This Side of Paradise is the debut novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Published in 1920, and taking its title from a line of the Rupert Brooke poem Tiare Tahiti, the book examines the lives and morality of post-World War I youth. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is a wealthy and attractive Princeton University student who dabbles in literature and has a series of romances that eventually lead to his disillusionment. In his later novels, Fitzgerald would further develop the book's theme of love warped by greed and status-seeking. Many consider Amory Blaine to be at least partially based on Fitzgerald himself, who, like Amory, attended Princeton University before joining the Army. Also, Fitzgerald named the protagonist in his novel "This Side of Paradise" Amory Blaine in reference to Hobey Baker, a member of Princeton's class of 1914. Baker was a star athlete in football and hockey who died in a plane crash just weeks after the end of the war in Europe in 1918.
The 1920s proved the most influential decade of Fitzgerald's development. The Great Gatsby was first published on April 10, 1926, and set in New York City and Long Island during the 1920s. The novel was not popular when it was first published, selling fewer than 24,000 copies during Fitzgerald's lifetime. Largely forgotten due to the Great Depression and then World War II, it was republished in the 1950s and quickly found a wide readership. Over the following decades the novel has emerged as a standard text in high school and university courses in literature around the world, and is often cited as one of the greatest English-language novels of the 20th Century, as well as one of the greatest American literature pieces ever written.
The story centers around Jay Gatsby, the title character, who is a young millionaire with a mysterious and somewhat notorious past. He's famous for throwing glamorous parties attended by high society. Gatsby has no ties to the society of the rich in which he circulates and is a lonely man. All he really wants is to repeat the past, and that's to be reunited with the love of his life, Daisy. The reader learns that Daisy is the primary reason he pursued a life of money, the other being that he wanted to escape from the life of his father, poverty. But Daisy has moved on and is married to respectable millionaire Tom Buchanan. The narrator is Nick Carraway, an apprentice Wall Street trader in the rising financial markets of the early 1920s, who is also Daisy's second cousin. Carraway lives in the small bungalow next to the mansion owned by Gatsby. He quickly meets and befriends Gatsby, and thus becomes the liaison between him and Daisy. Carraway is cynical of the rich, as respectable as they may seem superficially; he feels that they are careless people. One afternoon, after a confrontation between Tom and Gatsby over Gatsby's love for Daisy, as well as Gatsby's past actions and present intentions, Daisy runs over Myrtle, Tom's mistress, while driving back from the city with Gatsby in Gatsby's bright yellow car. Tom misleads Myrtle's heartbroken husband George, implying that the accident was Gatsby's fault to punish Tom for marrying Daisy. In a fit of rage, George goes to Gatsby's house with his gun, shoots Gatsby and then commits suicide. Hardly anyone, even Daisy, attends Gatsby's funeral. Carraway, Gatsby's sole friend, attends with Gatsby's father, a poor farmer. Gatsby is buried with the same mystery in which he suddenly appeared. At the end of the book, Carraway decides to move back out West, as he feels that the East is too corrupt for him. He is left to ponder The American Dream and what it is that makes us continue to strive for our goals.
The themes Fitzgerald uses with the American dream and the focus on the wealthy citizens of America, the notion of opulence with the attempt to gain wealth is apparent through Gatsby's extravagant and lavish parties. This also carried over into Fitzgerald's own life. While his passion lay in writing novels, they never sold well enough to support the opulent lifestyle that he and his wife, Zelda, adopted as New York celebrities. To support this lifestyle, Fitzgerald turned to writing short stories submitting them to magazines and was frequently in financial trouble and often required loans from his literary agent and his editor at Scribner's.
Other fine works include Tender Is the Night (1934), about a young psychiatrist whose life is doomed by his marriage to an unstable woman, and some stories in the collections Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), and All the Sad Young Men (1926). More than any other writer, Fitzgerald captured the glittering, desperate life of the 1920s; This Side of Paradise was heralded as the voice of modern American youth. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), continued his exploration of the self-destructive extravagance of his times.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The influence of Hemingway's writings on American literature was considerable and continues today. His distinctive writing style is characterized by terse minimalism and understatement and had a significant influence on the development of twentieth century fiction. Hemingway's protagonists are on average stoics, often seen as projections of his own character, where men who must show a grace under pressure persona. Heading into the 21st century, many of Hemingway's works are now considered classics in the canon of American literature. His influence of style has been so widespread that it can be glimpsed in most contemporary fiction, as writers draw inspiration either from Hemingway himself or indirectly through writers who more consciously emulated Hemingway's style. In his own time, Hemingway affected writers within his modernist literary circle.
A Soldier's Home tells the story of a soldier's return from World War I and how he is mentally scarred by his experiences. The story explores the effect of the war on Harold Krebs and his apparent numbness to the world around him. A Soldier's Home is not only a commentary on the horrible aspects of war and the human psyche, but also a commentary on society's attitudes towards war. This is shown through the actions of the other characters in relation to Krebs, and their efforts to change him. The sacrifice that Krebs made for his country is never appreciated during the story. After the war, there was a celebration and immediately afterwards the soldiers were expected to rejoin society and be productive members, essentially denying that the event even happened. Krebs is thrust back into his capitalist society, where the atrocities of the war are never questioned or reviled. The war has removed any semblance of humanity from Krebs, who can not relate to anyone, even his own mother who's not interested in his sacrifice. Krebs deals with his sister abstractly, but is appreciative of her innocence as a young child. Krebs sees himself as a unit, a soldier, and can not re-attain his feelings. His speech is void of description, and refers to himself as one does in the army, by his last name. This makes Soldier's Home not only a commentary on how war can dehumanize the human mind, but also an exploration of how society reacts to this new mind in an industrialist manner.
Real success came to this writer after he had published his first novel "The Sun Also Rises" (or "Fiesta").The novel is a powerful insight into the lives and values of the "Lost Generation", chronicling the experiences of Jake Barnes and several acquaintances on their pilgrimage to Pamplona for the annual fiesta and bull fights. Barnes suffered an injury during World War I which makes him unable to consummate a sexual relationship with Brett Ashley. The story follows Jake and his various companions across France and Spain. Initially, Jake seeks peace away from Brett by taking a fishing trip to Burguete, deep within the Spanish hills, with companion Bill Gorton, another veteran of the war. The fiesta in Pamplona is the setting for the eventual meeting of all the characters, who play out their various desires and anxieties, alongside a great deal of drinking.
William Faulkner (1897-1962)
Born to an old southern family, William Harrison Faulkner was raised in Oxford, Mississippi, where he lived most of his life. Faulkner created an entire imaginative landscape, Yoknapatawpha County, mentioned in numerous novels, along with several families with interconnections extending back for generations. Yoknapatawpha County, with its capital, "Jefferson," is closely modeled on Oxford, Mississippi, and its surroundings. Faulkner re-creates the history of the land and the various races -- Indian, African-American, Euro-American, and various mixtures -- who have lived on it. An innovative writer, Faulkner experimented brilliantly with narrative chronology, different points of view and voices (including those of outcasts, children, and illiterates), and a rich and demanding baroque style built of extremely long sentences full of complicated subordinate parts.
The novel The Sound and the Fury takes place in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County and is split into four sections. The first is from the viewpoint of Benjy Compson, a thirty-three year old man with mental retardation. The second segment is from the point of view of Quentin Compson, the Harvard-educated student who commits suicide after a series of events involving his sister Caddy. The third is from the point of view of their cynical, embittered brother, Jason, and the fourth is from a third person limited narrative point-of-view focused on Dilsey, the Compson family's black servant, and her unbiased point of view, which allows the reader to make his or her own assumptions from the actions of the other characters. The story overall summarizes the lives of people in the Compson family that has by now fallen into ruin. Many passages are written in a stream of consciousness. This novel is a classic example of the unreliable narrator technique.
The best of Faulkner's novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), two modernist works experimenting with viewpoint and voice to probe southern families under the stress of losing a family member; Light in August (1932), about complex and violent relations between a white woman and a black man; and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), perhaps his finest, about the rise of a self-made plantation owner and his tragic fall through racial prejudice and a failure to love.
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