My Journey with F. Scott Fitzgerald

When I was accepted to graduate school in 1989 and assigned an editorial assistantship with Matthew J. Bruccoli, the world’s leading Fitzgerald scholar, my first reaction, I must confess, was a bit of dismay. I didn’t like Fitzgerald . . . or so I thought.

(A few years later I realized I must have had him mixed up with Hemingway in my memory. I have learned to appreciate Hemingway’s literary genius . . . but I still don’t particularly care for his material and not at all for the man himself.)

Over the summer before my first year in grad school, I read all of Fitzgerald’s novels and a collection of his stories. I’m not sure at what point it dawned on me that I did like Fitzgerald. But it didn’t take long to recognize the sheer brilliance of his writing.

Here are a few of the things that attract me most about Fitzgerald’s work:

— his expertise as a social historian—his ability to make you understand exactly what it was like in a particular time and place

— the warmth of his authorial voice (Despite his usual classification as a modernist, Fitzgerald was at heart an old-fashioned storyteller.)

—most of all, the beauty of his style, the rhythm of his sentences (In his later years, when he hit a writing roadblock, he would have his secretary read the King James Bible aloud to him for cadence.)

If you write fiction, or even if you are concerned about style and voice in your nonfiction, you would do well to study how Fitzgerald did what he did.