F. Scott Fitzgerald was a writer very much of his own time. As Malcolm Cowley once put it, he lived in a room full of clocks and calendars. The years ticked away while he noted the songs, the shows, the books, the quarterbacks. His own career followed the pattern of the nation, booming in the early 1920s and skidding into near oblivion during the depths of the Depression. Yet his fiction did more than merely report on his times, or on himself as a prototypical representative, for Fitzgerald had the gift of double vision. Like Walt Whitman or his own Nick Carraway, he was simultaneously within and without, at once immersed in his times and able to view them--and himself--with striking objectivity. This rare ability, along with his rhetorical brilliance, has established Fitzgerald as one of the major novelists and story writers of the twentieth century.

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