Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896- December 21, 1940) was an Irish American Jazz Age novelist and short story writer. Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. In his own age, Fitzgerald was the self-styled spokesman of the "Lost Generation", or the Americans born in the 1890s who came of age during World War I. He finished four novels, left a fifth unfinished, and wrote dozens of short stories that treat themes of youth, despair, and age. Many admire what they consider his remarkable emotional honesty. His heroes- handsome, confident, and doomed - blaze brilliantly before exploding, and his heroines are typically beautiful, intricate, and alluring. Fitzgerald started writing for periodicals, publishing early stories such as "The Diamond as Big as The Ritz," later collected in Tales of The Jazz Age (1922). Fame and prosperity were both welcome and frightening; in The Beautiful and Damned (1922), he describes the life he and Zelda feared, a descent into ennui and dissipation. The Fitzgeralds moved in 1924 to the French Riviera, where they fell in with a group of American expatriates, described in his last completed novel, Tender Is The Night (1934). Shortly after their arrival, he completed his greatest work, The Great Gatsby (1925), which poignantly expresses his ambivalence about American life, at once vulgar and dazzlingly promising. Some of his finest short stories of this period, particularly "The Rich Boy" and "Absolution," appeared in All the Sad Young Men (1926). His last work, the Hollywood novel The Last Tycoon (1941), was left unfinished at his death at 44 of alcohol-related causes. The text under analysis is an extract from the short story "May Day". The text is about two friends, who are both twenty-four, Yale graduates of the year before the war. One of them is Philip Dean, a wealthy successful man, who is in his vacations in New
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896- December 21, 1940) was an Irish American Jazz Age novelist and short story writer. Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. In his own age, Fitzgerald was the self-styled spokesman of the "Lost Generation", or the Americans born in the 1890s who came of age during World War I. He finished four novels, left a fifth unfinished, and wrote dozens of short stories that treat themes of youth, despair, and age. Many admire what they consider his remarkable emotional honesty. His heroes- handsome, confident, and doomed - blaze brilliantly before exploding, and his heroines are typically beautiful, intricate, and alluring. Fitzgerald started writing for periodicals, publishing early stories such as "The Diamond as Big as The Ritz," later collected in Tales of The Jazz Age (1922). Fame and prosperity were both welcome and frightening; in The Beautiful and Damned (1922), he describes the life he and Zelda feared, a descent into ennui and dissipation. The Fitzgeralds moved in 1924 to the French Riviera, where they fell in with a group of American expatriates, described in his last completed novel, Tender Is The Night (1934). Shortly after their arrival, he completed his greatest work, The Great Gatsby (1925), which poignantly expresses his ambivalence about American life, at once vulgar and dazzlingly promising. Some of his finest short stories of this period, particularly "The Rich Boy" and "Absolution," appeared in All the Sad Young Men (1926). His last work, the Hollywood novel The Last Tycoon (1941), was left unfinished at his death at 44 of alcohol-related causes. The text under analysis is an extract from the short story "May Day". The text is about two friends, who are both twenty-four, Yale graduates of the year before the war. One of them is Philip Dean, a wealthy successful man, who is in his vacations in New