Flappers and Philosophers
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St Paul, Minnesota, and went to Princeton University, which he left in 1917 to join the army. He was said to have epitomized the Jazz Age, which he himself defined as ‘a generation grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken’. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre. Among his publications were five novels, This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and Damned, Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon (his last and unfinished work); six volumes of short stories and The Crack-Up, a selection of autobiographical pieces. Fitzgerald died suddenly in 1940. After his death The New York Times said of him that ‘He was better than he knew, for in fact and in the literary sense he invented a “generation” … he might have interpreted and even guided them, as in their middle years they saw a different and nobler freedom threatened with destruction.’
Sarah Churchwell is a Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia and the author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (Granta: 2004). She writes about books and films for a range of newspapers and magazines, including the Guardian, the Independent, the Observer, the TLS, the New York Times Book Review, the Times, the Liberal, the Spectator, and the New Statesman, and frequently appears on television and radio. She is currently writing a book about F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1922, and the real events that inspired The Great Gatsby.