1. The Man who Made “The Jazz Age”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Man who Made
“The Jazz Age”

2. The Jazz Age / The Roaring Twenties
According to Fitzgerald,
“It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.”

3. WWI  Boom  Bust
A decade sandwiched between two great heartaches

4. The Jazz Age

5. Francis Scott Fitzgerald
Born in Minnesota
Namesake: Francis Scott Key of the “Star-Spangled Banner”
Published a story in the school paper at 12, but also got expelled from High School for neglecting his studies
At Princeton University, he wrote musical comedies and left without a degree
Enlisted in the Army, but then WWI ended and he never had to go overseas

6. Love and Making a Living
Fell in love with Zelda Sayre
But he wasn’t rich enough
So she broke off their
engagement
When his first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published with bestseller status…
They married the next month.

7. Fitzgerald remarked that perhaps he should have continued writing musicals, but he said, "I am too much a moralist at heart, and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than entertain them."

8. The High Life: Living It Up and Putting It Down
Fitzgerald named “The Jazz Age” and enjoyed it, but also commented on it, watching and recording his era with subtle and powerful insight.
This Side of Paradise (1920)
The Beautiful and Damned (1921)
Flappers and Philosophers (1920)
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
The Great Gatsby (1925)

9. The Love of the Last Tycoon (unfinished b/c Fitzgerald died)
Tender Is the Night (1934)
About a psychiatrist who marries one of his patients
Perhaps inspired by Zelda’s ordeal with schizophrenia
Failed because Americans during the Depression were not interested in Jazz Age “parties”
The Love of the Last Tycoon (unfinished b/c Fitzgerald died)
About Hollywood
And 160 short stories! (He and Hemingway called this “whoring” for the magazine industry.)

10. Fitzgerald’s thematic elements
Aspiration / idealized ambition
Success / Failure
Love / Loss
Disillusionment
Mutability (changeability / loss)

12. The Great Gatsby The Epigraph
Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her, too,
Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!”
--Thomas Parke D’Invilliers
(a character in F’s This Side of Paradise)

13. Do you Agree or Disagree?
When one comes by wealth illegally, he or she is very likely to pay for it in the end.

14. Do you Agree or Disagree?
People who live in big East Coast cities are sophisticated, while people who live in Midwestern cities are simple and innocent.

15. Do you Agree or Disagree?
If you truly love another person long enough, you will eventually have a life together.

16. Do you Agree or Disagree?
There is no difference between a family that has been wealthy for generations and one which was poor until just recently.

17. Chapter 1: (a new kind of narrator!)
The movie: Today or tomorrow
The characters
The dream