e collected in Flappers and Philosophers (1920). Old, pre-war world with its Victorian code of behavior had been dumped in favor of a great, gaudy spree of new freedoms. Girls bobbed their hair and shortened their skirts, while boys filled their flasks with bootleg gin. To the wail of saxophones, couples danced the Charleston across the nation's dance floors. In young Fitzgerald s novel Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), the Jazz Age had found its definition.1922 he published his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned. After a stay in France, the Fitzgeralds returned to St. Paul, where their only child, a daughter named Frances, was born. Scott is also at the height of his popularity and power in the short stories of All the Sad Young Men (1926). Announced to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner s, that he was going to write something new, something extraordinarily beautiful and simple and intricately patterned. He fulfilled that ambition in The Great Gatsby, a romantic tragedy centering on the destructive power of the glamorous, seductive American Dream, his nearly flawless masterpiece, which was published in 1925. He also knew that between the peaks of joy were periods of sorrow. The Great Gatsby reflects Fitzgerald s deeper knowledge, his recognition that wanting to be happy does not insure one s being so and that pursuit of entertainment may only cover a lot of pain.Great Gatsby tells the story of James Gatz, a poor boy from the Middle West who dreams of success and elegance and finds their incarnation in a Louisville girl named Daisy Fay. When Gatz returns from the war he learns she has become Daisy Buchanan, married to a rich Chicagoan and leading a careless, sumptuous life on Long Island. The hero, now a successful bootlegger known as Jay Gatsby, hopes to win Daisy from what he believes is a loveless, unhappy marriage. The mysterious Jay Gatsby discovers the devastating cost of success in terms of personal fulfillment and love. The story ends in Gatsby s death, but we can see that it was his dream, his vulnerability and feeling, that are admirable, and that the Buchanans are insulated from life s possibilities by their wealth and self-indulgence.central triumph of The Great Gatsby was its revelation of the rich in all their seductive luxury and heedlessness, accompanied by an implicit condemnation of their way of life. It showed wealth as a numbing, dehumanizing force that can destroy the heart. In a remarkably concise work, Fitzgerald probed deeply the ambiguities of the American dream. One of his masterful innovations in this novel - his manipulation of the point of view - matches the ambiguity of the book s theme. The story is told by Nick Carraway, Daisy s cousin. Nick s attitude, both engaged with the events and yet objective toward them, is often singled out as the ideal narrative point of view. Gatsby, with his vast new wealth acquired by breaking the Prohibition laws, represents extravagance and optimism and the desperate need of the outsider to belong . The Great Gatsby won some critical praise, but it was a financial disappointment.had to work even harder to keep up with the high cost of his and Zelda s international life. He turned out more pot-boiling short stories, mediocre in quality and written for money. In 1930, the tenth year of their marriage, Zelda suffered a mental breakdown and was to spend the rest of her life in and out of asylums. Hers was a search for both sanity and identity (her identity which seemed to have been devoured by Scott s productiveness). She aspired to be a dancer and a writer, and in 1932 produced her own novel, Save Me the Waltz. This was her thinly disguised account of her troubled marriage. s novel Tender Is the Night, the ambitious novel, which was published in 1934, was his rebuttal. Tender Is the Night reflects his personal tragedy: his own growing sense of failure and his wife s descent into madness. Zelda suffered a series of nervous breakdowns, his reputation as a writer declined. The hero of Tender Is the Night, Dick Diver, is a young psychiatrist, the protector and healer of the mad heroine, Nicole. Focus ing on the decline of a young American psychiatrist following his marriage to a wealthy but unstable woman, the novel reflects Fitzgerald s awareness of the tragedy that can result from obsession with wealth and social status . However, the stock market crash of ...
