Conversations with F. Scott FitzgeraldLiterary Criticism -- Biography Conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald assembles over thirty interviews with one of America's greatest novelists, the author of The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. Although most of these are not standard interviews in the modern sense, the quotes from Fitzgerald and the contemporary journalistic reaction to him reveal much about his writing techniques, artistic wisdom, and life. Editors Matthew J. Bruccoli, the foremost Fitzgerald scholar, and Judith S. Baughman have collected the most usable and articulate pieces on Fitzgerald, including a three-part 1922 interview conducted for the St. Paul Daily News. Fitzgerald (1896-1940) died before the authorial interview became a literary subgenre after World War II. Although Fitzgerald enjoyed his celebrity, as is clear in these pieces, he had a poor sense of public relations and provided interviewers with opportunities to trivialize him. As a result, Fitzgerald was often treated condescendingly in the press. Seven of his interviews-five printed before 1924-have flapper in their headlines. In the Jazz Age-a term Fitzgerald coined-he was regarded as a spokesman for rebellious youth, as a playboy, as an authority on sex and marriage, as an expert on Prohibition, and as an immensely popular writer for his work published in the Saturday Evening Post. Yet his literary ambitions were sizable and his impact on American fiction immeasurable. Matthew J. Bruccoli is Jefferies Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He has written or edited thirty volumes on Fitzgerald, including the standard biography, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Judith S. Baughman, who works in the department of English at the University of South Carolina, has written the F. Scott Fitzgerald volume in the Gale Study Guides series and has edited American Decades: 1920-1929. |
Contents
Introduction | xiii |
Chronology | xvii |
Books | 3 |
Fitzgerald Flappers and Fame | 6 |
Scott Fitzgerald Here on Vacation Rests by Outlining New Novels | 8 |
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald | 11 |
F Scott Fitzgerald Novelist Shocked by Younger Marrieds and Prohibition | 26 |
Unattractive Selfish Graceless Are Adjectives Applied to Middle West Girls | 30 |
That Sad Young Man | 77 |
Where the French Outclass Us | 81 |
Scott Fitzgerald Lays Success to Reading | 82 |
Fitzgerald Spenglerian | 86 |
Has the Flapper Changed? | 90 |
F Scott Fitzgerald | 95 |
F Scott Fitzgerald | 98 |
Fitzgerald Finds He Has Outgrown Jazz Novel Age | 100 |
The Gossip Shop | 32 |
Fitzgerald Flapperdoms Fiction Ace Qualifies as Most Brilliant Author But Needs Press Agent Says Scribe | 33 |
F Scott FitzgeraldJuvenile Juvenal of the Jeunesse Jazz | 35 |
Is the Jelly Bean from Georgia? | 40 |
Novelist Flays Drys Exalting Our Flappers | 43 |
F S Fitzgerald Believes Ulysses Is Great Book | 44 |
What a Flapper Novelist Thinks of His Wife | 46 |
F Scott Fitzgerald on Minnie McGluke | 50 |
All Women Over Thirtyfive Should Be Murdered | 55 |
Notes on Personalities IVF Scott Fitzgerald | 60 |
F Scott Fitzgerald | 67 |
Un Giovane Autore Americano | 72 |
Ellin Mackays Bored Debutantes Are Satirized by Scott Fitzgerald | 75 |
Scott Fitzgeralds to Spend Winter Here Writing Books | 101 |
Scott Fitzgerald Seeking Home Here | 103 |
CellarDoor? Ugh Quoth Baltimore Writers | 106 |
F Scott Fitzgerald Is Visitor in City New Book Appears Soon | 107 |
Holds Flappers Fail as Parents | 109 |
Looking at Youth | 111 |
F Scott Fitzgerald Staying at Hotel Here | 114 |
Fitzgeralds Six Generations | 117 |
Scott Fitzgerald 40 Engulfed in Despair | 120 |
Wanger Blends Abruptness with Charm in Personality | 127 |
| 129 | |