F. Scott Fitzgerald and the American Dream

F. Scott Fitzgerald's life is a tragic example of both sides of the American Dream - the joys of young love, wealth and success, and the tragedies associated with excess and failure. Fitzgerald grew up in a solidly Catholic and upper middle class environment. Fitzgerald started writing at an early age. His high school newspaper published his detective stories, encouraging him to pursue writing more enthusiastically than academics. He dropped out of Princeton University to join the army and continued to pursue his obsession, writing magazine articles and even musical lyrics. At 21 years of age, he submitted his first novel for publication and Charles Scribner's Sons rejected it, but with words of encouragement. Beginning a pattern of constant revising that would characterize his writing style for the rest of his career, Fitzgerald decided to rewrite "The Romantic Egoist" and resubmit it for publication. Meanwhile, fate, in the form of the U.S. army, stationed him near Montgomery, Alabama in 1918, where he met and fell in love with an 18-year-old Southern belle - Zelda Sayre. Scribners rejected his novel for a second time, and so Fitzgerald turned to advertising as a steady source of income. Unfortunately, his paltry salary was not enough to convince Zelda to marry him, and tired of waiting for him to make his fortune, she broke their engagement in 1919. Happily, Scribners finally accepted the novel after Fitzgerald rewrote it for the third time as "This Side of Paradise", and published it a year later. Fitzgerald, suddenly a rich and famous author, married Zelda a week after its publication.

In between writing novels, Fitzgerald was quite prolific as a magazine story writer. The Saturday Evening Post in particular served as a showcase for his short works of fiction, most of which revolved around a new breed of American woman - the young, free-thinking, independent "flapper" of the Roaring Twenties.

The Fitzgeralds enjoyed fame and fortune, and his novels reflected their lifestyle, describing in semi-autobiographical fiction the privileged lives of wealthy, aspiring socialites. Fitzgerald wrote his second novel - "The Beautiful and the Damned" a year after they were married. Three years later, after the birth of their first and only child, Scottie, Fitzgerald completed his best-known work: "The Great Gatsby."

The extravagant living made possible by such success, however, took its toll. Constantly globe-trotting (living at various times in several different cities in Italy, France, Switzerland, and eight of the United States), the Fitzgeralds tried in vain to escape or at least seek respite from Scott's alcoholism and Zelda's mental illness.

Zelda suffered several breakdowns in both her physical and mental health, and sought treatment in and out of clinics from 1930 until her death (due to a fire at Highland Hospital in North Carolina in 1948). Zelda's mental illness, the subject of Fitzgerald's fourth novel, "Tender is the Night," had a debilitating effect on Scott's writing. He described his own "crack-up" in an essay that he wrote in 1936, hopelessly in debt, unable to write, nearly estranged from his wife and daughter, and incapacitated by excessive drinking and poor physical health.

Things were looking up for Fitzgerald near the end of his life - he won a contract in 1937 to write for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood and fell in love with Sheilah Graham, a movie columnist. He had started writing again - scripts, short-stories, and the first draft of a new novel about Hollywood - when he suffered a heart attack and died in 1940 at the age of 44, a failure in his own mind. Most commonly recognized only as an extravagant drunk, who epitomized the excesses of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald's work did not earn the credibility and recognition it holds today until years after his death.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American writer who expressed the disillusionment following upon the war. The stories and novels of 1896–1940 capture the restless, pleasure-hungry, defiant mood of the 1920s. Fitzgerald's characteristic theme, expressed poignantly in “The Great Gatsby”, is the tendency of youth's golden dreams to dissolve in failure and disappointment. Fitzgerald also elucidates the collapse of some key American Ideals, such as liberty, social unity, good governance and peace, features which were severely threatened by the pressures of modern early 20th century society.

Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)

American novelist and playwright, and the first American author to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The award reflected his ground-breaking work in the 1920s on books such as “Main Street”, “Babbitt”, and “Arrowsmith”. He was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize for 'Arrowsmith', but declined it because he believed that the Pulitzer was meant for books that celebrated American wholesomeness and his novels, which were quite critical, should not be awarded the prize.

Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941). American author, poet, playwright, essayist, and newspaper editor, wrote “Winesburg, Ohio” (1919), "The Book of the Grotesque". Many of Anderson's contributions to American Literature reflect his own struggles between the material and spiritual worlds as husband, father, author, and businessman and also cover issues as wide-ranging from labour conditions to marriage.

Early on he was writing his own poetry and short stories, influenced by such notable authors as Carl Sandburg and Gertrude Stein. Possibly because of his early transient life and often straightened circumstances he became known for his stories that gave a voice to small town American characters and their plight with finding the American Dream.

His first novel was published when he was forty – “Windy McPherson's Son” (1916). The same year “Marching Men” (1917) and “Mid-American Chants” (1918) followed. “Many Marriages” (1923) was followed by his autobiography “A Story Teller's Tale” (1924).

His last work is an extensive essay entitled “Home Town” (1940).

His epitaph reads "Life not death is the greatest adventure". Many of his works are still in print.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work “The Sun Also Rises” (1926). Equally successful was “A Farewell to Arms” (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel “The Old Man and the Sea” (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.
Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in “Men Without Women” (1927) and “The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories” (1938).

In his writing he cut out unnecessary words, simplified the sentence structure, and concentrated on concrete objects and actions. He adhered to a moral code that emphasized grace under pressure, and his protagonists were strong, silent men who often dealt awkwardly with women. “The Sun Also Rises” and “A Farewell to Arms” are generally considered his best novels; in 1953 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

In an attempt to create a saga of his own, Faulkner has invented a host of characters typical of the historical growth and subsequent decadence of the South. The human drama in Faulkner's novels is then built on the model of the actual, historical drama extending over almost a century and a half. Each story and each novel contributes to the construction of a whole, which is the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County and its inhabitants. Their theme is the decay of the old South, as represented by the Sartoris and Compson families, and the emergence of ruthless and brash newcomers, the Snopeses. Theme and technique - the distortion of time through the use of the inner monologue are fused particularly successfully in “The Sound and the Fury” (1929), the downfall of the Compson family seen through the minds of several characters. The novel “Sanctuary” (1931) is about the degeneration of Temple Drake, a young girl from a distinguished southern family. Its sequel “Requiem For A Nun” (1951), written partly as a drama, centered on the courtroom trial of a Negro woman who had once been a party to Temple Drake's debauchery. In “Light in August” (1932) prejudice is shown to be most destructive when it is internalized, as in Joe Christmas, who believes, though there is no proof of it, that one of his parents was a Negro. The theme of racial prejudice is brought up again in “Absalom, Absalom!” (1936), in which a young man is rejected by his father and brother because of his mixed blood. Faulkner's most outspoken moral evaluation of the relationship and the problems between Negroes and whites is to be found in “Intruder In the Dust” (1948).

In 1940 Faulkner published the first volume of the Snopes trilogy “The Hamlet”, to be followed by two volumes “The Town” (1957) and “The Mansion” (1959), all of them tracing the rise of the insidious Snopes family to positions of power and wealth in the community. “The reivers”, his last and most humorous work, with great many similarities to Mark Twain's “Huckleberry Finn”, appeared in 1962, the year of Faulkner's death. Faulkner managed to encompass an enormous range of humanity in Yoknapatawpha County, a Mississippian region of his own invention. He recorded his characters' seemingly unedited ramblings in order to represent their inner states, a technique called "stream of consciousness". He also jumbled time sequences to show how the past – especially the slave-holding era of the Deep South – endures in the present. Among his great works are “Absalom, Absalom!”, “As I Lay Dying”, “The Sound and the Fury”, and “Light in August”.

American drama attained international status only in the 1920s and 30s, with the works of Eugene O'Neill. He began to write plays in the fall of 1913. He wrote the one-act “Bound East for Cardiff “ in the spring of 1914. This is the only one of the plays written in this period which has any merit. In the next few years the theatre put on nearly all of his short plays, but it was not until 1920 that a long play “Beyond the Horizon” was produced in New York. Some of the critics praised the play and it was soon given a theatre for a regular run, and later on in the year was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He received this prize again in 1922 for “Anna Christie” and for the third time in 1928 for “Strange Interlude”.

John Steinbeck (1902–1968)

The great author depicted in his works severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. He was a clear representative of Depression era literature which was blunt and direct in its social criticism. After publishing some novels and short stories, Steinbeck first became widely known with “Tortilla Flat” (1935), a series of humorous stories about Monterey paisanos.
Steinbeck's novels can all be classified as social novels dealing with the economic problems of rural labour, but there is also a streak of worship of the soil in his books, which does not always agree with his matter-of-fact sociological approach. After the rough and earthy humour of “Tortilla Flat”, he moved on to more serious fiction, often aggressive in its social criticism, to “In Dubious Battle” (1936), which deals with the strikes of the migratory fruit pickers on California plantations. This was followed by “Of Mice and Men” (1937), the story of the imbecile giant Lennie, and a series of admirable short stories collected in the volume “The Long Valley” (1938). In 1939 he published what is considered his best work “The Grapes of Wrath”, the story of Oklahoma tenant farmers who, unable to earn a living from the land, moved to California where they became migratory workers.
Among his later works should be mentioned “East of Eden” (1952), “The Winter of Our Discontent” (1961), and “Travels with Charley” (1962), a travelogue in which Steinbeck wrote about his impressions during a three-month tour in a truck that led him through forty American states. His style was simple and evocative, winning him the favor of the readers but not of the critics. Steinbeck often wrote about poor, working-class people and their struggle to lead a decent and honest life. “The Grapes of Wrath”, considered his masterpiece, is a strong, socially-oriented novel that tells the story of the Joads, a poor family from Oklahoma and their journey to California in search of a better life. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.

Henry Miller a ss umed a unique place in American Literature in the 1930s when his semi-autobiographical novels, written and published in Paris, were banned from the US. Although his major works, including “Tropic of Cancer” and “Black Spring”, would not be free of the label of obscenity until 1962, their themes and stylistic innovations had already exerted a major influence on succeeding generations of American writers, and paved the way for sexually frank 1960s novels by John Updike.

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