"Winter Dreams" | |
---|---|
Short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald | |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Genre(s) | Short story |
Publication | |
Published in | Metropolitan magazine All the Sad Young Men |
Publication type | Magazine Short Story Collection |
Publisher | Scribner (book) |
Media type | |
Publication date | December 1922 |
"Winter Dreams" is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald first published in Metropolitan magazine in December 1922 and collected in All the Sad Young Men in 1926. [1] The plot concerns the attempts by a young Midwestern man to win the affection of an upper-class socialite. Frequently anthologized, the story is regarded as one of Fitzgerald's finest works for evoking "the loss of youthful illusions." [2] [3]
In the Fitzgerald canon, scholars consider the story to be in the "Gatsby-cluster" as the author expanded on many of its themes in his 1925 novel The Great Gatsby . [2] Writing his editor Max Perkins in June 1925, Fitzgerald described "Winter Dreams" as a "first draft of the Gatsby idea." [4]
Fitzgerald based the short story on his unsuccessful romantic pursuit of socialite Ginevra King. [5] A wealthy heiress from a Chicago banking family, Ginevra enjoyed a privileged upbringing, and the Chicago press chronicled her mundane activities as a member of the elite "Big Four" debutantes during World War I. [6]
While teenagers, Ginevra and Fitzgerald met at a sledding party in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and shared a romance from 1915 to 1917, but their relationship ended when Ginevra's family intervened. [7] Her imperious father, stockbroker Charles Garfield King, or someone else purportedly humiliated the impressionable young writer and bluntly told him that "poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls." [8]
Due to his middle-class status and her family's intervention, Ginevra spurned Fitzgerald by January 1917. [9] In later years, Fitzgerald claimed that Ginevra had rejected him "with the most supreme boredom and indifference." [10] For the remainder of his life, the author remained "so smitten by King that for years he could not think of her without tears coming to his eyes." [11]
Dexter Green is a middle-class young man born in rural Minnesota who aspires to be part of the "old money" elite of the American Midwest. His father owns the second most profitable grocery store in the town. To earn money, Dexter works part-time as a teenage caddie at a golf club in Black Bear Lake, Minnesota, where he meets the 11-year-old Judy Jones. He quits his job rather than be Judy's caddie as he cannot abide acting as one of her obsequious servants.
After college, Dexter opens a successful a laundry business. He returns to the Sherry Island Golf Club and plays golf with the affluent men for whom he once caddied. He encounters Judy Jones again on the golf course, only now she is older and more beautiful. In the evening on Black Bear Lake, Dexter swims to a raft where he encounters Judy piloting a motor boat. She asks him to drive the boat while she aquaplanes. Judy invites Dexter to dinner, and a romance blossoms, but he discovers that he is merely one of a dozen beaus whom she is clandestinely romancing.
After eighteen months, while Judy vacations in Florida, Dexter becomes engaged to Irene Scheerer, a kind-hearted but ordinary-looking girl. When Judy returns, she again ensnares Dexter's affections and asks him to marry her. Dexter breaks off his engagement with Irene, only to be spurned again by Judy a month later. Unable to cope with this recurrent heartbreak, Dexter joins the American Expeditionary Forces to fight in World War I.
Seven years later, Dexter has become a successful businessman in New York. Now wealthy, he hasn't visited his home in years. One day, a Detroit man named Devlin visits Dexter on a business pretext. During the meeting, Devlin reveals that Judy Simms—formerly Judy Jones—is the wife of one of his friends. Devlin recounts how Judy's beauty has faded, and her husband treats her callously. This news demoralizes Dexter as he still loves Judy. Dexter realizes that his dreams are gone, and he can never return home.
Frequently anthologized, critics praise Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams" as among his finest works for evoking "the loss of youthful illusions." [2] [3] In the Fitzgerald canon, scholars categorize "Winter Dreams" as part of the so-called "Gatsby-cluster" as the author expanded upon its themes in his 1925 novel The Great Gatsby . [2] Writing his editor Max Perkins in June 1925, Fitzgerald described the short story as a "first draft of the Gatsby idea." [4]
Fitzgerald scholar and biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli described "Winter Dreams" as "the strongest of the Gatsby-cluster stories." [2] He continues:
Like the novel, it examines a boy whose ambitions become identified with a selfish rich girl. Indeed, Fitzgerald removed Dexter Green's response to Judy Jones' home from the magazine text and wrote it into the novel as Jay Gatsby's response to Daisy Fay's home. [2]
Scholar Tim Randell has asserted that "Winter Dreams" should be regarded as a crowning literary achievement as Fitzgerald "achieves a dialectical metafiction" in which he deftly criticizes "class relations and print culture." [13] Fitzgerald's short story "identifies ruling class interests as the collective origin of meaning and 'reality' for the entire social body" and "conveys the possibility of counter, collective meanings" driven by class antagonism. [13] Randell argues that the story chronicles a young man's alienation with modernity due to a "lack of communal meaning" and his self-conscious descent into despair and melancholy. [14]
The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, near New York City, the novel depicts first-person narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with Jay Gatsby, the mysterious millionaire with an obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.
Zelda Fitzgerald was an American novelist, painter, and socialite. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, to a wealthy Southern family, she became locally famous for her beauty and high spirits. In 1920, she married writer F. Scott Fitzgerald after the popular success of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise. The novel catapulted the young couple into the public eye, and she became known in the national press as the first American flapper. Because of their wild antics and incessant partying, she and her husband became regarded in the newspapers as the enfants terribles of the Jazz Age. Alleged infidelity and bitter recriminations soon undermined their marriage. After Zelda traveled abroad to Europe, her mental health deteriorated, and she had suicidal and homicidal tendencies, which required psychiatric care. Her doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia, although later posthumous diagnoses posit bipolar disorder.
Matthew Joseph Bruccoli was an American professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He was an expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald; his biography of Fitzgerald, published in 1981, was considered the standard biography for decades. He also wrote about other writers, including Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and John O'Hara, and was editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
This Side of Paradise is a 1920 debut novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. It examines the lives and morality of carefree American youth at the dawn of the Jazz Age. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is a handsome middle-class student at Princeton University who dabbles in literature and engages in a series of unfulfilling romances with young women. The novel explores themes of love warped by greed and social ambition. Fitzgerald, who took inspiration for the title from a line in Rupert Brooke's poem Tiare Tahiti, spent years revising the novel before Charles Scribner's Sons accepted it for publication.
Tender Is the Night is the fourth and final novel completed by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in French Riviera during the twilight of the Jazz Age, the 1934 novel chronicles the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist, and his wife, Nicole, who is one of his patients. The story mirrors events in the lives of the author and his wife Zelda Fitzgerald as Dick starts his descent into alcoholism and Nicole struggles with mental illness.
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Jay Gatsby is the titular fictional character of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The character is an enigmatic nouveau riche millionaire who lives in a luxurious mansion on Long Island where he often hosts extravagant parties and who allegedly gained his fortune by illicit bootlegging during prohibition in the United States. Fitzgerald based many details about the fictional character on Max Gerlach, a mysterious neighbor and World War I veteran whom the author met in New York during the raucous Jazz Age. Like Gatsby, Gerlach threw lavish parties, never wore the same shirt twice, used the phrase "old sport", claimed to be educated at Oxford University, and fostered myths about himself, including that he was a relation of the German Kaiser.
The Great Gatsby is a 2000 British-American historical romantic drama television film, based on the 1925 novel of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was directed by Robert Markowitz, written by John J. McLaughlin, and stars Toby Stephens in the title role of Jay Gatsby, Mira Sorvino as Daisy Buchanan, Paul Rudd as Nick Carraway, Martin Donovan as Tom Buchanan, Francie Swift as Jordan Baker, Heather Goldenhersh as Myrtle Wilson, and Matt Malloy as Klipspringer. The film aired on March 29, 2000 in the United Kingdom on BBC, and on January 14, 2001 in the United States on A&E.
Daisy Fay Buchanan is a fictional character in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The character is a wealthy socialite from Louisville, Kentucky who resides in the fashionable town of East Egg on Long Island during the Jazz Age. She is narrator Nick Carraway's second cousin, once removed, and the wife of polo player Tom Buchanan, with whom she has a daughter. Before marrying Tom, Daisy had a romantic relationship with Jay Gatsby. Her choice between Gatsby and Tom is one of the novel's central conflicts. She was described by Fitzgerald as a "golden girl".
Nick Carraway is a fictional character and narrator in F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. The character is a Yale University alumnus from the American Midwest, a World War I veteran, and a newly arrived resident of West Egg on Long Island, near New York City. He is a bond salesman and the neighbor of enigmatic millionaire Jay Gatsby. He facilitates a sexual affair between Gatsby and Nick's second cousin, once removed, Daisy Buchanan which becomes one of the novel's central conflicts. Carraway is easy-going and optimistic, although this latter quality fades as the novel progresses. After witnessing the callous indifference and insouciant hedonism of the idle rich during the riotous Jazz Age, he ultimately chooses to leave the eastern United States forever and returns to the Midwest.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, widely known simply as Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. During his lifetime, he published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. Although he achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, Fitzgerald received critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Ginevra King Pirie was an American socialite and heiress. As one of the self-proclaimed "Big Four" debutantes of Chicago during World War I, King inspired many characters in the novels and short stories of Jazz Age writer F. Scott Fitzgerald; in particular, the character of Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. A 16-year-old King met an 18-year-old Fitzgerald at a sledding party in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and they shared a passionate romance from 1915 to 1917.
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