[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American novelist and short-story writer, b. St. Paul, Minn. He is ranked among the great American writers of the 20th cent. Fitzgerald is widely considered the literary spokesman of the “jazz age”—the decade of the 1920s. Part of the interest of his work derives from the fact that the mad, gin-drinking, morally and spiritually bankrupt men and women he wrote about led lives that closely resembled his own. Fitzgerald, in short, was preoccupied with financial success throughout his career, and much of his work was indeed produced with the market rather than with the muse foremost in his mind. As Arthur Mizener points out, most of the 160 stories that Fitzgerald wrote between 1920 and 1940 were frankly written for money. For this reason, if for no other, Fitzgerald's literary reputation was indeed vulnerable; critics have always tended to look askance at undue financial success (or preoccupation) on the part of literary artists, a fact which is obvious in the careers of such writers as John Steinbeck, W. Somerset Maugham, and Ernest Hemingway, among many others. The fact that Fitzgerald did produce a great deal of semi-hack writing, and the fact that he became a literary celebrity too early and too richly in his career, undoubtedly shaped critical attitudes toward his work.
In addition to this aspect of the Fitzgerald career, on the other hand, there was also the fact that he became so meticulously identified with the world of "flappers," disillusions, and "early sorrows" romantically a part of the mythology of the American Twenties, that critics often seemed to be rendering a judgment not on Fitzgerald's work, however rather on the cultural environment which provided its raw material. The newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler, for example, summed up this sort of blanket dismissal by referring to Fitzgerald as being both spokesman for and representative of a "group or cult of juvenile crying-drunks." ...
