F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Age of Excess
Books
Recent biographies of Fitzgerald include:
Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur:
The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, c1981.
This is the definitive biography, and it’s available
in a revised, paperback edition from the University
of South Carolina Press, 2002.
As long as I’m citing books by Matt Bruccoli,
our era’s greatest Fitzgerald expert, I’ll
recommend this superb “companion” to the
novel:
_____, (Ed). F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby:
A Literary Reference. New York: Carroll & Graf,
2002.
Canterbery, E. Ray. F. Scott Fitzgerald: Under
the Influence. St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2006.
Places Fitzgerald in a broader cultural framework.
Hook, Andrew. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Literary Life.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. A brief life of
Fitzgerald, drawing heavily on Bruccoli’s work.
Mellow, James R. Invented lives: F. Scott and Zelda
Fitzgerald. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. Out
of print now, but it’s an interesting look at
the Fitzgeralds’ life together.
Prigozy, Ruth, (Ed). The Cambridge Companion to
F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Cambridge, 2001.
A collection of specially-commissioned articles on all
aspects of Fitzgerald’s life and work.
Prigozy, Ruth. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Woodstock,
NY: Overlook Press, c2001. A lively, brief, heavily
illustrated book by a well known Fitzgerald scholar.
Rielly, Edward J. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. Another brief biography.
Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda and other women of the
“Flapper Era” have attracted considerable
attention on their own:
Milford, Nancy. Zelda: A Biography. New York:
Harper & Row, 1970.
Zeitz, Joshua. Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex,
Style, Celebrity, and the Women who Made America Modern.
New York: Crown Publishers, c2006.
Fitzgerald helped popularize the term “Jazz Age”
for the 1920s with the title of a collection of his
short stories published in 1922 and very much still
in print. You might want to take a look at it as well
as Gatsby. This is the most recent edition scholarly
edition, but there are plenty of others:
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tales of the Jazz Age.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
It’s hard for anyone to discuss American literature
in the Twenties without discussing Fitzgerald. Take
a look at these studies:
Bryer, Jackson R. and J. Gerald Kennedy (Eds).
French Connections: Hemingway and Fitzgerald Abroad.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. A collection of
essays on these expatriate American writers.
Berman, Ronald. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the
Twenties. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
c2001.
Meade, Marion. Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers
Running Wild in the Twenties. New York: Nan A.
Talese/Doubleday, 2004.
These are just a few of the lively broader studies
of that lively decade:
Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: An Informal
History of the 1920s. New York: Wiley, 1997.
Evensen, Bruce J. When Dempsey Fought Tunney: Heroes,
Hokum, and Storytelling in the Jazz Age. Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, c1996.
Goldberg, David Joseph. Discontented America: The
United States in the 1920s. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999.
Miller, Nathan. New World Coming: The 1920s and
the Making of Modern America. New York: Scribner,
c2003.
Goldberg, Ronald Allen. America in the Twenties.
Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003.
Smith, Page. Redeeming the Time: A People's History
of the 1920s and the New Deal. New York: McGraw-Hill,
c1987.
To bring yourself back to reality, get this book on
rural life in the same period as the madcap urban Jazz
Age:
Meyer, Carrie A. Days on the Family Farm: From
the Golden Age through the Great Depression. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, c2007.
Internet Resources
The University of South Carolina’s F. Scott Fitzgerald
Centenary Website is useful for scholars and provides
authoritative bibliographical data – but it’s
not designed for k-12 classroom teachers:
http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/
For classroom purposes, F. Scott Fitzgerald Society
Website will be far more helpful:
http://www.fitzgeraldsociety.org/teaching/index.html
The University of Kansas (Pittsburg) Jazz Age Website
is largely a “critical bibliography of Websites
(meaning that they’re evaluated, not just listed),and
we all know what a help that service can be:
http://faculty.pittstate.edu/~knichols/jazzage.html
Don’t miss their Fitzgerald entries on the Lost
Generation Writers Webpage. These links will give you
lesson plans among other things:
http://faculty.pittstate.edu/~knichols/jazzage3.html#lost
