Francis Scott Fitzgerald
"His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it."
"His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it."
to an upper-middle-class family.
His parents had irish and english origins. In 1908 his father was fired from Procter & Gamble, a multinational company. When he was 15 his family sent him to the Newman School, in New Jersey,
then he continued his artistic development at Princeton University. But in 1917 he dropped out of school to join the U.S.Army. Here he wrote a novel, "The Romantic Egoist". He was assigned near Montgomery and in a country club he met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre.
When the war ended in 1918, Fitzgerald decided to move to New York City to start a writing career and to convince Zelda that he could support her economically. He was unable to convince Zelda so she refused his proposal of marriage and he returned to his parent's house. Here he revised "The Romantic Egoist", recast as "This Side of Paradise", a semiautobiographical novel of Fitzgerald's years at Princeton. The success of the novel convinced Zelda to come back. After that he travelled around Europe, in particular in France and becoming friend of famous authors such as Ernest Hemingway. During the following years, Fitzgerald and his wife adopted a lifestyle characterized by excess, luxury. This kind of style brought the author to a continuous economic difficulty which leaded him to alcoholism. In 1922 Fitzgerald published "The beautiful and damned", while the 1925 is the year of his masterpiece: "The Great Gatsby". In 1934 he wrote "Tender is the night", his last great work because he died in 1940 of a heart attack.
Style
Fitzgerald’s writing style was inspired in large part by Joseph Conrad and American authors like Sherwood Anderson. While Conrad’s style is extremely dense, a series of puzzles wrapped in enigmas, it includes a sense of mystery and the exotic.
Fitzgerald’s prose is lighter than Conrad’s, it is this type of subtext that allows his novels to contain a “sense” of doom and tragedy while also appearing blissfully romantic.
Sherwood Anderson is another influence of Fitzgerald. Combining the clarity of literary naturalism and the psychological complexity of early 20th century literature, Anderson inspired the clear and crisp sentence structure that would characterize the work of the more significant American authors of the 1920’s. Of course, Fitzgerald puts a lot of his own life into his fiction, and many stories can be read for their allegorical qualities. Alcoholism, mental illness and marital issues factor into nearly every one of his novels, and they aggressively contrast his glamorous public image.
The Great Gatsby
The narrator in Nick Carraway, a young man which lived in a small house on Long Island.
Here lives a millionaire, Jay Gatsby, which every week organizes parties where he doesn't partecipate. Then, Nick reaches East Egg for a dinner with Daisy Fay, his cousin,
and her husband, Tom.
Here Nick meets Jordan Baker. She reveals to him that Tom has a mistress, Myrtle
Wilson. During the summer of 1922, Gatsby invite Nick to one of his parties. During the party, Nick meets with Jordan Jay Gatsby.
Through Jordan, Nick learns that Jay fell in love with Daisy in 1917. Now that the war is
finished, he organizes parties with the hope that one day Daisy partecipate to one of them.
Nick one day invites Daisy for a tea, without telling to her that Jay will be there.
Initially they were embarassed, but in a short time they fall in love for the second time. Tom understands that his wife has a relationship with Gatsby. So Tom forces the group to drive into New York in a suite at the Plaza Hotel, where Tom says that he has a relation with Daisy that he couldn't understand. The group decides to come back to East Egg. During the travel, the yellow car of Gatsby killed Tom's mistress, Myrtle. Nick then learns that Daisy was driving at the moment of the accident. Myrtle's husband, believes that Gatsby killed his wife, so he decided to kill him. He finds out Gatsby's castle, and kills both Gatsby and then himself. Nick organizes a small funeral for Gatsby, but no one partecipates. Finally, he ends his relationship with Jordan and moves back to the Midwest.
The story concern the young, misteryous and millionaire Jay Gatsby and his obsession for Daisy Fay. The novel
explores themes of decadence, idealism and excess which create a portrait of the Jazz Age, the roaring twenties, a
period linked with "The American Dream". The american dream is a set of ideals, including freedom which gives the opportunity
of prosperity and success. The novel is full of themes,but I think that the most importants are:
- loneliness of Gatsby and indifference of Daisy and Tom.
- lack of true feelings.
Gatsby is the character more alone: he didn't attend the parties organized in his house only for Daisy. When he died no one
showed interest about it, except Nick. Also Daisy, which represents the aim of all Gatsby's actions, run away with Tom when Jay
died.
Jay Gatsby can be considered totally a Romantic hero: he is destined to failure, he appears different from the world around him. Nick, at the end of the novel, says that people didn't merit a great person like Gatsby. He lives only for a dream, which is Daisy, and he could also die in order to obtain it. nothing except Daisy has importance, but his pure desire lead him to his destruction. His spiritual greatness and his behaviours with Daisy are so wide that Jay's dark side, consisting in criminal activities, is hidden. Two are the adaptations of the novel, one by starring Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby and Mia Farrow as Daisy Fay, and the more recent one by Buzz Luhrmann starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Carey Mulligan.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is a short story published on May 27, 1922.
In 1860 Baltimore, Benjamin is born with the physical appearance of a 70-year-old man, already capable of speech.
When Benjamin turns 12, the Button family realizes that he is aging backwards.
At the age of 18, Benjamin enrolls in Yale College, but is sent home by officials, who think he is a 50-year-old lunatic.
In 1880, when Benjamin is 20, he meets the young Hildegarde, and falls in love with her.
Hildegarde mistakes Benjamin for a 50-year old brother of Roger Button; she prefers older men and marries him six months later, but remains ignorant of his condition.
Years later, Benjamin's business has been successful, but he is tired of Hildegarde because her beauty has faded and she nags him.
Bored at home, he enlists in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and achieves great triumph in the military, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel.
He retires from the army to focus on his company, and receives a medal.
In 1910, Benjamin, now looking like a 20-year-old, enrolls at Harvard University. However, during his junior and senior years he is only 16 years old, too weak to play football. After graduation, Benjamin returns home, only to learn that his wife has moved to Italy. He lives with Roscoe, who treats him sternly, and forces Benjamin to call him "uncle". As the years progress, Benjamin grows from a moody teenager into a child. Eventually, Roscoe has a child of his own who later attends kindergarten with Benjamin. After kindergarten, Benjamin slowly begins to lose memory of his earlier life. His memory fades away to the point where he cannot remember anything except his nurse. Everything fades to darkness shortly after. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was released as a motion picture late in 2008 starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett and directed by David Fincher. The screenplay differs greatly from the short story. Only the title, Benjamin's name, and most aspects of the aging process are retained in the screenplay.
Amir Sayed & Alessandro Franceschini.