literary pleasure and possibility, including the experimentations of postmodernism and the narrative satisfactions of genre fiction.

This still left millions of potential titles. So we approached experts—scholars, critics, and novelists, both at The Atlantic and outside it—and asked for their suggestions. From there, we added and subtracted and debated and negotiated and considered and reconsidered until we landed on the list you’re about to read. We didn’t limit ourselves to a round, arbitrary number; we wanted to recognize the very best—novels that say something intriguing about the world and do it distinctively, in intentional, artful prose—no matter how many or few that ended up being (136, as it turns out). Our goal was to single out those classics that stand the test of time, but also to make the case for the unexpected, the unfairly forgotten, and the recently published works that already feel indelible. We aimed for comprehensiveness, rigor, and open-mindedness. Serendipity, too: We hoped to replicate that particular joy of a friend pressing a book into your hand and saying, “You have to read this; you’ll love it.”

This list includes 45 debut novels, nine winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and three children’s books. Twelve were published before the introduction of the mass-market paperback to America, and 24 after the release of the Kindle. At least 60 have been banned by schools or libraries. Together, they represent the best of what novels can do: challenge us, delight us, pull us in and then release us, a little smarter and a little more alive than we were before. You have to read them.

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The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

An American Tragedy

Theodore Dreiser

The Making of Americans

Gertrude Stein

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Willa Cather

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway

Nella Larsen

The Sound and the Fury

William Faulkner

Absalom, Absalom!

Djuna Barnes

East Goes West

Younghill Kang

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston

John Dos Passos

Ask the Dust

The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler

The Day of the Locust

Nathanael West

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck

Richard Wright

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers

A Time to Be Born

Dawn Powell

All the King’s Men

Robert Penn Warren

In a Lonely Place

Dorothy B. Hughes

The Mountain Lion

Jean Stafford

The Catcher in the Rye

J. D. Salinger

Charlotte’s Web

E. B. White

Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury

Maud Martha

Gwendolyn Brooks

The Adventures of Augie March

Saul Bellow

Vladimir Nabokov

Giovanni’s Room

James Baldwin

Peyton Place

Grace Metalious

Patricia Highsmith

On the Road

Jack Kerouac

The Haunting of Hill House

Shirley Jackson

Joseph Heller

A Wrinkle in Time

Madeleine L'Engle

Another Country

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

The Zebra-Striped Hearse

Ross Macdonald

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

Mary McCarthy

The Crying of Lot 49

Thomas Pynchon

A Sport and a Pastime

James Salter

John Updike

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Philip K. Dick

Susan Taubes

Portnoy’s Complaint

Philip Roth

Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

Desperate Characters

Play It as It Lays

Joan Didion

Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine

Stanley Crawford

Mumbo Jumbo

Ishmael Reed

Toni Morrison

The Revolt of the Cockroach People

Oscar Zeta Acosta

The Dispossessed

Ursula K. Le Guin

Winter in the Blood

James Welch

Corregidora

Renata Adler

Leslie Marmon Silko

Song of Solomon

A Contract With God

Will Eisner

Dancer From the Dance

Andrew Holleran

Stephen King

Octavia E. Butler

The Dog of the South

Charles Portis

Housekeeping

Marilynne Robinson

The Salt Eaters

Toni Cade Bambara

Little, Big: Or, the Fairies’ Parliament

John Crowley

Oxherding Tale

Charles Johnson

Machine Dreams

Jayne Anne Phillips

Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy

A Summons to Memphis

Peter Taylor

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

Katherine Dunn

Tripmaster Monkey

Maxine Hong Kingston

Jessica Hagedorn

American Psycho

Bret Easton Ellis

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

Julia Alvarez

Norman Rush

Bastard Out of Carolina

Dorothy Allison

The Secret History

Donna Tartt

So Far From God

Ana Castillo

Stone Butch Blues

Leslie Feinberg

The Shipping News

Annie Proulx

Native Speaker

Chang-rae Lee

Sabbath’s Theater

Under the Feet of Jesus

Helena María Viramontes

Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace

I Love Dick

Chris Kraus

Don DeLillo

The Intuitionist

Colson Whitehead

Joyce Carol Oates

House of Leaves

Mark Z. Danielewski

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon

The Last Samurai

Helen DeWitt

The Quick and the Dead

Joy Williams

Percival Everett

I, the Divine

Rabih Alameddine

The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen

Sandra Cisneros

Debra Magpie Earling

The Russian Debutante’s Handbook

Gary Shteyngart

The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri

Mary Gaitskill

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

A Visit From the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan

Karen Tei Yamashita

Salvage the Bones

Jesmyn Ward

The Round House

Louise Erdrich

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Imogen Binnie

A Brief History of Seven Killings

Marlon James

Family Life

Akhil Sharma

Fates and Furies

Lauren Groff

The Fifth Season

N. K. Jemisin

The Sellout

Paul Beatty

The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Amiable With Big Teeth

Claude McKay

Lincoln in the Bardo

George Saunders

Nick Drnaso

There There

Tommy Orange

Lost Children Archive

Valeria Luiselli

Nothing to See Here

Kevin Wilson

The Old Drift

Namwali Serpell

No One Is Talking About This

Patricia Lockwood

The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Biography of X

Catherine Lacey