F Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald Works

This Side of Paradise

Follows Amory Blaine, a handsome and self-regarding young man from the Midwest who arrives at Princeton full of romantic ambition and a conviction of his own destiny, throws himself into social life and literary pursuits, and falls in and out of love before being devastated by the loss of Rosalind Connage, a society girl who chooses wealth over him. He serves briefly in World War One, returns to drift through New York broke and directionless, and gradually sheds his youthful illusions one by one. The novel ends with Amory alone and humbled, possessing little except a hard-won sense of self-knowledge. Published when Fitzgerald was just 23, it was an immediate sensation and remains a vivid portrait of romantic American youth colliding with the disenchantments of adulthood.

The Beautiful and Damned

Follows Anthony Patch, an idle and charming Harvard-educated New Yorker awaiting a vast inheritance, and his wife Gloria, a stunning and equally self-indulgent beauty, as they plunge into a glamorous life of parties and drinking that gradually curdles into poverty, bitterness, and ruin. Anthony makes halfhearted attempts at work and writing that all fail, their money dwindles, their marriage grows corrosive, and their youth fades as their drinking intensifies. After years of legal battle Anthony finally wins back his grandfather's inheritance, but the victory is hollow — he is by then a broken, prematurely aged alcoholic and everything that made life worth living is already gone.

The Great Gatsby

Follows Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner who moves to Long Island and becomes drawn into the world of his mysterious neighbor the main character, a self-invented millionaire who has built his entire fortune and persona in order to win back his lost love Daisy Buchanan. The main character and Daisy rekindle their romance, but she is too anchored to her privileged world to truly commit to him, and when she strikes and kills a woman while driving his car, she lets the main character take the blame and quietly leaves town with her brutish husband Tom. The main character is shot dead by the dead woman's grieving husband, and Nick, disgusted by the moral emptiness and carelessness of the wealthy, returns to the Midwest. Slim, precise, and dazzlingly written, it is the defining novel of the Jazz Age and one of the greatest meditations on the American Dream and the impossibility of recapturing the past.

Tender is the Night

Follows Dick Diver, a brilliant American psychiatrist on the French Riviera who has married Nicole, a beautiful and wealthy patient he helped recover from a breakdown caused by her father's abuse, becoming dangerously entangled between his roles as her doctor and husband. As the novel progresses Dick is slowly hollowed out by the burden of Nicole's illness, the corrupting influence of her family's vast wealth, and his own weaknesses of drink and romantic wandering, while Nicole paradoxically grows stronger and more independent, eventually leaving him for another man. Dick returns to America and fades into quiet obscurity in a succession of small upstate New York towns, his brilliant promise entirely spent.

Save me the Waltz

Follows Alabama Beggs, a spirited Southern woman who marries David Knight, a famous painter thinly veiled as Scott Fitzgerald, and plunges with him into the glamorous and dissolute expatriate life of the 1920s before growing desperate to forge an identity entirely her own. She throws herself into grueling ballet training in Paris and Naples, reaching a point of genuine accomplishment, only to have her dancing career cut short by a serious foot infection. The novel ends with Alabama returning to America, her dreams spent and her life defined more by loss than fulfillment.

The Jelly-Bean

Follows Jim Powell, a good-natured but shiftless young man from a once-prominent Georgia family, who idles his days away shooting craps and avoiding ambition until he encounters Nancy Lamar, a beautiful and reckless wealthy girl, at a country club dance. Jim saves Nancy from embarrassment by winning back money she needs in a craps game, and the experience briefly inspires him to resolve to make something of himself. But almost immediately he learns that Nancy drunkenly married another man the night before, extinguishing his spark of hope almost as soon as it was lit.

Tales of the Jazz Age

Collection of short stories by F Scott Fitzgerald

The Camel’s Back

Follows Perry Parkhurst, an indecisive young man who storms off after refusing his girlfriend Betty Medill's ultimatum to marry her that very night, then shows up at a costume party that same evening dressed in a two-person camel costume with a taxi driver as the rear half. Hidden inside the costume, Perry encounters Betty, who doesn't recognize him, and the two flirt and dance together until a moment of comic confusion results in them accidentally getting married at the party. When the costumes come off the marriage turns out to be legally binding, and the story ends with Perry having been maneuvered by circumstance into doing exactly what he was too timid to do himself

May Day

Takes place over a single turbulent night in New York City in May 1919, weaving together several intersecting storylines against a backdrop of postwar social tension between the glamorous wealthy and the desperate and disillusioned. Gordon Sterrett, a Yale-educated young man fallen into poverty, spirals toward ruin while his careless wealthy former classmate parties without a thought; two rough unemployed veterans drift through the city and join a mob that attacks a socialist newspaper office, killing a man; and various society figures collide at a debutante ball as the two worlds briefly and violently intersect. The story ends the following morning with Gordon, having drunkenly married a woman he despises during the night, shooting himself in a hotel room while the bright May morning goes on indifferently around him.

Porcelain and Pink

A slight comic playlet set entirely in and around a bathroom, where Julie is taking a bath while her sister Lois is supposed to be entertaining their caller Mr. Calkins downstairs. Calkins wanders up and ends up outside the bathroom door, where he strikes up a flirtatious and witty conversation with the disembodied voice behind the door without realizing Julie is in the bath. When the situation is finally revealed, Calkins finds himself more charmed by Julie than by Lois, the sister he originally came to call on, and the piece ends with romantic possibilities cheerfully reshuffled.

The Diamond as Big as the Ritz

Follows John Unger, a modest Midwestern boy who accepts an invitation to spend the summer at his prep school friend Percy Washington's family estate in Montana, only to discover it is built on a single flawless diamond the size of the Ritz-Carlton, kept secret from the world for generations through murder, slavery, and the imprisonment of anyone who stumbles upon it. John falls in love with Percy's sister Kismine, who casually reveals that all summer guests are killed at the end of their visit to protect the secret. The estate is eventually discovered and destroyed by bombers, and Percy's father famously attempts to bribe God himself with the diamond to stop the attack before dying in the ruins