F Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) is another favorite writer. I won't go into any details about his life. That's not what I find interesting anyway. It's his writing I admire, not his personality. His language is beautiful and I love the settings for his novels. You see all those rich people in their beautiful homes, yet they can't find happiness no matter how hard they try. I think that was typical of the era. Post-WWI. The disillusioned generation. On the other hand, later eras have tended to disillusion their generations too.

Here are some quotes by or about Fitzgerald:

"What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story." - from the Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western, section 15 (first part).

"Then the postman rang, and that day I quit work and ran along the streets, stopping automobiles to tell friends and acquaintances about it-- my novel This Side of Paradise was accepted for publication. That week the postman rang and rang, and I paid off my terrible small debts, bought a suit,and woke up every morning with a world of ineffable toploftiness and promise." -"Early Success," American Cavalcade (October 1937)

"A writer's days must be bound each to each by his sense of his life, and Fitzgerald the undergraduate was father of the best in the man and the novelist." "Fitzgerald was perhaps the last notable writer to affirm the Romantic fantasy, descended from the Renaissance, of personal ambition and heroism, of life committed to, or thrown away for, some ideal of self." -Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1953. 235-44.

"All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase -- I love you." -"The Off-Shore Pirate," The Saturday Evening Post (29 May 1920)

" . . All fine prose is based on the verbs carrying the sentences. Š A line like "The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass," is so alive that you race through it, scarcely noticing it, yet it has colored the whole poem with its movement ‹ the limping, trembling and freezing is going on before your eyes." - FSF to Frances Scott Fitzgerald, 1938; qtd. in F. Scott Fitzgerald On Writing, New York: Scribners, 1985, 53.

"Action is character." - The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1978. p. 332

"Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you -- like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist -- or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations." - FSF to Frances Scott Fitzgerald, 1940; qtd. in F. Scott Fitzgerald On Writing, New York: Scribners, 1985, 56.

"All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath." -F. Scott Fitzgerald, from an undated letter to his daughter Scottie.

"People read him now for clues and guidelines, as if by understanding him and his beautiful and damned period, they could see more clearly what's wrong." -Smith, Scottie Fitzgerald. "Notes About My Now-Famous Father." Family Circle (May 1974): 118-20.

"My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next and the schoolmasters of ever afterward." An ambitious, twenty-three-year-old Fitzgerald penned this "Author's Apology" for his first novel, This Side of Paradise.

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