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The Jazz Age: Essays

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Even the American Heritage Dictionary acknowledges that F. Scott Fitzgerald "epitomized the Jazz Age." And nowhere among his writings are the gin, pith, and morning-after squint of that era better illuminated than in these short essays. Selected in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Fitzgerald's birth, these candid personal memoirs—one written with his wife, Zelda—furnish nothing less than the autobiography of "the lost generation" of the 1920s. "He lacked armor," E.L. Doctorow, author of The Waterworks, Ragtime, and Billy Bathgate, notes in his introduction. "He did not live in protective seclusion, as Faulkner. He was not carapaced in self-presentation, as Hemingway. He jumped right into the foolish heart of everything, as he had into the Plaza fountain." The Jazz Age is a celebration of one of the twentieth century's most vital writers.

Echoes of the Jazz Age (1931)
My Lost City (1932)
"Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number ___" (1934)
The Crack-Up (1936)
Early Success (1937)

96 pages, Paperback

First published September 17, 1996

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About the author

F. Scott Fitzgerald

2,357 books25.9k followers
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, widely known simply as Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. Owing to a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King, he dropped out in 1917 to join the United States Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. Although she initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, Zelda agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.
His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propelled him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, Fitzgerald frequented Europe, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now hailed by some literary critics as the "Great American Novel". Following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, Fitzgerald completed his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).
Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works during the Great Depression, Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he embarked upon an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940, at 44. His friend Edmund Wilson edited and published an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald's death. In 1993, a new edition was published as The Love of the Last Tycoon, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli.

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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
Profile Image for Steven R. Kraaijeveld.
571 reviews1,926 followers
February 22, 2021
"And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again." (24)
This small collection of essays by Fitzgerald, written between 1931 and 1937, consists mostly of recollections from the 1920s—of Scott's and Zelda's lives (one of the pieces, "Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Room—", was written by the two of them) as they made their way through, and past, the Jazz Age.
18 reviews65 followers
January 11, 2021
My Lost City:
This is not an account of the city's changes but of the changes in this writer's feeling for the city. From the confusion of the year 1920 I remember riding on top of a taxicab along deserted Fifth Avenue on a hot Sunday night, and a luncheon in the cool Japanese gardens at the Ritz with the wistful Kay Laurel and George Jean Nathan, and writing all night again and again, and paying too much for minute apartments, and buying magnificent but broken-down cars. The first speak-easies had arrived, the toddle was passe, the Montmartre was the smart place to dance and Lillian Tashman's fair hair weaved around the floor among the enliquored college boys. The plays were “Declassee” and “Sacred and Profane Love”, and at the Midnight Frolic you danced elbow to elbow with Marion Davies and perhaps picked out the vivacious Mary Hay in the pony chorus. We thought we were apart from all that; perhaps everyone thinks they are apart from their milieu. We felt like small children in a great bright unexplored barn. Summoned out to Griffith's studio on Long Island, we trembled in the presence of the familiar face of the “Birth of a Nation”; later I realized that behind much of the entertainment that the city poured forth into the nation there were only a lot of rather lost and lonely people. The world of the picture actors was like our own in that it was in New York and not of it. It had little sense of itself and no centre: when I first met Dorothy Gish I had the feeling that we were both standing on the North Pole and it was snowing.

Even now I go into many flats with the sense that I have been there before or in the one above or below—was it the night I tried to disrobe in the Scandals, or the night when (as I read with astonishment in the paper next morning) “Fitzgerald Knocks Officer This Side of Paradise”? Successful scrapping not being among my accomplishments, I tried in vain to reconstruct the sequence of events which led up to this denouement in Webster Hall. And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.

The tempo of the city had changed sharply. The uncertainties of 1920 were drowned in a steady golden roar and many of our friends had grown wealthy. But the restlessness of New York in 1927 approached hysteria. The parties were bigger—those of Conde Nast, for example, rivalled in their way the fabled balls of the nineties; the pace was faster—the catering to dissipation set an example to Paris; the shows were broader, the buildings were higher, the morals were looser and the liquor was cheaper; but all these benefits did not really minister to much delight. Young people wore out early—they were hard and languid at twenty-one, and save for Peter Arno none of them contributed anything new; perhaps Peter Arno and his collaborators said everything there was to say about the boom days in New York that couldn't be said by a jazz band. Many people who were not natural alcoholics were lit up four days out of seven, and frayed nerves were strewn everywhere; groups were held together by a generic nervousness and the hangover became a part of the day as well allowed-for as the Spanish siesta. Most of my friends drank too much—the more they were in tune to the times the more they drank. And so effort per se had no dignity against the mere bounty of those days in New York, a depreciatory word was found for it: a successful programme became a “racket”—I was in the “literary racket”.

And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground.

All is lost save memory, yet sometimes I imagine myself reading, with curious interest, a “Daily News” issue of 1945:

MAN OF FIFTY RUNS AMUCK IN NEW YORK
Fitzgerald Feathered Many Love Nests Avers Cutie
Bumped Off By Two-timed Gunman

So perhaps I am destined to return some day and find in the city new experiences that so far I have merely read about. For the moment I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O glittering and white!

"Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number ___":

That night we stopped under the white-trunked trees to open the windshield to the moon and to the sweep of the south against our faces, and to better smell the fragrance rustling restlessly amidst the poplars.

The night of the stock-market crash we stayed at the Beau Ravage in St. Raphael in the room Ring Lardner had occupied another year. We got out as soon as we could because we had been there so many times before—it is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

But we went to Annecy for two weeks in summer, and said at the end that we’d never go there again because those weeks had been perfect and no other time could match them.

Early Success:
Not I—I was in love with a whirlwind and I must spin a net big enough to catch it out of my head, a head full of trickling nickels and sliding dimes, the incessant music box of the poor.

The uncertainties of 1919 were over—there seemed little doubt about what was going to happen—America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it. The whole golden boom was in the air—its splendid generosities, its outrageous corruptions and the tortuous death struggle of the old America in prohibition. All the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them—the lovely young creatures in my novels went to ruin, the diamond mountains of my short stories blew up, my millionaires were as beautiful and damned as Thomas Hardy's peasants. In life these things hadn't happened yet, but I was pretty sure living wasn't the reckless, careless business—these people thought—this generation just younger than me.

It was back into the mind of the young man with cardboard soles who had walked the streets of New York. I was him again—for an instant I had the good fortune to share his dreams, I who had no more dreams of my own. And there are still times when I creep up on him, surprise him on an autumn morning in New York or a spring night in Carolina when it is so quiet that you can hear a dog barking in the next county. But never again as during that all too short period when he and I were one person, when the fulfilled future and the wistful past were mingled in a single gorgeous moment—when life was literally a dream.
Profile Image for Mallory.
502 reviews61 followers
December 22, 2015
"I was in love with a whirlwind."

Four essays by F. Scott Fitzgerald and one co-authored by his wife, Zelda. Fantastic insight into the Jazz Age and one of the most beloved authors during that period. The essays got progressively better in the order they are in the book, with "Early Success" finishing off the collection as a wistful and bittersweet reflection on the consequences of peaking early in life (which Scott believes he did).

I was slightly irritated that he always referred to Zelda as "the girl" and brought up the broken engagement multiple times, then made his wife sound like a different person than the girl who broke off the engagement. In his eyes, they might have been different people because Zelda broke his heart when she broke off the engagement and then mended it when she agreed to marriage after the publication of This Side of Paradise. This purposeful discrepancy occurred in both "The Crack-Up" and "Early Success" and I only caught it because I'm enamored with the Fitzgeralds.
Profile Image for R.a..
133 reviews26 followers
August 29, 2012
A potent little volume.

Here, we see Fitzgerald the essayist. And, like his fiction, the writing is taut.

The pieces are: "Echoes of the Jazz Age," "My Lost City," "Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number—," "The Crack Up," and "Early Success."

Malcolm Cowley of the New Yorker writes, "More than any other writer of these times, Fitzgerald had a sense of living in history."

This certainly comes out in these essays. The personal particular is cast amidst the collective general as the reader progresses from essay to essay.

A more direct assessment with the same touches of irony that his novels generate.

Just when I thought I had "completed" my Fitzgerald readings, this little gem stuck out.
431 reviews1 follower
Read
May 29, 2021
The period diction and style of Nella Larsen's Passing reminded me of Fitzgerald, and I felt compelled to dip back into his bibliography. Reading these I realized I had never read any of his non-fiction, which is very good (and occasionally transcendent) as well surprisingly reflective and tuned into the absurdities of his and Zelda's mythos. Boy, the man sure could turn a phrase. I'll keep an eye out for similar collections in the future.
Profile Image for Deborah.
582 reviews5 followers
February 22, 2021
I understand why Fitzgerald is so highly considered as an author. Reading these essays, documenting the rise and fall and in between, of his life was laid out so beautifully. I've only read one other of his stories and I'm looking forward to reading many more. His writing is so lyrical; it flows, it draws pictures, scenes, life.
Profile Image for mehg-hen.
420 reviews68 followers
September 10, 2012
I think it would be nice to have a throw pillow on your bed that you could, when you wanted to, turn inside out and have it become a plush version of F. Scott Fitzgerald holding a drink and a pen and looking sad and hopeful all at once. No one would need to know what that throw pillow actually was, so they could say "is that from Pier One?" and you could say "no, CB2." and the whole time it is the F. Scott Fitzgerald doll that you sometimes have to reveal, curl around, and sleep with. His description of New York is dead on almost 100 years later, especially when he talks about first getting there, walking around in gorgeous places and in good parties and the whole time thinking about his shithole apartment in the Bronx. There is an essay in here that he wrote with Zelda that is boring but dimly like "well, I guess I like it," like a dry chocolate cake with good sprinkles (so, minus 2 stars). There is something about him that is totally different when you read it as an adult. I mean he talks about "stoic laughter" and I felt a little bit sick and naked and like I needed to hug him. And he talks about shouting to a guy from a cab who can't hear him, when it had just started to rain, and he talked about the dark brown spots on the pavement. He captures the feeling perfectly, and I even read the introduction--AFTERWARDS--and it was actually interesting and said that Fitzgerald had no armor. Well put E.L. Doctorow. Yikes, what a writer.

I will start a Kickstarter for that pillow if you're into it.
Profile Image for J.F. Ramirez.
64 reviews8 followers
March 2, 2010
"The Crack Up" is a sad story of a man really busting his balls to prove to himself and to those around him that his life work isn't a hack waste.

This is another short book - I love these quick read pocket books - by a good author that can be used as a short, very short, introduction to the themes in his work. It's mostly essays about the twenties as opposed to short stories, but it's solid nonetheless. Fitzgerald is someone that I both admire, for the spark like quality of his prose and ideas, and that I can loathe at times. What gets me is his his obvious genius that's just thrown out the window and wasted in the name of a good time. How many really great works of fiction could he have completed in a full life? He saw things in the clearest, most writer-ly way and he phrased what he saw into beautiful sentence structures. That's the Fitzgerald that I like and that I choose to follow, the other guy, the party boy, I don't care much for him.

"In the spring of '27, something bright and alien flashed across the sky. A young Minnesotan who seemed to have nothing to do with his generation did a heroic thing, and for a moment people set down their glasses in country clubs and speakeasies and thought their old best dreams."
- "Echoes of the Jazz Age," The Crack-Up, 1945.
Profile Image for George Shetuni.
Author 39 books5 followers
June 5, 2014
I recently completed this book. It is a compilation of essays that primarly discuss his life in the 1920's. Fitzgerald was a young man at the time from Minneapolis, who had moved to the Northeast. He graduated from Yale, and soon enough sought his fortune in New York. He wrote a couple of novels and to his credit, and good luck, was published (in time) and earned money. He became one of the people that were living "the high life." He enjoyed socializing, going out, drank naturally, but there was something classy in the way he presents things. He is a lyrical writer, who does not dwell, whether the chips are up or down. Now that he is writing, in the early '30's he has a bit of melancholia about his memories and is thinking as if: "Was that real? Or was that just the calm before the storm?" It was maybe both. The stock market crashed and it was kind of like the recession we have today. The fun ended. Eventually, although the book does not mention, I think he and his wife left New York. Just like the title of this book suggests, an image lacking definite shape or clarity, ie jazz, this book too is just the author's musings. He, however, knows how to present those musings poetically and lyrically, and he is a world class author.
Profile Image for Lucille.
77 reviews2 followers
January 30, 2013
One of the essays, "My Lost City," was wonderful mostly because it talked of his life-long relationship with NYC. I always enjoy reading about my favorite city affecting others as profoundly as it does me. Another essay that struck me was "The Crack-Up." I thought it was sad, depressing, hopeless, but somehow (and obviously) beautifully written.
Profile Image for Stewart.
708 reviews9 followers
February 24, 2016
Searing, riveting confessional essays from a great writer on the downslide. "The Crack Up" is unforgettable. The voice of the zeitgeist (of the 1920's and 30's, that is) leaves behind powerful glimpses into his life and times.
Profile Image for Seth.
19 reviews
February 4, 2008
Great short stories from one of the master pens of the Jazz age. The prose is condensed and lyrical.
Profile Image for Marissa.
160 reviews1 follower
November 21, 2011
Had wanted to read this for a while and expected something a little different. Sadly, it was uninteresting to me.
Profile Image for Alicia.
26 reviews
October 19, 2016
He is so relatable at times... And I adore his description. The last essay was rather bittersweet, but it was a perfect closure for the book.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews