The first half of the XNUMXth century saw a real boom of good writers in the United States. In those days, between the two great wars and with the Great Depression in between, it is worth wondering if it could not be that adverse circumstances are the ones that end up generating writers who witness the evolution of life.
Adversity must necessarily be purged, sublimated. Literature is an emotional and intellectual placebo to overcome bad times ... The lost generation of Hemingway, faulkner, Steinbeck and the own Francis Scott Fitzgerald, whom I bring up to this space today, perhaps they owe a lot to what they had to live.
If not for the critical times, if not for the monstrosities experienced and the famine ... or put another way, having been a happy world ... what need would there be to tell? Many of those authors of the lost generation hid, they hid in a bohemian lifestyle, but when they wrote they had no choice but to swallow bile and narrate their shared regrets with all of society.
Francis Scott Fitzgeral felt the same urgent need as others of his contemporaries and wrote. And within the misfortune of the warlike and critical years of the twentieth century, that decision is welcome because some of the most brilliant stories came out of his hands ..., although experimentation with literature forced an early end of his life at 44 years of age.
3 Recommended Novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald
On this side of paradise
The paradise of the 20s in the United States was a shadow, a carnival, a hypocritical display that was erected over a world in a continuous latent conflict, which confronted them with other countries but also between their own social classes.
The evasion of the upper classes and the burgeoning bourgeoisie concealed in this scene of chicha calm. Everything that happens in this novel is a true reflection of what the author himself saw in his sunny lifestyle.
The unscrupulousness of some and the nihilism of the few who harbored some conscience. The crash of 1929 was the bitter awakening to that state of social hibernation announced by this novel.
The Great Gatsby
The winner of the author's time was the one who knew how to deal with the law and morality so that he strengthened ties with the mafias and served as a platform for corruption to enter politics.
Never a present of debauchery and lack of control was so pressing as the one that America experienced in the mid-twentieth century. Jay Gatsby is the protagonist of the novel, a true gentleman of appearances and the perfect host for any party. F. Scott Fitzgeral uses it to introduce us to the unstitched of the society of those years.
All laws were evaded by the mafias, the repression only served to silence the people in the last resort. Discontent was palpable in the streets, while jazz continued to enliven unreal life in the salons on duty.
Beautiful and cursed
In a way Scott Fitzgerald was a privileged observer, a charismatic writer who illuminated every social gathering.
But while participating in the party, Scott watched, dissected that reality. And it is that the soul of the author was contradictory, he enjoyed but recognized the falsehood. Perhaps a part of him wishes he had acted more consistently.
If his books were a denunciation of the general masquerade, why continue with the game? Hedonist and son of the times, in novels like this one finally dealt with representing lost youth, without horizons, without a future time foreseen beyond the next instant.
Una generation of Dorian Gray replicas that they did not expect to encounter the worst of his reflexes. A great novel about nihilism that can accompany bad times ..., something similar to today.
