The image of the artist in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald

A good writer generally writes about what he knows best, and F. Scott Fitzgerald was no exception. His writing and his life were so strongly intertwined that the fiction was frequently only a thin gilding of his own experiences. That fact has caused many Fitzgerald scholars to concentrate on the flamboyant events which made the writer a chronicler of the Jazz Age, a representative of the "flapper and philosopher" era about which he first began to write. When interest in the decade of the twenties began to wane, so did Scott's popularity; only after his death did scholars once again attempt to analyze Fitzgerald as an artist. Those analyses often did nothing more than assert his status as a minor writer, one whose fame would always rest on his association with the flappers. Others attempted to identify people and events in his works as thinly disguised realities, thus maintaining that Fitzgerald was able to write only because he lived such an exciting life and therefore had available material for stories and novels.