F. Scott Fitzgerald: influences, peers and legacy

Every connection with its receipt

F. Scott Fitzgerald turned the boom and hangover of the 1920s into prose, coining "the Jazz Age" while borrowing structure from Conrad, cadence from Keats, and the campus novel from Edwardian England. This mix traces the Princeton reading lists, the St. Paul roots, the Scribner's editorial machine, and the mid-century novelists who inherited his ache for lost glamour.

The Kynda mix for F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Key Influence · The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' by Joseph Conrad (1897). Fitzgerald repeatedly credited Conrad's preface — the vow to make the reader see — as the aesthetic creed behind The Great Gatsby. He adopted Conrad's device of the limited, implicated narrator, giving Nick Carraway the same role Marlow plays: an observer whose moral unease shapes the tale. Fitzgerald also borrowed Conrad's chronological scrambling, withholding Gatsby's origins until the novel's structure demands them.
• Influencia Obscura · Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie (1913). Mackenzie's two-volume chronicle of an English boy's schooling and disillusion was the direct model for This Side of Paradise: Fitzgerald transplanted its episodic coming-of-age scaffolding, its poetry-strewn interludes and its aesthete hero to Princeton. Critics of the 1920 debut noticed the debt immediately, and Fitzgerald later conceded his enthusiasm for Mackenzie had cooled — a sign of how formative the borrowing had been.
• Local Roots · Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (1920). Published weeks apart from This Side of Paradise, Lewis's satire of Gopher Prairie came out of the same Minnesota that Fitzgerald fled and kept returning to; both men mined the provincial Midwest from which the Upper Midwest's new money rose. Fitzgerald's St. Paul stories and Nick Carraway's return to "the middle west" share Lewis's ambivalence toward the small town as both moral ballast and suffocation.
• Beyond the Medium · The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler (1918). Fitzgerald described himself as having absorbed Spengler's cyclical pessimism and claimed it colored his view of a civilization exhausting itself in luxury. The conviction that the West had entered a late, moneyed, culturally spent phase runs through Tender Is the Night, where expatriate Americans consume Europe, and through the valley of ashes that shadows Gatsby's parties — history as decay rather than progress.
• Peer · The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926). Fitzgerald met Hemingway in Paris in 1925, championed him to Scribner's editor Max Perkins, and gave detailed notes on this manuscript urging that the opening chapters be cut — advice Hemingway largely took. Their long, souring friendship produced the era's sharpest contrast: expatriate disillusion rendered in Hemingway's stripped declaratives against Fitzgerald's lyric accumulation, two answers to the same lost generation.
• From the Canon · Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934). Nine years and seventeen drafts after Gatsby, this Riviera novel of a psychiatrist consumed by his wealthy patient-wife is the book that explains the career's second half: Zelda's breakdowns, the sanatoriums, the expatriate drift, the slow transfer of vitality from husband to wife. It sold poorly in 1934 and Fitzgerald kept rearranging its chronology afterward, convinced the structure had betrayed his best material.
• Key Collaborator · Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe (1929). Maxwell Perkins was the Scribner's editor who gambled on Fitzgerald's debut, suggested the narrative reordering of Gatsby and the title change, lent him money for years and stood by him through the Hollywood decline. Wolfe's debut, cut to publishable shape by the same hand, shows Perkins's editorial craft at full stretch — and Fitzgerald and Wolfe argued in letters, refereed by Perkins, over how much a novel should contain.
• Legacy · The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (1951). Salinger was an avowed Fitzgerald admirer who collected his work and whose narrator Holden Caulfield name-drops the prep-school world Fitzgerald mapped; the confiding first-person voice, mourning a lost purity amid phoniness, descends directly from Nick Carraway. Salinger's early Esquire-and-New Yorker story apprenticeship followed the same commercial-magazine route Fitzgerald had used two decades earlier.

What influenced F. Scott Fitzgerald

• George Gershwin. Quennell compared the novel's mood to Gershwin's music. (via The Great Gatsby) “Titled The Jazz History of the World , an apparent allusion to Rhapsody in Blue , it began, as Nick hears it, “with a weird, spinning sound,”” (Town Topics)
• Zelda Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald used Zelda's remarks for Daisy Buchanan's dialogue. (via The Great Gatsby, Save Me the Waltz) “Fitzgerald later used some of her rambling almost verbatim for Daisy Buchanan's dialogue in The Great Gatsby .” (Wikipedia)
• Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie (1913). Sinister Street (Compton Mackenzie) — ghost for F. Scott Fitzgerald “Wells' 1909 work Tono-Bungay and Sir Compton Mackenzie's 1913 novel Sinister Street, which chronicled a young college student's coming-of-age at Oxford University.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' by Joseph Conrad (1897). The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (Joseph Conrad) — titan for F. Scott Fitzgerald “To this end, he consciously emulated the literary styles of Joseph Conrad and Willa Cather.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Father Sigourney Fay. Fay encouraged Fitzgerald's development as a writer while he was a student. “In 1911, Fitzgerald's parents sent him to the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey . [ 19 ] At Newman, Father Sigourney Fay recognized his literary potential and encouraged him to become a writer.” (Wikipedia)
• Arthur Rimbaud. Fitzgerald names Rimbaud as a model for the artistic accomplishment he values. “I would as soon be as anonymous as Rimbaud if I could feel that I had accomplished that purpose.” (Wikipedia)
• Ginevra King. Ginevra King modeled Daisy Buchanan. (via The Great Gatsby) “She would become his literary model for the characters of Isabelle Borgé in This Side of Paradise , Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby , and many others.” (Wikipedia)
• Celestial Eyes. The article credits the novel's dust-jacket artwork with contributing to its later popularity. (via The Great Gatsby) “It would take decades for the novel to gain its present acclaim and popularity, thanks also to the popular dust-jacket art, named Celestial Eyes .” (Wikipedia)
• Max Gerlach. Details of Gerlach's behavior inspired elements of the novel. (via The Great Gatsby) “Flaunting his new wealth, Gerlach threw lavish parties, [ 134 ] never wore the same shirt twice, [ 135 ] used the phrase "old sport", [ 136 ] and fostered myths about himself, including that he was a relation of the German Kaiser . [ 137…” (Wikipedia)
• Satyricon by Petronius. The novel's initial title alluded to Satyricon. (via The Great Gatsby) “Initially titled Trimalchio —an allusion to the Latin work Satyricon —the plot followed the rise of a parvenu who seeks wealth to win the woman he loves.” (Wikipedia)
• Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats (1819). Ode to a Nightingale (John Keats) — culture for F. Scott Fitzgerald (openlibrary.org)
• Prejudices by H. L. Mencken (1919). Prejudices (H. L. Mencken) — culture for F. Scott Fitzgerald (openlibrary.org)
• The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler (1918). The Decline of the West (Oswald Spengler) — culture for F. Scott Fitzgerald (openlibrary.org)
• The End of a Chapter by Shane Leslie (1916). The End of a Chapter (Shane Leslie) — ghost for F. Scott Fitzgerald (openlibrary.org)
• Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900). Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser) — titan for F. Scott Fitzgerald (openlibrary.org)

Peers and kindred spirits

• Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald met and admired Hemingway in the expatriate community. (also via The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises) “Most notable among them was a then relatively unknown Ernest Hemingway , whom Fitzgerald first met in May 1925 and grew to admire.” (Wikipedia)
• Gertrude Stein. Fitzgerald and Stein are described as friends in the Paris expatriate community. “Dedicated attendees included Pablo Picasso , Ernest Hemingway , F. Scott Fitzgerald , Sinclair Lewis , Ezra Pound” (Wikipedia)
• Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe (1929). Look Homeward, Angel (Thomas Wolfe) — collaborator for F. Scott Fitzgerald “After a tremendous struggle, Perkins induced Wolfe to cut 90,000 words from his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929).” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Ezra Pound (1885). Fitzgerald and Pound are placed in the same Paris expatriate community. “During this period, he became friends with writer Gertrude Stein , bookseller Sylvia Beach , novelist James Joyce , poet Ezra Pound and other members of the American expatriate community in Paris,” (Wikipedia)
• Axel's Castle by Edmund Wilson (1931). Axel's Castle (Edmund Wilson) — geography for F. Scott Fitzgerald “He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926). The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway) — peer for F. Scott Fitzgerald “He frequented Europe during this period, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Lost Generation. The article places Fitzgerald among the Lost Generation's expatriate community. “He frequented Europe during this period, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the " Lost Generation " expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway .” (Wikipedia)
• James Joyce. Fitzgerald and Joyce are placed in the same Paris expatriate community. “During this period, he became friends with writer Gertrude Stein , bookseller Sylvia Beach , novelist James Joyce , poet Ezra Pound and other members of the American expatriate community in Paris,” (Wikipedia)
• Modernism. The infobox identifies Modernism as Fitzgerald's movement. “Writing career Period 1920–1940 Notable works This Side of Paradise (1920) The Great Gatsby (1925) Tender Is the Night (1934) Movement Modernism” (Wikipedia)
• Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Fitzgerald worked under a screenwriting contract with MGM. “Fitzgerald's dire financial straits compelled him to accept a lucrative contract as a screenwriter with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in 1937 that necessitated his relocation to Hollywood.” (Wikipedia)
• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920). The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton) — peer for F. Scott Fitzgerald “Eliot, and Edith Wharton praised Fitzgerald's work, and the novel received generally favorable reviews from contemporary literary critics.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• You Know Me Al by Ring Lardner (1916). You Know Me Al (Ring Lardner) — peer for F. Scott Fitzgerald “He met sports columnist Ring Lardner, journalist Rebecca West, cartoonist Rube Goldberg, actress Laurette Taylor, actor Lew Fields, comedian Ed Wynn, and many others.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Beloved Infidel by Sheilah Graham (1958). Beloved Infidel (Sheilah Graham) — collaborator for F. Scott Fitzgerald “While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Sylvia Beach. Fitzgerald and Beach are placed in the same Paris expatriate community. “During this period, he became friends with writer Gertrude Stein , bookseller Sylvia Beach , novelist James Joyce , poet Ezra Pound and other members of the American expatriate community in Paris,” (Wikipedia)
• Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (1920). Main Street (Sinclair Lewis) — geography for F. Scott Fitzgerald (openlibrary.org)
• Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald (1932). Save Me the Waltz (Zelda Fitzgerald) — collaborator for F. Scott Fitzgerald (openlibrary.org)
• Diary of a Freshman by Charles Macomb Flandrau (1901). Diary of a Freshman (Charles Macomb Flandrau) — geography for F. Scott Fitzgerald (openlibrary.org)

Who F. Scott Fitzgerald influenced

• Taylor Swift (1989). The article names Fitzgerald as a literary inspiration for Swift's fictional songwriting. (also via The Great Gatsby) “She imposed her emotions onto imagined characters and story arcs, inspired by authors and poets of romantic and modernist literature like F. Scott Fitzgerald , Robert Frost , William Wordsworth , and Emily Dickinson ;” (Wikipedia)
• Ralph Lauren (1939). The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) — culture for Ralph Lauren (via The Great Gatsby) “In 1974, he outfitted the male cast of the film The Great Gatsby in costumes from his Polo line” (Wikipedia)
• James L. Brooks (1940). Brooks names F. Scott Fitzgerald as a literary influence. “as well as writers Mark Twain , Paddy Chayefsky and F. Scott Fitzgerald” (Wikipedia)
• William Faulkner. The article compares Faulkner’s early work with Fitzgerald’s. “These and Faulkner's other early works resembled those of contemporaries such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald , at times nearly appropriating phrases.” (Wikipedia)
• Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (1961). Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates) — legacy for F. Scott Fitzgerald “Richard Yates, a writer often compared to Fitzgerald, hailed The Great Gatsby as showcasing Fitzgerald's miraculous talent and triumphal literary technique.” (en.wikipedia.org)
• Winter Dreams. Fitzgerald described the story as an early attempt at the idea developed in The Great Gatsby. (via The Great Gatsby) “Fitzgerald viewed his stories as worthless except for " Winter Dreams ", which he described as his first attempt at the Gatsby idea.” (Wikipedia)
• Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney (1984). Bright Lights, Big City (Jay McInerney) — legacy for F. Scott Fitzgerald (openlibrary.org)
• The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (1951). The Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger) — legacy for F. Scott Fitzgerald (openlibrary.org)
• Imagine Dragons (2008). The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) — culture for Imagine Dragons (via The Great Gatsby) (openlibrary.org)
• Vampire Weekend by Vampire Weekend. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) — culture for Vampire Weekend (via The Great Gatsby) (openlibrary.org)