A Presentation by Robin Lee to U3A: Overberg

Monday 16 August 2021 at 10.00

Few novelists have their description of the period they lived in accepted as the name for the whole age. But in 1922, F Scott Fitzgerald published a book of short stories entitled “Tales of the Jazz Age”, and the name stuck as a description of the decade of the 1920s, in the USA at least.

Fitzgerald’s relatively short life of 44 years is tragic in several ways and gives us much insight into the typical lives of many other artists of the first half of the 20th century. Some of the elements I will discuss are: struggles for acceptance of early artistic productions; using their own life experiences as the material for their art; personal notoriety of various kinds as modern media came to investigate, portray and record the life of the artist; professional scrutiny of mental health problems associated with artistic creativity, as modern medicine came to discover the genetic and other origins of what was before seen as ‘artistic lifestyle’; fame coming late in life or, often, after death.

Vincent van Gogh and Sylia Plath are prime examples of these trends, but Fitzgerald shares some aspects as well.

The presentation will cover the following aspects of Fitzgerald’s life and times:

• The novelist’s life in some detail, explaining the relative lack of success of his work

• The historical significance of the ‘jazz age’ or the ‘roaring twenties

• Diagnosis of hyperglycaemia as an explanation of the novelist’s career

• The massive popularity of The Great Gatsby in the second half of the twentieth century and in the present ( Approximately 300 million copies of The Great Gatsby have been sold and it still sells more than 500 000 copies every year).

The presentation contains many photographs from the period 1900 to 1950, educational videos, and films based on the novels, especially The Great Gatsby.