F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), an American novelist and short story writer, was the unofficial artistic spokesman for the Jazz Age (1920s-1930s). His fiction is filled with the excess and exaggerated exuberance that defined this era—although his own style, crafted with precision and discipline, and edged with a tragic tone, served as a perfect counterpoint to (and thereby transcended) the age about which he wrote. A victim of the these same excesses, however, he died of complications of “the bottle.” His early death precluded any firm estimation of his full potential as a writer; nonetheless, the work he did accomplish (especially The Great Gatsby (1925)) earned him a place among the great modern American novelists, including Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Like Faulkner’s verse, many of his poems (written during his days as a Princeton student), served as a training ground for his prose, and like Hemingway’s verse, it was occasional but often pointed up the thematic concerns he also explored in his fiction.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), an American novelist and short story writer, was the unofficial artistic spokesman for the Jazz Age (1920s-1930s). His fiction is filled with the excess and exaggerated exuberance that defined this era—although his own style, crafted with precision and discipline, and edged with a tragic tone, served as a perfect counterpoint to (and thereby transcended) the age about which he wrote. A victim of the these same excesses, however, he died of complications of “the bottle.” His early death precluded any firm estimation of his full potential as a writer; nonetheless, the work he did accomplish (especially The Great Gatsby (1925)) earned him a place among the great modern American novelists, including Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Like Faulkner’s verse, many of his poems (written during his days as a Princeton student), served as a training ground for his prose, and like Hemingway’s verse, it was occasional but often pointed up the thematic concerns he also explored in his fiction.
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