Becoming a Writer

Abstract

The language of fiction engages with different kinds of reality. In the novels and stories of Fitzgerald’s great contemporaries — Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner ’ the realities of war, violence, and what Dos Passos in a letter to Fitzgerald in 1936 called ‘the murderous forces of history’ loom large. For Fitzgerald, however, the reality he recognized was that defined by society. In his life and in his art Fitzgerald remained focused on the social dimension of human experience, on behaviour and manners within relatively familiar social contexts. The world beyond and outside everyday society — the world that concerned writers whom he admired such as Conrad and Hemingway — interested him less than the problems and pressures experienced by individuals within a more or less conventional social world.