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The odd couple: John Keats and F Scott Fitzgerald
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Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F Scott Fitzgerald by Jonathan Bate, review
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How Keats lives on His radical depictions of desire and oblivion changed the course of English poetry – and, 200 years after his death, they disarm us still. As Jonathan Bate observes, the American critic Edmund Wilson “never allowed his friendship to dull his critical intelligence”. He had been close to F Scott Fitzgerald as a student, but, writing in 1924 about Fitzgerald’s first novel,
This Side of Paradise, he was unforgiving towards what he saw as its central weaknesses – a lack of energy and coherence, which he attributed to the intertwining malign influences of Compton Mackenzie and John Keats. Mackenzie, whose stock as a novelist was still high in the 1920s, had himself attributed features of his florid literary style to Keats’s example; but Fitzgerald had certainly gone direct to the source as well.
Sun 24 Jan 2021 02.00 EST
In my mindâs eye, I see F Scott Fitzgerald in white flannels on some Riviera beach, or at the wheel of a flashy car, its metallic curves in sharp contrast to the waistless girls all around. Forever a shiny figure, irrespective of what I know of his struggles with booze, outwardly he could not be more different to his literary idol, John Keats, with his curls, his cough and his mud-spattered boots. If both men were permanently in motion, comets blazing, Keats by design as well as necessity was a tramper: in 1818, he walked for 600 miles across Britain. Whatever the connections between them, the parallels of biography and sensibility, I can no more imagine he and Fitzgerald together than I can see them in silvery old age (Keats was 25 when tuberculosis killed him; Fitzgerald died of a heart attack aged 44).
Alternative Title: Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald, in full
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, (born September 24, 1896, St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S. died December 21, 1940, Hollywood, California), American short-story writer and novelist famous for his depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s), his most brilliant novel being
The Great Gatsby (1925). His private life, with his wife, Zelda, in both America and France, became almost as celebrated as his novels.
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Who was F. Scott Fitzgerald?
F. Scott Fitzgerald was a 20th-century American short-story writer and novelist. Although he completed four novels and more than 150 short stories in his lifetime, he is perhaps best remembered for his third novel,
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