Love Affair: F. Scott Fitzgerald

This is the first entry of the 'Love Affair' series I intend to write about some great people (and their works) I really, really admire. I personally think that if you love reading novels, you ought to love books written by certain author(s). I haven't read much and I've never been a student of English Literature, but I love classics - something that I actually put an effort to read. My first encounter with a Fitzgerald's work happened 3 years ago when I stumbled upon my sister's copy of The Great Gatsby. It's Fitzgerald's shortest completed novel. I couldn't put it down and finished reading it that night. My next encounter didn't happen till earlier this summer. I decided to read all Fitzgerald's novels chronologically, from This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night to The Love of the Last Tycoon. Apart from his last (incomplete) novel, all his novels are semi-autobiographical. They're very much about his life; his problems with his glamourous wife, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald; the society he was living in; and so on. 

I couldn't help falling in love with his descriptive style of writing and complexity of his characters. Events are often described in elegantly flowing prose. In my opinion, most of his characters are often lost, they aren't fully aware with what they want - an aspect I can totally relate to. Besides, they are very accessible to girls. Unlike his contemporary authors at the time (e.g. Ernest Hemingway), his works are very personal and often, they're not of any political nature (considering they were mostly written during an interwar period). In a way, I find this characteristic of his works very real and it is interesting to see that people in the past experienced the same kind of personal problems we're facing now. If you look at the quote below, you'll see that he was writing about how he felt close to the characters he wrote (Amory Blaine from This Side of Paradise; Anthony Patch from The Beautiful and Damned; Jay Gatsby from The Great Gatsby; Dick Divers from Tender is the Night). This Side of Paradise has references of his university years at Princeton, while The Beautiful and Damned and Tender is the Night show his real-life relationship problems with Zelda.

"Books are like brothers. I am an only child. Gatsby my imaginary brother, Amory my younger, Anthony my worry. Dick my comparatively good brother but all of them far from home." - F. Scott Fitzgerald  in  The Crack-Up.

Another aspect I particularly learn a lot about his works is the living style of the wealthy society in early 1900s. It is fascinating to know more about "The Jazz Age", "The Lost Generation", "The Roaring 20s", and so on - for example, many Americans went to Europe during the Prohibition period. It is a shame that most of the film adaptations of his works ended up not receiving positive reviews. Perhaps the complex characters of his novels are not very filmable. 

I received my copy of Collected Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald from Amazon.co.uk today. Not only has it contained the four completed and one incomplete novels, it also has 24 short stories at the end of the book - a very good buy if you just wanna read for fun or mark the books. It's definitely a thick book, which consists of 1,456 pages. When I get the time to, I'll write some reviews of his four novels that I dearly love :).