I’m working hard on revising and expanding my 1998 book, F. Scott Fitzgerald A to Z, for Facts on File’s new series of Critical Companions.
When I was accepted to graduate school in 1989 and assigned an editorial assistantship with Matthew J. Bruccoli, the world’s leading Fitzgerald scholar, my first reaction, I must confess, was a bit of dismay. I didn’t like Fitzgerald . . . or so I thought. (A few years later I realized I must have had him mixed up with Hemingway in my memory. I have learned to appreciate Hemingway’s literary genius . . . but I still don’t particularly care for his material and not at all for the man himself.)
Over the summer before my first year in grad school, I read all of Fitzgerald’s novels and a collection of his stories. I’m not sure at what point it dawned on me that I did like Fitzgerald. But it didn’t take long to recognize the sheer brilliance of his writing.
Here are a few of the things that attract me most about Fitzgerald’s work:
— his expertise as a social historian—his ability to make you understand exactly what it was like in a particular time and place
— the warmth of his authorial voice (Despite his usual classification as a modernist, Fitzgerald was at heart an old-fashioned storyteller.)
—most of all, the beauty of his style, the rhythm of his sentences (In his later years, when he hit a writing roadblock, he would have his secretary read the King James Bible aloud to him for cadence.)
Yes, Fitzgerald’s personal life was problematic. Let’s just get that out of the way right now. Some of his characters are unpleasant and downright immoral. But he was a very moralistic author, constantly judging himself and his characters. Great material for thoughtful discussion with your older students or for your own literary education and enjoyment.
Mary Jo