Summary
For his keen social insight, glib sophistication, and breathtaking lyricism, F. Scott Fitzgerald stands as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. His biographers all note the importance of his boyhood in St. Paul, where, as he put it, he lived in "a house below the average on a street above the average." Fitzgerald's sensitivity about wealth and position'later made evident in such classics as The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night--was bred of his St. Paul family and associations. F. Scott Fitzgerald's St. Paul is a city of winter dreams and ice palaces, lakeside parties and neighborhood hijinks. These are stories of ambition and young love, insecurity and awkwardness, where a poor boy with energy and intelligence can break into the upper classes and become a glittering success. This selection brings together the best of Fitzgerald's St. Paul stories'some virtually unknown, others classics of short fiction. Patricia Hampl's incisive introduction traces the trajectory of Fitzgerald's blazing celebrity and its connections to his life in the city that gave him his best material. Headnotes by Dave Page provide specific ties between the stories and Fitzgerald's life in St. Paul. "Fitzgerald is a presence in St. Paul, a ghost who patrols his old neighborhood and keeps talking to us. He sits on Mrs. Porterfield's porch on Summit Avenue, smoking and talking about writing, and it is always that gorgeous summer just before he finished the book, hit it big, went to New York, married the girl. This lovely book sets out our claim on him. We have no Fitzgerald museum in St. Paul, no boyhood home restored--the family lived in apartments--but this book is the only monument he needs, his own stories, with historical notes, and Patricia Hampl's graceful shining essay for absolution, and Zelda's benediction." -- Garrison Keillor "These are wonderful stories, including several of the greatest Fitzgerald ever wrote. Anyone interested in Fitzgerald or the importance of place in fiction will want to read this book. And anyone who does will find it a delight." -- Scott Donaldson, author of Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald "In one of the ironies of fate of which life is so fond, the literary world knows the biography and work of F. Scott Fitzgerald better than it knows the particulars of the city where he was born. Fitzgerald loved, hated, and was obsessed by St. Paul, and in her brilliant introduction to these stories, Patricia Hampl shows us why. These stories and this wonderfully informative introduction give St. Paul a local habitation and a name, and they place Fitzgerald's ambitions and gifts in a cultural context too often ignored or forgotten." -- Charles Baxter, author of Saul and Patsy
F(rancis) Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. He was educated at Princeton University and served in the U.S. Army from 1917 to 1919, attaining the rank of second lieutenant. In 1920 Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre, a young woman of the upper class, and they had a daughter, Frances.
Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the finest American writers of the 20th Century. His most notable work was the novel, The Great Gatsby (1925). The novel focused on the themes of the Roaring Twenties and of the loss of innocence and ethics among the nouveau riche. He also made many contributions to American literature in the form of short stories, plays, poetry, music, and letters. Ernest Hemingway, who was greatly influenced by Fitzgerald's short stories, wrote that Fitzgerald's talent was "as fine as the dust on a butterfly's wing." Yet during his lifetime Fitzgerald never had a bestselling novel and, toward the end of his life, he worked sporadically as a screenwriter at motion picture studios in Los Angeles. There he contributed to scripts for such popular films as Winter Carnival and Gone with the Wind.
Fitzgerald's work is inseparable from the Roaring 20s. Berenice Bobs Her Hair and A Diamond As Big As The Ritz, are two short stories included in his collections, Tales of the Jazz Age and Flappers and Philosophers. His first novel The Beautiful and Damned was flawed but set up Fitzgerald's major themes of the fleeting nature of youthfulness and innocence, unattainable love, and middle-class aspiration for wealth and respectability, derived from his own courtship of Zelda. This Side of Paradise (1920) was Fitzgerald's first unqualified success. Tender Is the Night, a mature look at the excesses of the exuberant 20s, was published in 1934.
Much of Fitzgerald's work has been adapted for film, including Tender is the Night , The Great Gatsby, and Babylon Revisited which was adapted as The Last Time I Saw Paris by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1954. The Last Tycoon, adapted by Paramount in 1976, was a work in progress when Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, in Hollywood, California. Fitzgerald is buried in the historic St. Mary's Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland.
(Bowker Author Biography)
