For many, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald are legendary and romantic figures. They epitomize the so-called Jazz Age, which more or less ended ubruptly on "Black Tuesday", October 29, 1929 when the Dow Jones plunged and so, too, did many a man's fortune--16 million shares of stock were sold by panicking investors who had lost faith in the American economy. At the height of the Depression in 1933, 25% of the Nation's total work force, 12,830,000 people, were unemployed. Wage income for workers who were lucky enough to have kept their jobs fell 42.5% between 1929 and 1933. It was the worst economic disaster in American history. People starved.
Fitzgerald's fiction offers us a picture of the generation whose way and philosophy of life both helped to provoke this political and economic disaster and whose way of life was lost in the wake of it. However, as Brian Way long ago noted, "The evolution of the legend has helped make Fitzgerald a cult figure, but it has harmed his reputation as an artist and made it more difficult to discuss his work sensibly."
This course is designed
to discuss his work sensibly--i.e. critically, intelligently and with passion
and in a historical context. Fitzgerald may have attained a cult status,
but he was also a dedicated, meticulous and questioning craftsman, a social
writer who saw the individual as a condensed expression of the collective
social, political, cultural and economic forces that gave rise to that
individual's dreams, desires and despairs.
As a social writer, Scott had the ability of an "instrument of precision," even as he sought to understand on the page that most imprecise of instruments, the human heart. His narratives function as highly composed word-images that flip into a moving picture of how Americans changed themselves and their social, cultural and political lives in the span of one generation.
All titles will
be available at Wild Iris Books, 802 W. University Ave.
375-7477. Supplemental
readings will be provided by instructor.