In his time, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was born on this day in 1896, was thought to be a drunken naïf who occasionally stumbled on beauty; now he is an enduring legend of the West.
The Fitzgeralds are not a poignant Jazz Age footnote but an enduring legend of the West.F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote once that there are no second acts in American lives—which proves, perhaps, only that there are no second acts in American aphorisms.
Fitzgerald’s worldly success, and his good looks, haloed his literary reputation. One of the sharpest portraits of him remains Budd Schulberg’s fine, too often overlooked novel “The Disenchanted” , a transparently fictionalized account of a doomed and drunken effort to write a screenplay for a college musical with the frail Hollywood Fitzgerald. Schulberg’s Fitzgerald, called Halliday, was a “wonder boy of the Twenties . . .
Therese Anne Fowler’s best-selling novel “Z.,” written in Zelda’s persona—though in nothing like her original, run-on rhapsodic literary voice, evident in her letters and one promising, if fragmentary, novel—is a recent installment in the story.
Getting Fitzgerald’s own writing right-sized is hard. Two new books show how easy it is to make him either too big, too grandiose and epic, or too small, an easy-to-take pop artist, in a way that erases his commitment to literary seriousness of the most earnest, modernist kind. This doubleness is in part built into the economics of his career, which made him both chase conventional commercial success and hate it.
On the other hand, Maureen Corrigan, the “Fresh Air” book critic, seems eager to downsize Fitzgerald to contemporary tastes. In “So We Read On: How ‘The Great Gatsby’ Came to Be and Why It Endures” , she has an infectious sense of excitement about the novel, the furthest thing from academic deadness imaginable.
In any case, the noirish tone of disabused realism isn’t Fitzgerald’s tone by a mile. “Gatsby” is a book about a tabloid murder that works by being resolutely anti-tabloid in style; that’s its point. The noir novelists properly so called, Cain and Hammett, later on saw real virtues in the stripped-down style of the popular newspaper account; Fitzgerald, a much more self-consciously poetic writer, working in a distinctly earlier moment, did not.
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Scott and Zelda Go on Inspiring New BooksIn his time, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was born on this day in 1896, was thought to be a drunken naïf who occasionally stumbled on beauty; now he is an enduring legend of the West.
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