Book Report of The Great Gatsby
1. About the author.
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St Paul, Minnesota of mixed Southern and Irish descent. He was given three names after the writer of The Star Spangled Banner, to whom he was distantly related. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was a salesman, a Southern gentleman, whose furniture business had failed. His greater impact to him was “even if your business has failed,we have to maintain the habit of generous style”. Mary McQuillan, his mother, was the daughter of a successful wholesale grocer, and devoted to her only son. Fitzgerald entered Princeton University in 1913, where he spent most of his time doing social activities. He left his studies in 1917 because of his poor academic records, and took up a commission in the US Army. His experiences during World War I were more peaceful than Hemingway's - he never saw action and even did not go to France. The turning point in his life was when he met Zelda Sayre while he was at one of the bases where he trained in 1918, herself as the daughter of a justice from Alabama Supreme Court and an aspiring writer. He proposed to her but failed as she thought he was just a poor boy. In 1920 appeared Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise. The book gained a success which Fitzgerald celebrated energetically in parties and married Zelda successfully. Zelda danced on people's dinner tables in endless parties to celebrate the immediate success. But that was not to be the ending for the Fitzgerald. They lived in New York City. He drank too much. She spent too much money. He promised himself to live a less costly life. Always, however, he spent more than he earned from writing. In 1925, Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, considered great work. Although it initially met with little commercial success, this novel about the American dream of material success has become one of the most popular widely read and critically acclaimed works of fiction in American literature. The life of the title character, Jay Gatsby, has been compared to Fitzgerald’s life. While living in the French Riviera, Zelda’s illness became serious. She suddenly began to practice ballet, dancing night and day. After a second nervous breakdown, she was hospitalized for mental illness in Carolina. During the last years of his life, Fitzgerald lived in Hollywood, earning his living as a screenwriter. He died of heart attack at the age of 45. In 1948, the hospital at which Zelda was a patient caught fire, causing her death.
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