F. Scott Fitzgerald

"There are three volumes of Fitzgerald’s letters, but this is a selection of the highlights. If you really want to understand Fitzgerald you need to hear his own voice. He had a great deal more range than people sometimes think. What I love about A Life in Letters is that it conveys more clearly his sense of humour. One of the things that I think people sometimes miss about Gatsby is its sense of humour. We’ve been encouraged to read it only as an elegiac romance – which it is – but it’s also a very funny book with a great deal of facetious wit. I think that one gets more of an ear for Fitzgerald’s particular brand of humour by reading his letters. Also, you get a sense of how serious he was about writing and how much reading he did. A great many of his letters are exchanges with friends who were writers and journalists, and they are all developing theories of writing. He is thinking very consciously and explicitly about the kinds of writing that he wants to do. So I think this collection of letters is a good way of getting a feel for the era and for the man. Well, he was changing his mind about it. His first novel came out in 1920, when he was just 24, and Gatsby came out in 1925 – he was 28 when he finished it. So he was evolving very much as a writer and as an adult over the course of his first books. By the time Gatsby came out he had written three novels in four years, published two collections of short stories, and he’d written a satirical play at the end of 1923, which was a complete flop. The majority of that writing was satirical. At first he saw himself as a satirist and that was his metier. But in the early 1920s, Fitzgerald and his friends were also thinking and talking earnestly about the idea of what American literature should be. There was a very prominent conversation in the papers and magazines, as well as in books, of course, about an emerging idea of modern American literature . How would America find its own voice, its own form, a literature that was unique, indigenous, and not just aping European and particularly British literature? Could America develop its own literary identity? In particular, they were theorising about what the novel should be and what it should do, how the characters should work, what its purposes were. And that is why there is a pronounced shift in tone, form and style among his first three novels as he explores those different ideas. Exactly, although he didn’t meet Hemingway until after Gatsby came out. But they discussed Tender is the Night , Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel, and also Hemingway’s first novels, in detail."