age consciousness, and the rise of American youth culture 28 kirk curnutt The question of vocation in This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned 48 james l. w. west iii The short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald 57 bryant mangum The Great Gatsby and the twenties 79 ronald berman Tender is the Night and American history 95 milton r. stern Fitzgerald's expatriate years and the European stories 118 j. gerald kennedy Women in Fitzgerald's fiction 143 rena sanderson ix contents 9 Fitzgerald's nonfiction scott donaldson 10 Fitzgerald and Hollywood alan margolies 11 The critical reputation of F. Scott Fitzgerald
The seventy-one song titles (see chart below) and innumerable lyrics that sprinkle his works indicate the extent of F. Scott Fitzgerald's reliance upon popular music as a source of his art. Contemporaneous descriptions of him as “laureate of the Jazz Age” need not be considered derisive; Fitzgerald was thoroughly in touch with his culture, was aware of the meaning of his sources, and was a keen analyst of the effects of popular culture on American lives. Cecilia Brady, in The Last Tycoon, admits “some of my more romantic ideas actually stemmed from pictures—42nd Street, for example, had a great influence on me. It's more than possible that some of the pictures which Stahr himself conceived had shaped me into what I was.” Fitzgerald was shaped by movies, by musical comedies, and not least by popular music. Other writers of our century were influenced in the same way, but it was Fitzgerald who acknowledged his debt to popular culture, who used it with meticulous care, and who evaluated seriously its impact, for better or worse, on the American scene.
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