1929 had put an end to Fitzgerald s era, and readers had lost interest in the problems of the expatriates like Dick Diver. Still, the book displays Fitzgerald s hard-won experience of life, the commitment to early dreams, the self-destructiveness of charm, and a whole generation s craving for endless youth and irresponsibility. In its despair, Tender Is the Night was an epitaph for the Jazz Age.was Fitzgerald s epitaph as well. After its publication, he struggled with mounting debts, failing health, drinking, and depression. Following the stock market crash in 1929 which led to the hard times of the Depression, Fitzgerald s life changed dramatically. Fitzgerald lost his self-confidence and his public during the Depression Era. Financial difficulties forced him to seek work as a Hollywood screenwriter in the middle thirties. Despite illness and alcoholism he managed to write scenarios. When he could, he continued to do serious work. Through his love affair with Sheila Graham, a British journalist, he grew interested in the Hollywood producer Irving Thalberg and began work on a novel about him. He was at work on this novel, The Last Tycoon, in 1940 when he died in Hollywood of heart failure, down and used up. The Last Tycoon was completed by his friend Edmund Wilson and was published after Fitzgerald s death in 1941 to wide critical praise.
William Faulkner
1897-1962are now unanimous in their opinion that William Faulkner was one of the greatest of all American novelists of the twentieth century.was born on September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi. His great grandfather fought in the Civil War, and he wrote romantic fiction. Later he served the model for Colonel John Sartoris in William Faulkner s novels. I want to be a writer like my great-granddaddy said William Faulkner when he was nine. He was speaking of Colonel William Clerk Falkner, the family founder. (William Faulkner restored the lost letter u in the family name). Named after him, Faulkner grew up feeling at every turn the giant s tread of this first William: slave-owner, planter, brigadier in the militia, lawyer, railroad king, ( he built the first railroad in our country , said little William of his great-grandfather). The Faulkners were the owners of the railroad built by the writer s great grandfather, and then the owners of a cottonseed oil mill, and ice plant, a livery stable, and an agency selling petroleum. William learned early to ride and to shoot game. His story The Bear, though not strictly autobiographical, is based on his recollections of autumn days hunting in the woods.attended high school in Oxford, Mississippi. Instead of finishing school and graduating, he had been working for a year as a bookkeeper in a bank. Faulkner hung around the University of Mississippi in Oxford where his father was a business manager.the outbreak of World War I, the US Army rejected him because he failed to meet their height and weight requirements. However, in 1918 Faulkner enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and trained for flight duty, only to see the war end before he was commissioned. He loved flying, and as soon as he could afford, he bought a light plane. After he was demobilized, Faulkner returned to Oxford and spent there over a year as a registered student at Old Miss. But he disliked the way literature was taught there and dropped out to read on his own. He also wrote verse and published the collection The Marble Faun in 1924. 1924, he left Oxford for New Orleans, where he made the acquaintance of some members of the New Orleans literary circle, including Sherwood Anderson who had attracted much attention with the publication of Winesburg, Ohio (1919), his study of small-town life . Impressed and encouraged by Anderson, Faulkner tried his hand at fiction.the six months he spent in New Orleans Faulkner published a number of stories in a little magazine and wrote his first novel Soldier s Pay (1926), a self-conscious story about the lost generation. Anderson recommended the book to his publisher, and Faulkner s career as a novelist began. In 1927 his second novel Mosquitoes appeared. Thereafter Faulkner wrote with a tireless energy.the next three years, Faulkner found his great theme: he began writing about the decaying Southern family, the younger members of which are imbued with the sense of futility and alienation, unable to shake off the weight of the nobler past, the Am...
