Although perceived in his own day as a lightweight
chronicler of 1920s trends and fads, F. Scott Fitzgerald
(1[zasłonięte]896-19) is now recognized as one of the most
important writers of the twentieth century. Whether for
his classic novels (The Great Gatsby,
Tender is the Night), his frequently
anthologized short stories ("Babylon Revisited,"
"Bernice Bobs Her Hair"), or his searing essays of
personal examination (The Crack-Up), Fitzgerald
is rightly celebrated as a master stylist who plumbs the
depths of love, loss, and longing. Unfortunately, much
of the interest in Fitzgerald has focused on
biographical concerns, including his meteoric rise to
fame, his tempestuous marriage to quintessential flapper
Zelda Sayre, his rivalry with Ernest Hemingway, and his
tragic descent into alcoholism and depression. The
resulting, somewhat distorted, image of Fitzgerald has
been that of as a self-destructive literary playboy.
Even scholarly treatments of the author have tended to
depict him as a mere spokesman for the Lost Generation,
a symbol of the excesses of his era, without properly
appreciating the range of his writing or his intellect.
This volume of historically minded, newly commissioned
essays looks beyond the Jazz Age façade to topics that
reveal how Fitzgerald's work both illumines and
challenges conceptions of his milieu. Studies of the
literary marketplace of the 1920s, the influence of
public intellectuals such as Walter Lippmann and H. L.
Mencken, film and its treatment of the New Woman, and
the aftereffects of World War I all document the depth
and breadth of Fitzgerald's thinking.
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