F Scott Fitzgerald
Story Stream
How “The Great Gatsby” Took Over High School April 30, 2025
In the spring of 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald was worried about “The Great Gatsby.” It had been fifteen years since the novel was published, and the author had little to show for it....
One Half-Tipsy Yank with a Typewriter April 29, 2025
Shirley Hazzard once observed that at a certain age memory protects one from the burden of experience. A vivid scene, with the interval of several decades, becomes little more than a word, a gesture, perhaps the way the light fell on a certain aftern...
Will There Ever Be Another “Great Gatsby”? April 16, 2025
Toward the end of his life, F. Scott Fitzgerald, consumed by thoughts of inadequacy and convinced he was a “has-been,” wrote to his editor Max Perkins asking if his old book The Great Gatsby was simply destined to be unpopular. The novel, published i...
Gatsby's America April 14, 2025
The Great Gatsby is a novel of manners in which no one minds their manners, narrated by a man who claims to reserve judgment as he constantly casts it. A tale of East Coast decadence populated entirely by Midwestern transplants. A book too slender to...
The Man Without a Past April 11, 2025
Early in The Great Gatsby, a nightingale is spotted on the lawn outside the Buchanans’. There aren’t nightingales in America. Daisy calls it “romantic” and wonders which ship it might have crossed the Atlantic on. Asked to write about The Great Gatsb...
Living in Gatsby’s World April 10, 2025
The study hall in my high school was a large open area with beige desks lined in a row. Fluorescent lights dumbly hummed over the linoleum floors and trapped me in between. I mostly put my head on the desk, but occasionally, I’d read for pleasure, an...
How Gatsby Deceived America April 10, 2025
It is almost too symmetrical. On the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby, it is Elon Musk, titanic car manufacturer and destroyer of worlds, who defines the spirit of a new America. The American car, emblem of power, speed and so...
On My Grandfather’s Novel April 09, 2025
I never met my grandparents: Scott died young, in 1940 at the age of forty-four. I was born in 1948. Zelda wrote my mother from Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, “I long to see the baby,” but she perished in a fire a couple of months la...
America the Beautiful April 08, 2025
The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.—Walt Whitman (1855)Perhaps what this country needs is a great poem.—Herbert Hoover (1932)Why did F. Scott Fitzgerald write one great book?...
One Hundred Years of Gatsby April 07, 2025
F.Scott Fitzgerald’s final royalty check was for $13.13, making him the recipient of a double dose of bad luck. By 1940, the novel he thought to be his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, was very nearly out of print, and the woman he regarded as the love...
It’s Gatsby’s World, We Just Live in It March 31, 2025
And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly back into a book that its author considered calling “Trimalchio in West Egg.” Would we still be talking about it if he had?But he called it “The Great Gatsby” and we are....
Happy Birthday, Old Sport March 31, 2025
One wishes they hadn’t interpolated themselves and messed up the title. Why not The Great Gatsby: 100th Anniversary Deluxe Annotated Edition, putting the editor and his helpers in their subtitled place, in service to the greatness? This great novel i...
Flannery at 100—and Forever March 19, 2025
Raymond Chandler said that F. Scott Fitzgerald is “a subject no one has a right to mess up. Nothing but the best will do for him.” That is how I feel about Flannery O’Connor, the centennial of whose birth is this year. Chandler thought that Fitzgeral...
The Great American Classic We’ve Been Misreading March 10, 2025
The Great Gatsby is 100 years old this year, which feels right in a way. After all those years as a perennial mainstay of the American high school English curriculum, all those Gatsby-themed flapper parties, all those valiant but ham-fisted attempts ...
The Greatness of The Great Gatsby March 10, 2025
2025 marks the centenary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It is one of a few contenders, and perhaps the frontrunner, for the title of “the great American novel.” It was something everyone was trying to write in the 1920s and many suspected...
A Delightfully Frenetic Cult Classic March 03, 2025
Sometimes a great book just doesn’t get its due, at least at first. As many readers may know, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was initially published to a reception that ranged from lukewarm to scornful. Today, the book is considered a classic...
'The Great Gatsby' at 100 January 21, 2025
In 2004, I attended a performance of Gatz, a stage adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby that, in addition to witty interpretations of the novel’s key scenes, featured Fitzgerald’s entire text read aloud by the actors. The performance ...
Scott Fitzgerald’s Last Act September 23, 2024
The final year of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life was both a tragedy and, in a more obscure sense, a triumph. Fitzgerald, who died of a heart attack at 44 in 1940, was sober and writing well when he died, and he still knew what he was: the author of the a...
The Sacred and the Profane September 19, 2024
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1937 short story “Thank You For the Light” follows a Chicago-based corset-saleswoman as she scours the streets for matches to light her cigarette. A widow with “no close relatives to write to in the evenings,” smoking “meant a l...
Gatsby Loses to Woody Allen April 30, 2024
Welcome to the Roaring Twenties. Of course, it’s too early to know whether the roar is college revolt or the howl from high food prices. Two years ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece of the prior Roaring Twenties, The Great Gatsby, entered the pub...
Hemingway, McCarthy, and Our ‘Used Up’ Words April 29, 2024
I used to dislike Ernest Hemingway’s style. His iceberg technique, with so much left beneath the surface, seemed cold in contrast to the sonatas of his contemporaries like F. Scott Fitzgerald. In a letter containing advice to the latter author, Hemin...
