菲茨杰拉德 美国文学教学教案.docVIP

F. Scott. Fitzgerald 1896?940
American short-story writer and novelist, known for his depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s). With the glamorous Zelda Sayre (1900-48), Fitzgerald lived a colorful life of parties and money-spending. At the beginning of one of his stories Fitzgerald wrote the rich are different from you and me. This privileged world he depicted in such novels as THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED (1922) and THE GREAT GATSBY (1925), which is widely considered Fitzgeralds finest novel. It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers - because if you ask a writer anything, you usually get an answer - still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers arent people exactly. Or, if theyre any good, theyre a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. Its like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying - only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers. (from The Last Tycoon, 1941) F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in St Paul, Minnesota of mixed Southern and Irish descent. He was given three names after the writer of The Star Spangled Banner, to whom he was distantly related. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was a salesman, a Southern gentleman, whose furniture business had failed. Mary McQuillan, his mother, was the daughter of a successful wholesale grocer, and devoted to her only son. The family moved regularly, but settled finally in 1918 in St. Paul. At the age of 18 Fitzgerald fell in love with the 16-year-old Ginevra King, the prototype of Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald started to write at St. Paul Academy. His first published story, The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage appeared in 1909 in Now and Then. Fitzgerald entered in 1913 Princeton University, where he failed to become a football hero. He left his studies in 1917 because of his poor academic records, and took up a commission in the US Army. His experiences during World War I were more peaceful than Hemingways - he never saw