I’ll bet there has been a previous thread on this subject, but I’m lazy, so I’m just gonna ask…
I’ve never read a word of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Where should I start? If I only read one book of his in my life, which one should it be?
(And…is the answer to these two questions the same, or different?)
Thanks!
(Still grinning at Dave Sim, in “Cerebus the Aardvark,” caricaturing “F. Stop Fitzgerald.”)
The Great Gatsby
I am going to assume that Gatsby is to obvious for you? Pick up a short story collection. Fitzgerald was an amazing short story writer. “Babylon Revisited” is my favorite of his shorts, get a collection that has that in it.
This collection looks good and has 23 of his stories.
“The Great Gatsby”, of course…from there you might pick up “The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald”.
As with most books, page 1 is the best place to start. Remember to hold the book right side up and read left to right.
And if you’re only going to read one book by Fitzgerald, it should be The Great Gatsby.
Don’t.
(Sorry. Bitter memories from high school.)
Start with a good stiff drink.
Say that you are someone who didn’t particularly care for* The Great Gatsby, thinking it was too hamhanded with its symbolism. What work by Fitzgerald, if any, is least like The Great Gatsby?
*I used to hate it in high school, but I can at least see some charm in it now, even if I still completely do not identify with any of it. The American Dream for me has nothing to do with class struggle for me. Good literary work,. but not for me. Before I thought it was just bad literature.
I won’t say it’s too obvious… I just didn’t know if it was “introductory.” For all I know, TGG might have been the second or third book in a series, and I’d have been confused by starting in the middle that way! I’m seriously ignorant here, and am VERY thankful for everyone’s advice. Even Johnny L.A.'s! (Sorry, but I’m committed. A academic friend of mine is about to publish a book of Fitzgerald scholarship, and I don’t want to read it in a state of total ignorance.)
I’ll follow your advice and read both TGG and the collection you linked.
Thanks again, everyone! I’ll come back and say what I thought!
ETA: just looked on Amazon, and they have a Kindle deal of 5 novels and 40 stories for $0.99. Gonna grab that!
TGG, if nothing else, has prose as carefully thought out as a Shakespeare Sonnet. It is something beautiful to read and speak. That said, the story leaves me feeling empty. Which I suppose is the point.
I hope you enjoy The Great Gatsby. It had been built up a bit too much in my opinion as “the greatest American novel ever written” but it is very good. The prose is just beautiful. The story itself is basically a melodrama soap opera. I read it voluntarily as an adult so take my opinion for what it’s worth. I wouldn’t say it’s a must read, but if you’re going to read only one thing from him, Gatsby is it.
ETA: haha! ninja’d. One of the reasons I’ve never been interested in any of the Gatsby movies is that the underlying story is just kind of meh and strains credulity. But the prose is amazing. I agree it’s as good as any Shakespeare. And the prose is impossible to translate over to film.
The Great Gatsby is more of a novella than a novel, clocking in at ~50,000 words or so, so it a decent place to start.
He used his short stories to work out characters and themes that went into his novels. His editor, Maxwell Perkins, then would gather up the short stories into a collection. Of the “Gatsby Cluster” of stories, Winter Dreams is the one that shows a lot of Gatsby work. It doesn’t spoil the novel, but it a wonderful shorter way to get a feel for how FSF wraps his brain around American dreams.
I should elaborate.
I went to a ‘progressive’ high school. The English classes were themed. For example, I was in one that was a whole semester on Poe. (And the teacher was smokin’ hot. 
) I wanted to get into the Science Fiction English class. The school wanted to make sure that classes were allotted in a fair manner, and they decided the fairest way of doing it was for students to register alphabetically. Being at the wrong end of the alphabet, I did not get into Science Fiction. (My best fiend, whose surname started with ‘L’ was the last one to get in.) Instead I was assigned to Roaring '20s English. I had zero interest in that era, and I found The Great Gatsby boring. It may have been because I really didn’t want to be there. The Roaring '20s was quite some time before Bradbury and Heinlein and Asimov. Nevertheless, I got an ‘A’ in the class.
Another semester (I don’t recall whether it was before, or after, the Roaring '20s fiasco) I was in an English class focusing on speculative fiction. Good reading in that one. Only, there was The Teacher That Nobody Liked; and her class was practically empty. So they pulled students from other English classes to fill up hers. To be ‘fair’, the last students to register for their classes would be the first ones pulled to fill up TTTNL’s class. And with registration being done alphabetically and by surname being toward the end, I was plucked from the very interesting class I wanted, and put into this other one. The good news is that we read Alas, Babylon!, which is speculative fiction; so I actually enjoyed that one. Got an ‘A’ in it, too.
Anyway, having to read F. Scott Fitzgerald when I wanted to read Harlan Ellison put me off Fitzgerald for life.
If you can lay your hands on a copy of Hemingway’s “A Movable Feast,” you might want to skim the chapters about Fitzgerald. I’ve never thought about him the same way since reading that book. Hem really makes him out to be a drunk. And when *Hemingway *thinks you drink too much, you *know *you drink too much!
It’s a classic effect: who can know how many high school students have been poisoned to Shakespeare by being made to read Shakespeare? When something becomes an assignment, it stops being fun! So, sure, total sympathy here. I’m just happy to be at a stage in my life when I can start to explore literature to which I had been blind. In a way, this is an assignment…but it’s one I’m assigning myself!
I’ll do this! I’ve only read one Hemingway – “The Old Man and the Sea” – and hated it. But, as above, it was a school assignment. But, also, the futility of the story alienated me. I was too young to appreciate that kind of irony.
Or the biography of Zelda called Zelda. F. Scott had issues. Zelda had issues. They could have started a magazine.
Since no one has suggested it, I’m going to insist that you start with The Great Gatsby.
Start with Scotch, progress to vodka.
Thank you for mentioning this. I have never read any FSF either and I just bought this for my iPhone Kindle.
Silly personal trivia: whenever I hear/see Fitzgerald’s name now, I visualize Tom Hiddleston, who played him in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, whereas when I hear/see Tom Hiddleston’s name, I visualize Loki, from Thor/Avengers. F. Loki Fitzgerald.
For a Fitzgerald neophyte, I think “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” is a decent place to start. It explores some of the same class/social division issues that Gatsby does (kind, honest Bernice; snooty Marjorie), but a format that’s compact enough to give you a sense of whether you want to delve deeper into Fitzgerald.
Time is important in Fitzgerald’s novels. (OK, I haven’t gotten to The Beautiful and Damned or The Last Tycoon, but anyway.) The other three are all set in specific years, even down to the specific month during various passages. Keep track of the time when reading This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby or Tender is the Night. This is especially important for the latter, because it starts in 1925, flashes back, and then returns to the late 1920s.
Actually, I’d rate Tender as a slightly better novel than Gatsby, but I wouldn’t recommend reading it first. Gatsby stands out as a novel written by a relatively young man who’s able to critique his generation as an insider and outsider simultaneously. Tender is more personal and indeed autobiographical.
This Side of Paradise isn’t the strong work that the two aforementioned novels are, but it’s worth reading if you find that you like Fitzgerald. He was just beginning to shape the critiques that would form some of Gatsby’s basis.
Knowing the pop-culture references that Fitzgerald makes can be challenging unless you have a strong interest in the movies of music of the era. In Gatsby and Tender, you’ll find references to Gilda Gray, “Ain’t We Got Fun”, “Three o’ Clock in the Morning”, Norma Talmadge, and “The Wedding of the Painted Doll”. Find an edition annotated by Matthew Bruccoli to make sense of some of these, as well as to get historical insight that can help one understand the events of the novels.