His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was an American author best known for his work, The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald graduated from Princteon University in 1917. He was a prolific author, writing screenplays, novels, poetry, radio scripts, and stage plays. He died of a heart attack in 1940 in Hollywood, California.
“First you take a drink,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once noted, “then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” Fitzgerald wrote alcohol into almost every one of his stories. On Booze gathers debutantes and dandies, rowdy jazz musicians, lost children and ragtime riff-raff into a newly compiled collection taken from The Crack-Up, and other works never before published by New Directions. On Booze portrays “The Jazz Age” as Fitzgerald experienced it: roaring, rambunctious, and lush – with quite a hangover.
Edited by Edmund Wilson
A self-portrait of a great writer’s rise and fall, intensely personal and etched with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s signature blend of romance and realism, The Crack-Up tells the story of his sudden descent at the age of thirty-nine from glamorous success to empty despair, and his determined recovery. This revealing collection of Fitzgerald’s most visceral essays – and of letters to and from his friends Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, T. S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, and Edmund Wilson (who compiled this volume shortly after Fitzgerald’s death) – tells of a man with charm and talent to burn, whose gaiety and genius made him a living symbol of the Jazz Age, and whose recklessness took him down.
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,” EL. Doctorow, author of The Waterworks, Ragtime, and Billy Bathgates, 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.
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings.
Great God, Scott… you are a fine writer. Believe it––not me.
