Abstract
The language of fiction engages with different kinds of reality. In the novels and stories of Fitzgerald’s great contemporaries — Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner ’ the realities of war, violence, and what Dos Passos in a letter to Fitzgerald in 1936 called ‘the murderous forces of history’ loom large. For Fitzgerald, however, the reality he recognized was that defined by society. In his life and in his art Fitzgerald remained focused on the social dimension of human experience, on behaviour and manners within relatively familiar social contexts. The world beyond and outside everyday society — the world that concerned writers whom he admired such as Conrad and Hemingway — interested him less than the problems and pressures experienced by individuals within a more or less conventional social world.
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Notes
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Afternoon of an Author, New York, 1957, pp. 135–6.
See M.J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, the Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, New York and London, 1981, p. 140.
See ‘Mrs Oscar Kalman remembers the Fitzgeralds’ in M. J. Bruccoli (ed.), Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual, 1976, 117–23.
Edmund Wilson (ed.), The Crack-Up, New York, 1956, p. 76.
Jackson R. Bryer, John Kuehl (eds), The Basil and Josephine Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, New York, 1973, p. 75.
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© 2002 Andrew Hook
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Hook, A. (2002). Becoming a Writer. In: F. Scott Fitzgerald. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919267_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919267_1
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