Much like Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, his work is instantly recognizable due to its distinctive prose style. self-indulgence, love and romance, and money and class. Only posthumously would critics appreciate his merits, although understanding of his talent would compete with popular interest in his life and marriage.įitzgerald’s main themes are ambition and loss, discipline vs.
A half-decade later, he died in semi-obscurity, considered a failure, despite publishing 160+ short stories in his twenty-year career. By the time he completed Tender, the Depression had rendered the Roaring Twenties irrelevant, and Fitzgerald was considered a has-been. Before the age of thirty he published his masterpiece, Gatsby, but its artistic maturity was stymied for a decade by alcoholism, financial problems, and the mental illness of his wife, Zelda Sayre (1900-1948). Best known for The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934)-two keystones of modernist fiction-Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was the poet laureate of the “Jazz Age,” a term he popularized to convey the post-World War I era’s newfound prosperity, consumerism, and shifting sexual mores.įitzgerald first rose to fame at twenty-three by chronicling those changes in This Side of Paradise (1920).
