A good deal has been made of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s hometown by commentators on his work, but the fact is that he spent precious little time there. He was born in St. Paul in September 1896 and left eighteen months later. The next decade was spent in Buffalo and in Syracuse. The Fitzgeralds did not return to St. Paul until the summer of 1908, shortly before Scott’s twelfth birthday. From 1908 to 1911 the family lived in St. Paul, and Scott attended St. Paul Academy. Then he was sent east, first to the Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey, and...

Settling into a house in the San Fernando Valley in 1938, Scott Fitzgerald thought the place rather drab, but when Buff Cobb came for a visit, admired the garden, and remarked that its fence pickets looked “like little gravestones in a Confederate graveyard,” Fitzgerald ran inside to tell Sheilah Graham that Buff had “made the place livable! We’ve got romance in the house” (Graham and Frank, Infidel, 266–67).

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s attitudes toward the American South were shaped by two important relationships: with his wife, Zelda Sayre of Alabama, and with his father, Edward Fitzgerald of Maryland. Born and...

F. scott fitzgerald started writing This Side of Paradise when he was still a Princeton undergraduate and published it when he was only twenty-three. The book launched Fitzgerald’s career as one of the nation’s greatest novelists; it also established him as a spokesman for and chronicler of the life and times of his generation. His story of Amory Blaine’s passage through adolescence and youth toward maturity has a universal appeal, yet it’s very much a young person’s novel, speaking most eloquently to readers between fifteen and thirty.

Publishing This Side of Paradise was of crucial importance to Fitzgerald’s private and...

Two hundred and eighty pages into The Portrait of a Lady, Madame Merle carries on an instructive conversation with Isabel Archer about marriage prospects. Madame Merle, very much a woman of the world, feels sure that there is an “inevitable young man” (287) with a mustache in Isabel’s past, but knows that he doesn’t really count, whether he has a castle in the Apennines or an ugly brick house on Fortieth Street.

“I don’t care anything about his house,” Isabel responds, eliciting from Madame Merle a lecture born of experience. “When you have lived as long as I, you will...

Nick carraway is a snob. He dislikes people in general and denigrates them in particular. He dodges emotional commitments. Neither his ethical code nor his behavior is exemplary: propriety rather than morality guides him. He is not entirely honest about himself and frequently misunderstands others. Do these shortcomings mean that Nick is an unreliable narrator? At times and in part, yes. But they also mean that he is the perfect narrator for The Great Gatsby and that Fitzgerald’s greatest technical achievement in the novel was to invent this narrative voice at once “within and without” the action.

The first clue...

Most authors constantly repeat themselves, Scott Fitzgerald observed in 1933. “We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives,” he continued, and on the basis of these experiences “we tell our two or three stories—each time in a new disguise—maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen” (My Lost City, 86–87). One of the stories Fitzgerald told over and over again was about the struggle of the poor young man to win the hand of the rich girl. That had “always” been his situation, he remarked. He grew up “a...

As F. Scott Fitzgerald said of himself, the man who started Tender Is the Night was not the one who finished it (qtd. in Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, 369). It could hardly have been otherwise, for the years from 1925 to 1934 saw the author’s private universe fall apart while the world outside descended into decadence and depression. Fitzgerald had an affair—or said he did—with the young actress Lois Moran, to balance the affair Zelda had—or said she did—with the French aviator Edouard Jozan. During drinking bouts Scott alienated friends, got into fights with...

F. Scott Fitzgerald will be remembered primarily for his novels and stories, but during his twenty years as a professional writer, he also produced an important and revealing body of work in the form of articles and essays and correspondence. The very best of these—the autobiographical pieces written in the 1930s—command the lyrical magic and emotional power of his most lasting fiction. And even at their least meritorious, in the advertisements for himself Fitzgerald composed as a beginning author, these articles reveal a great deal about the way he wanted to present himself to his readers. Read chronologically,...

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” articles that ran in Esquire for February, March, and April 1936 precipitated an extraordinary response from the magazine’s readers. Letters came from old friends who wanted to cheer him up, from total strangers who recognized something of their own plight in Fitzgerald’s account of emotional exhaustion, and most of all from other writers, among them James Boyd, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Nancy Hoyt, John O’Hara, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, G. B. Stern, Julian Street, and Alexander Woollcott. As O’Hara put it in an April letter, “I suppose you get comparatively little mail these days that...

The image of the frivolous playboy clings to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s reputation like a barnacle on a ship. He helped build the image himself, to be sure, but it’s a false one. Most of his career Fitzgerald was a serious, hard-working, intelligent artist. Yet people persist in thinking of him as an artist in spite of himself, a bear of remarkable talent but lamentably little brain.

It follows that he has rarely been credited with having any political ideas at all. Fitzgerald knew “absolutely nothing” about politics “and was not interested in the slightest,” one of his oldest friends observed...

F. scott fitzgerald spent the last three and a half years of his life in Hollywood, but he never really belonged there. His secretary, Frances Kroll Ring, recalls seeing him walking to Schwab’s drug store on Sunset Boulevard, wearing a dark topcoat, a gray homburg, an indoor pallor, and looking for all the world as if he’d just got off the train.

Fitzgerald came west midway through 1937 to write for the movies and make enough money to keep his wife, Zelda, in the best sanitariums and his daughter, Scottie, in the best girls schools. He worked hard at learning...

If hemingway had stuck to his trade as a reporter, Philip Young judged, he “would have ranked among the best there ever were” (17). The reviewers of Byline: Ernest Hemingway (1970) did not go that far, but they generally admired Hemingway’s articles in the Toronto Star papers, the Daily Star and the feature-oriented Star Weekly, for their liveliness and wit. These newspaper pieces, written from 1920 to 1923, were remarkably personal for a profession that prided itself on objectivity. In writing about what he saw and heard on his pan-Atlantic beat, Hemingway of the Star put his own personality and...

Ernest hemingway met Agnes von Kurowsky in the Red Cross hospital in Milan, where he had been taken to recuperate from his July 1918 wounding on the Austrian front. She was twenty-six, a Red Cross nurse, very attractive, and not without experience in affairs of the heart. He was barely nineteen, good-looking, charming in his eagerness to confront life, and innocent in the ways of courtship. Despite the difference in their ages, they fell in love. When he sailed for the States from Genoa in early January, it was understood that he would get a job, she would follow, and...

The trouble with “A Canary for One,” for many readers, is that it has a surprise ending, and while surprise endings may be all right for O. Henry, they seem all wrong for Ernest Hemingway. If he ever wrote such an ending, it is surely in this poignant tale of a broken marriage whose final one-sentence paragraph, “We were returning to Paris to set up separate residences,” strikes with the force of a revelation. Yet if you reread the story immediately, as Julian Smith suggests (“Hemingway in the Wasteland,” 355), you will begin to see the groundwork the author laid...

Scopophilia runs dominant in modern dramatic arts. Marilyn Monroe’s skirts go skyward in a gust of air-conditioning. Marlene Dietrich pulls on her stockings. Rita Hayworth strips off her gloves. The male audience observes, smiles, leers. Under such scrutiny the actress/woman is reduced to a sexual object. “The determining male gaze,” as Laura Mulvey puts it, “projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly” (“Visual Pleasure,” 808).

There is very little scopophilia in the work of Ernest Hemingway. Confrontational looks are common enough, as exemplified by the boxer Ad Francis’s angrily locking eyes with Nick Adams in...

While voyaging back to the United States in 1833, Ralph Waldo Emerson puzzled over a definition of morals. His thoughts, he admitted in his journal, were “dim and vague,” but one might obtain “some idea of them . . . who develops the doctrine in his own experience that nothing can be given or taken without an equivalent”‘ (Selections, 14–15). In Emerson’s sublime optimism, he weighted the scales of equivalence in favor of the taker. Only the half-blind, as he observes in his essay “The Tragic,” had never beheld the House of Pain, which like the salt sea encroached...

Ernest Hemingway started out trying to be funny. On the evidence of his high school compositions, a classmate recalled, “one might have predicted that he would be a writer of humor” (Fenton, Apprenticeship, 12). In the Trapeze, the Oak Park and River Forest Township high school weekly paper, he made fun of himself, his sister, his friends, and the school itself. Some of these pieces were fashioned after the epistolary subliteracy of Ring Lardner’s You Know Me, Al (1916).

“Well Sue as you are the editor this week I thot as how I would write and tell you about how...

A farewell to arms has usually been read as a classic love story, the tragic tale of two lovers driven together by the war who give themselves to each other in a blissful bonding that might have lasted indefinitely had not death cruelly snatched one away. The events of the novel take on a “fully idyllic” cast as Frederic Henry recalls them, one eminent critic observed (Wilson, “Gauge,” 242). Frederic and Catherine Barkley, according to another, represent counterparts “of Paolo and Francesca, of Lucy and Richard Feverel, of all great lovers” (Lovett, “Ernest Hemingway,” 615). Yet to interpret Hemingway’s novel...

Sheridan baker distinguishes between the early Hemingway hero, a passive young man somewhat given to self-pity, and the later, far more active and courageous hero (Hemingway: An Introduction, 2). Nick Adams is a boy things happen to; Robert Jordan, a man who makes them happen. This neat classification breaks down, however, when applied to the complicated narrator-protagonist of A Farewell to Arms. Frederic Henry consistently depicts himself as a passive victim inundated by the flow of events, which kills Catherine, one of the very good and gentle and brave who die young. But Frederic, who survives, belongs in another category...

Most of Ernest Hemingway’s books were banned in one place or another, at one time or another (Haight, Banned Books, 89–90). A Farewell to Arms was banned in Boston, or, rather, the second installment of a six-part serial version of the novel running in Scribner’s Magazine was banned there on June 20, 1929, by police chief Michael H. Crowley, who brought his wide expertise in such matters to bear and pronounced the book “salacious.” Though his ruling barred distribution of the magazine by Boston booksellers and newsstands for the run of the serial over the next four months, it...

In 1976, while looking through the Gertrude Stein papers at Yale’s Beinecke library, I serendipitously ran across some United States Army documents about an attempt to censor Hemingway’s stories. How that material found its way into the Stein papers remains a mystery; there is no mention of her anywhere in the file. But here is the story, as reconstructed from these military memoranda.

On May 16, 1945, Brigadier General Ernest J. Dawley, Commanding General, Ground Force Reinforcement Command, European Theater of Operations, wrote his superior, Lieutenant General John C. H. Lee, Commanding General, Communications Zone, European Theater, about the trouble...

During the second half of the 1930s, almost all of Ernest Hemingway’s writing followed a political agenda. In newspaper dispatches, magazine articles, a film, a play, his only public speech, a number of stories, and one of his greatest novels, he consistently—and sometimes passionately—wrote on behalf of the Spanish Republic.

Neither before nor after this time did Hemingway so devote himself to a political purpose. But this hardly means, as two of his biographers have argued, that he was “one of the least overtly political writers of his generation” and “basically bored by politics” (Kinnamon, “Hemingway and Politics.”...

Death was Hemingway’s great subject, and his great obsession. He wrote about it in his earliest stories and in his last ones. Of his seven completed novels, five end with the death of a male protagonist, and a sixth with the death of the heroine. Only in The Sun Also Rises, with its dying fall of an ending, do the characters survive to live and drink and fornicate another day. Yet that novel’s moral center is located not in the cafes of Paris and Pamplona but in the bullring where Pedro Romero confronts animals bred to kill and be killed...

Generations after his death Ernest Hemingway remains a famous American writer. Even those who have never read a word he wrote are aware of his presence in the world of celebrity—a rugged macho figure called Papa with a signature white beard. The outpouring of recognition and praise that followed his suicide on the morning of July 2, 1961, nearly obliterated the boundaries of space and time. His passing was memorialized by the Kremlin and the White House, in the Vatican and the bullrings of Spain. “It is almost,” the Louisville Courier-Journal observed, “as though the Twentieth Century itself has...