Prohibition Impact American Authors F. Scott Fitzgerald Ernest Hemingway
Prohibition and the roaring 20s:
The novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemmingway
The consumption of alcohol defines the works of both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. The quintessential Fitzgerald heroine is the flapper -- the short-haired, carefree, hard-drinking heroine of works such as Tender is the Night and the Great Gatsby. The iconic 'Hemingway man' of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms was a hard-drinking man. It is deeply ironic that both authors came of age as writers during the era of Prohibition and published their most famous novels when drinking was technically illegal in the United States. ('Technically' illegal, despite the fact that the law was widely ignored). However, this is no coincidence -- just as must as The Great War, Prohibition showed the corrupt nature of modern society in the view of these authors, hence its centrality in their works.
This fact is perhaps most explicitly illustrated in the Fitzgerald novel The Great Gatsby. In Fitzgerald's most famous work, the titular hero has made vast sums of money as a bootlegger, after distinguishing himself fighting in World War I. Everyone knows he has done this and it is illegal, yet it is only tacitly referenced by society and people prefer to look the other way. Gatsby himself creates a false persona of a man who has gone to Oxford, even going so far as to order his shirts from abroad to create an image of someone who is a 'man about town.' "I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition" (Fitzgerald, Chapter 4). Yet it is a lie: part of the project of self-improvement he began many years ago back in the Midwest when he was growing up poor.
People go to Gatsby's parties but they disdain him on a personal level because they know he is not 'old money' and his gains are ill-gotten. They enjoy the fruits of his labor in the form of alcohol. "He's a bootlegger,' said the young ladies, moving somewhere between his cocktails...
Scott Fitzgerald and the Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald, born on the 24th of Sept 1896, was one of the greatest writers, who was well-known for being a writer of his own time. He lived in a room covered with clocks and calendars while the years ticket away his own career followed the pattern of the nation with his first fiction blooming in 1920s. "His fictions did more then report on
William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Doris Lessing An author's writing style is like a voice or a fingerprint: unique to that individual and impossible to replicate. There is no such thing as a "better" or a "worse" writing style, although it is possible to prefer one writing style over another, just as one might prefer blue eyes over brown, or soft melodious voices over rough, gravelly-sounding ones. Three great
doubt F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote one of the most captivating novels about the American Dream and the decaying American mentality when he penned the Great Gatsby. Julie Evans points out how the author seems to have become a victim of this kind of mentality with his work and his life, dying a "broken alcoholic" (Evans). Nevertheless, Fitzgerald should be remembered not for how he died but what he wrote
Winter Dreams" of F. Scott Fitzgerald and "Flowering Judas of Katherine Anne Porter" Cool. Dispassionate. Masters of the art of literary artifice, lies, and characters who wear masks rather than their true selves. Although one author deploys an almost newspaper-like dispassionate style, and the other is more poetic in her use of the language, both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Katherine Anne Porter have been called by these appellations because of
Benjamin Button F. Scott Fitzgerald is commonly thought of as one the 20th century's greatest writers and is best known for his reflections on the society of the 1920's; named the "Jazz Age" by Fitzgerald himself. But one of his short stories, published in Colliers magazine in 1922 was a purely fictional account of a remarkable man named Benjamin Button. In his The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Fitzgerald examines a
Gatsby had built up this incredible illusion of what Daisy really was, and had gone off the deep end in throwing himself after her. Weinstein (p. 25) quotes from pages 102-103 of the novel: "There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams -- not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion." It is typical of Fitzgerald to
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