F. Scott Fitzgerald
Overview
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age
Jazz Age
The Jazz Age was a movement that took place during the 1920s or the Roaring Twenties from which jazz music and dance emerged. The movement came about with the introduction of mainstream radio and the end of the war. This era ended in the 1930s with the beginning of The Great Depression but has...

, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost Generation
Lost Generation
The "Lost Generation" is a term used to refer to the generation, actually a cohort, that came of age during World War I. The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises. In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to...

" of the 1920s. He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise
This Side of Paradise
This Side of Paradise is the debut novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Published in 1920, and taking its title from a line of the Rupert Brooke poem Tiare Tahiti, the book examines the lives and morality of post-World War I youth. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is an attractive Princeton University...

, The Beautiful and Damned
The Beautiful and Damned
The Beautiful and Damned, first published by Scribner's in 1922, is F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel. The novel provides a portrait of the Eastern elite during the Jazz Age, exploring New York Café Society. As with his other novels, Fitzgerald's characters are complex, especially in their...

, Tender is the Night
Tender is the Night
Tender Is the Night is a novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was his fourth and final completed novel, and was first published in Scribner's Magazine between January-April, 1934 in four issues...

 and his most famous, The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published in1925, it is set on Long Island's North Shore and in New York City from spring to autumn of 1922....

. A fifth, unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon
The Love of the Last Tycoon
The Love of The Last Tycoon: A Western is an unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, compiled and published posthumously.-Publication history:The novel was unfinished and in rough form at the time of Fitzgerald's death at age 44...

, was published posthumously.
Quotations

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Undated letter to his daughter "Scottie" (Frances Scott Fitzgerald|Frances Scott Fitzgerald).

The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we've forgotten there’s any other way.

"Amory Blaine" in This Side of Paradise|This Side of Paradise (1920) Bk. 2, Ch. 5

Whenever you feel like criticizing any one... just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

The Great Gatsby (1925)

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The Great Gatsby (1925)

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.

Tender is the Night (1934)

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pinprick, but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

Tender Is the Night (1934) Bk. 3, Ch. 13

Either you think — or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

Tender Is the Night (1934)

I hate the place like poison with a sincere hatred.

Responding to a suggestion that he return to Hollywood to work on a script of Tender is the Night in a letter to his agent (10 January 1935)

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day.

The Crack-Up|The Crack-Up (1936)

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.

The Crack-Up (1936)

 
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