Stranger on Earth

Writing about F. Scott Fitzgerald or any of his works apart from the immortal The Great Gatsby is often a challenge. The writer is after all the very definition of the Jazz Age, and it is difficult to resist reading the man himself into what he wrote. His biographers have, with varying degrees of conviction, traced characteristics of the man back to his fictional characters. Then there is the mammoth that is The Great Gatsby , which overshadows everything he wrote before and after it. He is often referred to by his detractors as a writer who never quite brought his talent to full fruition, his life wrecked by marital strife, alcoholism, penury, and a deeply entrenched sense of self-doubt. How should the reader then approach his final, uncompleted work ( The Love of) The Last Tycoon ? Read it bearing in mind that the man who wrote it was not the same youthful Dionysus who vacationed in Paris and gave the world The Great Gatsby. It was written by a man having been to the dark side ...

It may be superfluous to stipulate that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut This Side of Paradise (1920) is still remarkably relevant to our times, but a valid idea bears repeating, and those who have enjoyed and witnessed Fitzgerald’s literary finesse in this challenging first work would most certainly not mind being reminded of exactly why this novel, published almost a century ago now, still reflects our youths today. This Side of Paradise (a phrase derived from Rupert Brooke’s poem “Tiare Tahiti”) concerns Amory Blaine, a Princetonian convinced of his own intellectual brilliance (“Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory…” [19]), but never quite finding his niche, stumbling from one love affair to another, perennially wondering what life has in store for an exceptional mind like his. During the course of the novel, he removes himself from the highly regulated world of his mother’s, seeks knowledge in literary classics, makes fair-weather ...