an align="justify"> for the rest of his life. Attractive to women, he married four times and travelled as far as Paris, where he met the writer Gertrude Stein who had an important influence on his work. He also met, in Chicago, a young writer who impressed him. It was Anderson who sent the young man - whose name was Ernest Hemingway - to Paris with a letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein. During the Depression and the New Deal that followed it, Anderson s stories became oddly dated and irrelevant, though today a few of Anderson s stories have taken their places as American classics. These include such later stories as The Egg from The Triumph of the Egg (1921) and Death in the Woods and Brother Death from Death in the Woods (1933).
Francis Scott Fitzgerald
1896-1940ever there was an author whose life and fiction were one, it was Scott Fitzgerald. The America into which Fitzgerald was born and in which he grew up clung to inherited restraints and proprieties. But it was to change dramatically under the impact of the First World War, when inhibition suddenly was shed for exuberance in the crazy, wonderful, irresponsible era of the 1920 s. Scott Fitzgerald - handsome, charming, and uncommonly gifted - was not only part of this time; he thought about it and heard the sound of it and wrote about it in a way that gave it the name The Jazz Age . He made literary legend of it.Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota, the son of a father with claims to an aristocratic Maryland family. He was named for an ancestor, Francis Scott Key, the composer of the Star-Spangled Banner . His mother was the daughter of a rich Irish immigrant. The young Scott was a spoiled boy, a failure at school work and - to his own great disappointment - at sports. But he was a success at daydreaming and, while still in his teens, at writing stories and plays.was educated at Princeton University, which he entered in 1913, where he was active in the theatre and on campus publications until he dropped out in 1917 . At Princeton University, he wrote one of the Triangle Club musical shows, contributed to the Nassau Literary Magazine, and befriended the serious writers Edmund Wilson and John Peele Bishop. When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Fitzgerald left college for officers training school, yearning for heroic adventure overseas on the battlefields of France. He was never sent overseas, but in camp he began work on a novel, The Romantic Egoist. It was twice turned down by the publisher.of the army, Fitzgerald took a low-paying job he hated repairing car roofs at the Northern Pacific shops. I was an empty bucket , he said of the experience, so mentally blunted by the summer s writing that I d taken a job . Then he sent his novel, rewritten and retitled This Side of Paradise, off to Scribner s for the third time. In 1919, they agreed to publish it. Soon his autobiographical narrative, set mainly at Princeton, This Side of Paradise, appeared in 1920. It was a sensation. It was an immense popular success and Fitzgerald found himself the appointed spokesman for his generation, the so-called Jazz Age. He sensed the romantic yearnings of the Jazz Age and he put them in his fiction.second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), continued his exploration of the self-destructive extravagance of his times.concerns the world of youth, excited though somewhat cynical, and the parties and love affairs of the rich and the would-be-rich. He fell in love with Zelda Sayre, a rich, beautiful, talented, high-spirited but unbalanced woman, who lived near Montgomery, Alabama, where he was stationed when he enlisted in the US Army. Although Scott courted her persistently, he had not nearly enough money to offer her the kind of marriage she wanted, and at first she turned him down. After he was discharged at war s end, he went to seek his literary fortune in New York in order to marry her. They married later in April 1920 and lived in New York, Paris, and on the French Riviera. In New York Zelda became the center of a round of parties, while Scott turned out scores of stories which appeared in major national magazines. Later these stories wer...
