Fiction, Film, and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Description

Reconsiderations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most enduring novel The Great Gatsby and his final unfinished work The Last Tycoon are the focus of this course. Published in 1925, Gatsby has been viewed as  a definitive depiction of America’s hectic and hedonistic Jazz Age. But is this a distortion of Fitzgerald’s compact but complex novel? Is it possible for today’s readers to strip this away? And is it then possible to appreciate Fitzgerald’s high aspirations for Gatsby: “I want to write something new… something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.” Did he succeed? His style is always graceful and vivid, yet the story is slight: the wealthy bootlegger Jay Gatsby reinvents himself to win back his lost love, Daisy Buchanan. The tragic consequences of this entanglement are observed by the narrator Nick Caraway, whose thoughtful observations subtly suggest an unease about American values. Is this unease still pertinent today?

After the 1929 Crash and the onset of the Depression, Fitzgerald, the Jazz Age chronicler, became irrelevant. The popularity of his short stories in high-paying magazines kept him afloat financially and may possibly have assuaged his diminished celebrity. In the late 1930s, Fitzgerald headed to Hollywood in the hope of a script writing career. This disillusioning  experience is captured in the satirical Pat Hobby Stories. But Hollywood did give Fitzgerald  “something new”: the will to create The Last Tycoon, a suspenseful story of love, money, and intrigue in the fabled film world. Left unfinished when Fitzgerald died in 1940, Tycoon was reconstructed by Fitzgerald’s friend the critic Edmund Wilson for publication the following year. This remained the only version until the mid-1990s when the literary scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli issued his award-winning  reconstruction, which will be assigned for reading. Some critics claim that, once completed, The Last Tycoon might have been Fitzgerald’s finest work. This raises a key question: Is this plausible?

The following film adaptations will be shown in class: The Great Gatsby (Jack Clayton, Frances Ford Coppola) and The Last Tycoon (Elia Kazan, Harold Pinter).

Required texts:

• * The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (any edition)
• * The Love of the Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Michael J. Bruccoli version)

Participants must obtain a copy of the required texts at the bookstore or library of their choice.

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