If one is to understand America in the evolution it’s in now, the iteration of which will remain until America is destroyed or evolves once again, you’ll read “The Great Gatsby.” New York is a microcosm for the health and psyche of the nation, and the author of America’s magnum opus is a man who places his soul into its titular character.
Fitzgerald wrote in a time of the American identity crisis masked with glitz and glam that was known as the Jazz Age.
Aristocratic families fell out of fashion in the rise of the chaotic nouveau riche Broadway, Hollywood, and niche subsections of the industrialist class.
Christianity was under attack by the spirit of shellshock from WW1, questioning Christian monarchy and its moral framework let alone its eternal truth. Bilphism, occultism, and Nietzscheanism all crept into the gaps where Christianity once dwelled including the corners of Fitzgerald’s rare, gorgeous mind.
American was questioning hierarchy, as European hierarchy was outperformed overseas by raw, American zeal.
The question of how high America could climb and how hard it could fall was answered in the work of Fitzgerald, a man of the highest highs and lowest lows.
Fitzgerald first started writing and gaining popularity for and from Ivy League men who fell enamored with the black hole hearts of flapper women in his novels “This Side of Paradise,” a novel that began the movement that was literary Modernism, “The Beautiful & Damned,” and his short stories known as the “Tales of the Jazz Age.”
But he sacrificed his career and popularity to depart from this subject matter to write a or THE Great American novel. He wound up succeeding in this endeavor, but only posthumously. And like his titular character, he fell into a downward spiral by the hand of alcoholism learned form his father and a femme fatale wife who spun into insanity causing his career to become one of financial survival in short stories opposed to fully-realized genius in novels.
Despite this handicap, he became our great nation’s greatest writer.
The Blood & Rain Podcast
Episode 93:
“An Intro to F. Scott Fitzgerald”
