Ron Carlson
Regents Professor of English
Arizona State University
F. Scott Fitzgerald did more good and bad for the image of a writer in America than even Hemingway. He was an elegant, romantic figure who rocketed to fame at the age of 23 when his first book, This Side of Paradise, was published. Suddenly he had money and he won the golden girl, Zelda Fitzgerald, probably exactly the wrong girl for him in some ways, and no one came to him at that time and talked to him about marshalling his talents or the dangers of dissipation. This Side of Paradise is the classic first novel and is part story, part poem, literally part play, and part polemic. He stitched it all together and when it was published as the Twenties were just beginning, it fit the national mood like a driving cap. Fitzgerald drank heavily all through prohibition and by the age of thirty five he was tired and broken (and many times broke), but he had spun the glittering wheel in a way that still captures our imagination, and he did an amazing thing: he wrote the book that is still closest to being the “great American novel,” The Great Gatsby. Gatsy is a lyric retelling of the Horatio Alger story yet again, but with depth achieved via the point of view of the quintessential Midwestern moralist Nick Carraway, without whom the book would be four parties and three car crashes. It is a thrilling and affecting work to this day.
When I was in college someone quipped that if you wanted to study Fitzgerald read his biographies backwards because he got richer and happier. All through his life he struggled to make an income and the stories he was selling to the Saturday Evening Post and other periodicals (sometimes at 4000 dollars each) are collected in a telling book, The Price Was High, edited by M.J. Brucolli. Also wonderful are the letters Scott exchanged with Zelda in Dearest Scott, Dearest Zelda edited by Bryer and Banks. I always liked my professor Ken Eble’s biography simply called F.Scott Fitzgerald in the Twain authors series, and Mizener’s biography The Far Side of Paradise tells his life very well. It is key, I think, to read Zelda’s novel, Save Me the Waltz, which is as lyric and tender as the best of Scott’s work. Nancy Mitford wrote the biography of Zelda, simply titled that: Zelda. Lastly, I would recommend Tender is the Night, the title tellingly taken from Keats, from whom Fitzgerald took so many of his romantic ideas, and it is a better book than generally thought.
American Masters "F. Scott Fitzgerald: Winter Dreams"airs Wednesday, August 31 at 9 p.m. on Channel 8.
