F Scott Fitzgerald
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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...
Too Enjoyable to Be Literature February 05, 2024
I knew nothing about F. Scott Fitzgerald when I stumbled on Tender Is the Night in 1962. I didn’t know he’d struggled with the book for almost nine years, and that during his lifetime it never settled into a finished version. I was a naive and ignora...
