Shmoop - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Here you can read online Shmoop - F. Scott Fitzgerald full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2010, publisher: Shmoop, genre: Detective and thriller. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Author:
- Publisher:Shmoop
- Genre:
- Year:2010
- Rating:3 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
F. Scott Fitzgerald: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "F. Scott Fitzgerald" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
Dive deep into the story of F. Scott Fitzgeralds life anywhere you go: on a plane, on a mountain, in a canoe, under a tree. Or grab a flashlight and read Shmoop under the covers. Shmoops award-winning Biographies are now available on your eReader. Shmoop eBooks are like having a trusted, fun, chatty, expert always by your side, no matter where you are (or how late it is at night).
Shmoop Biographies offer fresh perspectives on great thinkers and doers. The biography includes a life story, family tree, resume of important works and accomplishments, jaw-dropping trivia and anecdotes, memorable quotes, and a timeline of formative events. Best of all, Shmoops analysis aims to look at people from multiple points of view to give you the fullest understanding. After all, there is no history, only histories (Karl Popper).
Experts and educators from top universities, including Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Harvard, have written these biographies designed to engage you and to get your brain bubbling. Shmoop is here to make you a better lover (of literature, history, life...) and to help you make connections to other historical moments, works of literature, current events, and pop culture. These learning guides will help you sink your teeth into the past. For more information, check out http://www.shmoop.com/biography/
Shmoop: author's other books
Who wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
F. Scott Fitzgerald — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "F. Scott Fitzgerald" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Font size:
Interval:
Bookmark:
If the "Roaring Twenties" conjures up images bobbed-hair flappers and couples dancing to jazz music, you may have F. Scott Fitzgerald to thank. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American writer of novels, short stories, essays and plays. During his lifetime, Fitzgerald completed four novels (a fifth was published posthumously) and about 160 stories. His novels include The Great Gatsby, one of the classics of American literature. He was also one of the most influential members of a group known as the Lost Generation. These were the men and women who just missed out on the drama of World War I and instead threw their energies into the freedoms and excesses of the 1920s. When the market crashed and the good times came to a screeching halt, those who survived were left to ponder their choices, regret the waste and mourn the passing of their youth. Fitzgerald's fiction captured these times with keen insight, detailed realism and a distinctly American voice. His writing defined the 1920s, an era Fitzgerald himself named "the Jazz Age."
All writers draw upon the mood and the energy of their times. In Fitzgerald's case, his life paralleled the trajectory of his generation to an almost eerie degree. His work and life flowered in the hedonistic excesses of the 1920s, influenced by a culture of liberated women, Freudian psychoanalysis and social mores as fluid as bootleg gin. When the Great Crash of 1929 rolled around, Fitzgerald and his wife, the inimitable Zelda, collapsed as well into their own financial and mental depressions. In his fiction and in his life, Fitzgerald spent the next decade exploring themes of maturity and regret. A lifelong alcoholic who could only write when off the sauce, he struggled to succeed in a decidedly sober decade. After years of false starts and failed projects, he died of a heart attack in 1940 at the age of 44. F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure; time has judged otherwise.
Men in slender-cut tuxedos, satin-draped women giggling tipsily at parties, the green light burning tantalizingly from Daisy Buchanan's dock at East Egg. These images from the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald's fiction have become so closely associated with the writer and his time that it's hard sometimes to separate where fiction ended and real life began. For Fitzgerald, who earned his place in the American literary canon as the master chronicler of his era, separating the man from his era is a dicey business. Fitzgerald's life (and the lives of his characters) echoed the national mood-boldly romantic before 1920, excessive and exuberant in the 1920s, sober and reflective in the 1930s. All writers rely on personal experience and insight to shape their work, but Fitzgerald was able to reflect the nuances and details of his surroundings onto the page with a skill few others have matched. He was also almost shameless about borrowing scenes, settings and characters from real life. When critics questioned his preoccupation with the themes of love and aspiration, Fitzgerald responded, "But, my God! It was my material, and it was all I had to deal with."
The defining period of Fitzgerald's life and work was the 1920s, the decade-long flowering of culture and literature that Fitzgerald himself named "the Jazz Age." As scholars have pointed out, the Jazz Age as captured in Fitzgerald's fiction is more reflective and self-aware than the cartoonish image of flappers and fur coats we often associate with the period today.Fitzgerald saw the waste as well as the wealth, the pain that rattled below the surface of the parties. It pained him in later life that he was so closely identified with the frippery he found in many ways abhorrent. But the fact remains that the Jazz Age was such a sustaining, inspiring time for Fitzgerald that when it crashed out of existence, Fitzgerald himself struggled simply to exist. He lasted for only another ten years before collapsing at his lover's apartment of a heart attack at the age of 44. He died believing himself a failure. Generations of readers since have proved him wrong.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24 September 1896 in St. Paul Minnesota, the son of second-generation Irish-American named Mollie McQuillan and a wicker furniture manufacturer from Maryland named Edward Fitzgerald. Despite several attempts to make it big in the furniture business, Edward Fitzgerald never really achieved the success he hoped for. Mollie's inheritance and donations from an aunt allowed the family to live a comfortable upper-middle class Midwestern life, but Fitzgerald never shook the sense that he was a poor boy crashing a rich man's party. The duel between resentment and admiration of those who have more-that most American of conflicts-would always be a dominant theme in Fitzgerald's life and fiction.
America in the years just before the First World War was a place of contradictions. Women couldn't vote and people of any race but white were mostly marginalized. There were few protections for working people, no pensions or Social Security. It was also the time of Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement, of the nascent rumblings that would eventually give way to women's suffrage and workers' rights. Through it all, Americans loved-loved-the idea of the self-made man, the plucky, ambitious fellow who pulled himself up by the bootstraps and took advantage of all that the land of opportunity had to offer. They admired business titans like J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie. Americans in the 1910s believed that it was possible to make something from nothing, which may explain why they were so ready for the prosperity of the decade that followed.
Fitzgerald attended prep schools in St. Paul and then in New Jersey, where his literary leanings first appeared in stories and plays he penned for student publications. In 1913, he entered Princeton University with the Class of 1917, beginning a period that would permanently shape his life and work. Princeton's aura of leisurely privilege inspired him. Fitzgerald made friends with young men (Princeton didn't go co-ed until 1969) who also would go on to become important literary figures, like the critic Edmund Wilson and the poet John Peale Bishop. A much better writer than a student, Fitzgerald scribbled prolifically for the campus' literary publications and theatrical societies while his grades withered. He fell in love with a young Chicago debutante named Ginevra King. Though the relationship eventually ended, Ginevra remained in his consciousness as a model for later female characters-most notably Gatsby's Daisy Buchanan. He also learned to drink. What started out as enjoyment of cocktails with friends eventually morphed into the alcoholism that contributed to Fitzgerald's early death.
Shockingly enough, the combination of wretched grades, unrequited love and rampant boozing eventually landed Fitzgerald on academic probation. With graduation unlikely, he did the gentlemanly thing for a young man of his time-he quit school and joined the military, hoping to be sent to Europe to fight in World War I. In November 1917, Fitzgerald accepted a commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He never graduated from Princeton. Soon after reporting for duty at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Fitzgerald started work on a novel entitled The Romantic Egoist. Fitzgerald would likely have admitted to egoism (he reported for military duty in a Brooks Brothers-tailored uniform) and he definitely held romantic visions of overseas battle. He was convinced he was going to die in the war and imagined his novel as his goodbye letter to the world.
Font size:
Interval:
Bookmark:
Similar books «F. Scott Fitzgerald»
Look at similar books to F. Scott Fitzgerald. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Discussion, reviews of the book F. Scott Fitzgerald and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.