“At Your Age,” a relatively unknown 1929 short story published in the Saturday Evening Post, contains all the trademark elements that F. Scott Fitzgerald's readers had come to expect by the end of the Jazz Age: there is a handsome, sympathetic hero embarrassed by his conventional, middle-class background; an irrepressible flapper whose flamboyant petulance symbolizes the frivolity of youth; a contemptuous, vain rival who steals the girl away with a flashy car; a doting, dull mother flummoxed by her daughter's anti-traditionalism; and even talk of petting parties, those scandalous teenage necking extravaganzas that This Side of Paradise first brought to public attention nearly a decade earlier. And yet “At Your Age” departs from the familiar Fitzgerald formula in at least one significant way. Unlike Amory Blaine, Dexter Green, or Jay Gatsby, Tom Squires loses the girl not because he is too poor, but because he is too old. At fifty, Tom is attracted as much to Annie Lorry's age as to her beauty or social status. She is for him a veritable fountain of youth, revivifying memories of “the warm sureties” of his own adolescence and reintroducing him to “the very terminology of young romance” (Price, 288). The pathos of the story arises from Tom's belief that age is a mind set, not a chronological measure. “I am not old,” he assures himself. “At fifty I’m younger than most men of forty” (Price, 278). But when Annie betrays him with a swain thirty years his junior, he is stunned by the foolishness of his Ponce-de-Léon pretensions. Chastising her in a parental tone, he realizes “with a shock that he and her mother were people of the same age looking at a person of another.” By story’s end, Tom resolves to act his age: “He had lost the battle against youth and spring, and with his grief paid the penalty for age’s unforgivable sin – refusing to die” (Price, 291).

In the very young Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), the driving engine was an impulse toward lyricism and extended evocative description - what the fledgling author thought of as “poetic” language, often included for its own sake. In his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), the driving force changed. The more seasoned young author began to concentrate on objective circumstance and the forward motion of narrative, but the book was less rich in the signature Fitzgerald element of extraordinary evocative power. In his third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), Fitzgerald's genius, luck, and artistic experience succeeded brilliantly in combining the impelling energies of the first two books. His structural method was the presentation of each concrete event within a progression of related events, a series of meals and parties, by means of hauntingly evocative patterns of language that intricately reflected events upon each other - themes that Fitzgerald called “elaborate and overlapping blankets of prose.” In the process of combining lyrical description with objective circumstance he mastered the connections between themes and narration. He discovered how to build a story out of tightly controlled and intricately woven patterns to express ideas. The expression itself grew from his remarkable power with evocative language.

In an all-too-brief professional career of approximately twenty years, Fitzgerald wrote 178 short stories, most of them for sale to commercial magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. Thirty-nine of these stories were collected in four separate volumes, one accompanying each of the four novels which Scribners published during Fitzgerald's lifetime: Flappers and Philosophers (1920) was the companion volume for This Side of Paradise (1920); Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) for The Beautiful and Damned (1922); All the Sad Young Men (1926) for The Great Gatsby (1925); and Taps at Reveille (1935) for Tender is the Night (1934). In addition, he wrote a play, The Vegetable, published by Scribners in 1923, and scores of nonfiction pieces, many of which appeared in commercial magazines during his lifetime. At the time of his death he was working on an elaborately conceived novel, The Last Tycoon,which was published posthumously in 1941 as a fragment with Fitzgerald's own notes. When he was not writing for publication, Fitzgerald wrote about his life and about his observations on life in his ledger and in his notebooks, both of which are now available in book form. In spare moments he wrote letters - letters to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribners; letters to his literary agent Harold Ober; letters to literary acquaintances, friends, and family - letters, often about his writing, which now fill four substantial volumes. Above all else Fitzgerald was a writer, a literary artist, who early shared with Edmund Wilson his immodest goal of becoming “one of the greatest writers who ever lived” (Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, 70).

During the peak of his contemporary popularity, F. Scott Fitzgerald lived abroad - mostly in France - for five years and eight months, much of that time pursuing a frenzied social life that impeded his literary work. His European travels included lengthy stays from May 1924 through the end of 1926 and then from March 1929 through September 1931, as well as a five-month sojourn in mid-1928. On foreign shores he experienced misery and elation: his wife Zelda's romance with French aviator Edouard Jozan; completion, publication, and celebration of his third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925); new friendships with Ernest Hemingway and with Gerald and Sara Murphy; innumerable alcoholic binges and embarrassments; false starts on a fourth novel and increasing self-doubts; domestic rivalry and acrimony; Zelda's first nervous breakdown and treatment; his hotel life and fugitive magazine fiction. Only after returning to the US did Fitzgerald publish Tender is the Night (1934), a work that despite its flaws plumbs the paradoxes of desire more profoundly than did Gatsby. Understandably, Tender has preoccupied scholars and biographers seeking insight into the author's life abroad, for its thinly veiled treatment of the Fitzgeralds' domestic calamities, set against the crazy violence of post-war Europe, reveals much about the author's own identification with expatriate culture. But the many short stories set at least partly in Europe likewise merit closer attention, less for their biographical connections than for their representations of the American migration to Europe after World War I.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is best known as a chronicler of the 1920s and as the writer who, more than any other, identified, delineated, and popularized the female representative of that era, the flapper. Though it is an overstatement to say that Fitzgerald created the flapper, he did, with considerable assistance from his wife Zelda, offer the public an image of a modern young woman who was spoiled, sexually liberated, self-centered, fun-loving, and magnetic. In Fitzgerald's mind, this young woman represented a new philosophy of romantic individualism, rebellion, and liberation, and his earliest writings enthusiastically present her as an embodiment of these new values. Although she is often seen now as a mere fashion of the bygone Jazz Age, the flapper should be regarded as one of the great authentic characters in American history. A virtual emblem of American modernity, she and all she stood for were envied, desired, feared, and emulated throughout much of theWestern world, and it was Fitzgerald's particular version of the flapper that “women imitated for more than four decades” (Solomon, Ain't We Got Fun?, 22).

Fitzgerald’s early and widely publicized association with the flapper, however, has led many readers to misconstrue and to oversimplify the author’s portraits of women and of relations between the sexes. It is important to understand that, almost from the start, Fitzgerald was ambivalent toward his “creation,” fearing that the flapper embodied not freedom but moral anarchy and lack of direction. Increasingly he used her as a symbol not only of a new order, but also of social disorder and conflict. As he wrote to Edmund Wilson in May 1925, “If I had anything to do with creating the manners of the contemporary American girl I certainly made a botch of the job” (Life in Letters, 110).

The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, seems to speak directly to its current audience about love and existential freedom. Yet the ideas we bring to the story may not be the ideas that the story brings to us. The book was written before most of its readers were born. It inhabits a different world, with barriers between men and women, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, rich and poor, capital and labor, educated and half-literate. It was a more defined and morally harder world then: at no point in the novel does Daisy Fay Buchanan ever appeal to the transcending authority of love, or Jay Gatsby to that of equality. Social judgment matters more. Daisy knows that life has many things more permanent than love, and Gatsby knows, or Fitzgerald knows for him, that equality is only a political virtue.

Part of the meaning of the text can be explained by sources, influence, background. Research on these things has concentrated on three broad issues: the novel’s development from Fitzgerald’s earlier writing about love and money; the influence of other writers like Joseph Conrad and T. S. Eliot; and its powerful retelling of the story of Scott and Zelda. Fitzgerald’s own “Winter Dreams” (1922) and “‘The Sensible Thing’” (1924) are both about men who need money, in love with women inaccessible without it. The first of these stories “examines a boy whose ambitions become identified with a selfish rich girl.” Part of it was absorbed into The Great Gatsby: “Indeed, Fitzgerald removed Dexter Green’s response to Judy Jones’s home from the magazine text and wrote it into the novel as Jay Gatsby’s response to Daisy Fay’s home.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald will be remembered primarily for his novels and stories, but during his twenty years as a professional writer, he also produced an important and revealing body of work in the form of articles and essays and correspondence. The very best of these - the autobiographical pieces written in the 1930s - command the lyrical magic and emotional power of his most lasting fiction. And even at their least meritorious, in the advertisements for himself Fitzgerald composed as a beginning author, these articles reveal a great deal about the way he wanted to present himself to his readers. Read chronologically, they trace the rise and fall of his career from the publication of This Side of Paradise in March 1920 to his final years in Hollywood.

In accepting This Side of Paradise for publication, editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribners asked Fitzgerald for a photograph and some publicity material. “You have been in the advertising game long enough to know the sort of thing,” Perkins added (Dear Scott/Dear Max, 21). In fact, Fitzgerald had worked only four months for the Barron Collier agency in New York, from March to July 1919, but he did understand how promotion could help sell books and was eager to cooperate in the enterprise. In a letter presented at the American Booksellers' Convention and included on a leaf added to several hundred copies of the novel, he began to establish a public personality designed at once to shock and attract his audience.

While Fitzgerald's experiences in Hollywood during the last years of the 1930s contributed heavily to the planning and writing of The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western, a glimpse at the novelist's earlier life and work suggests that this novel was almost foreordained. Fitzgerald had been interested in, maybe fascinated by, movie-making from a very early period in his life. He wrote film treatments and scripts and, in addition, used what he knew about Hollywood in several of his short stories as well as in The Beautiful and Damned and later in Tender is the Night. He had mixed feelings about film as an art form during these years, and yet was convinced of its power over its audience. With the advent of talking pictures, he mulled over the possibility - and felt sorrow - that someday it might replace the novel. In 1936, he wrote: “I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that, whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, was capable of only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion” (Crack-Up, 78).

This gloominess reflected the beliefs of Oswald Spengler in his Decline of the West, a work Fitzgerald referred to a number of times in his writing. In addition, Fitzgerald’s statement was written during a period of despondency. His writing during his last years in Hollywood suggests, however, that his pessimism about the future of film may have been wavering. Even though he planned to kill off movie man Monroe Stahr at the end of The Last Tycoon, he portrayed Stahr as a man who did not totally believe in “the tritest thought” and “the most obvious emotion.”

The histories of composition for F. Scott Fitzgerald's first two novels, This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922), resemble each other very little. This Side of Paradise was an inspired cut-and-paste job, a merging of bits and pieces of a failed novel (called “The Romantic Egotist”) with some short stories, a handful of poems, and a one-act play. Fitzgerald assembled the book during the summer of 1919 in a desperate attempt to prove himself as an author and as a prospective husband for Zelda Sayre, his golden girl. He produced the manuscript in a rush of improvisation, revised it quickly, submitted it to Charles Scribner's Sons in the early fall of 1919, had it accepted, and saw it into print the following spring.

The Beautiful and Damned, by contrast, was a carefully planned piece of literary composition. After a false start that produced “May Day”(1920), one of his finest stories, Fitzgerald settled down and wrote The Beautiful and Damned from start to finish. He sought advice about the novel from his friend Edmund Wilson and from Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribners, and he took their suggestions seriously, revising and polishing throughout. The narrative was serialized in Metropolitan Magazine beginning in September 1921, then published in book form in the spring of 1922. The Beautiful and Damnedreadsmuch more like a conventional novel than does This Side of Paradise. The narrative is coherent; the characters are consistent (as they are not in This Side of Paradise); and the themes are carefully articulated throughout. That does not make The Beautiful and Damned the better book: it lacks the verve and energy of This Side of Paradise, but it makes up for its deficiencies by providing readers with a blueprint for character types and moral questions that would preoccupy Fitzgerald for the rest of his writing career.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the most recognized figures in American literary and cultural history, not only as one of the major writers of the twentieth century, but also as a man whose life story excites the fascination of a public that knows him primarily as the author of The Great Gatsby. Any study of Fitzgerald's career must trace its familiar trajectory: early success, then public oblivion, and finally posthumous resurrection; had he lived a few years longer, he might have proved the exception to his own belief that there are no second acts in American lives. Fitzgerald's life and work were intertwined from the very beginning; his career spanned one of the most turbulent eras of the century, and from the very start he was part creator, part victim of the new culture of celebrity which accompanied the rise of modern technology. His fame and his marriage coincided, and so today, as in the 1920s, the names of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald are linked in public perception; indeed, for the last three-quarters of a century they have been indissolubly tied to American popular culture.

Scarcely a week passes that we do not notice an allusion to one or both of them in our mass media. In a bestselling paperback mystery, a leading character marries a beautiful but hopelessly mad woman who slashes the bathroom mirror with lipstick before shattering it, and then collapses bleeding on the floor. He later tells his friend, “I’ve got Zelda for a wife” (Patterson, Escape the Night, 1984, 31). In a 1970s film, Getting Straight, the protagonist, played by Elliott Gould, rebels against his questioners at an MA oral examination when they state that Nick Carraway and Gatsby have a homosexual relationship, that Jordan Baker is probably a lesbian, and that Fitzgerald, Gould’s favorite author, was driven by “a terrible need to express homosexual panic through his characters.”

1940–1949

F. Scott Fitzgerald's familiar and often-quoted observation that “there are no second acts in American lives” (LT, 163; it had a certain vogue during Bill Clinton's impeachment proceedings in 1999) is certainly belied by the history of Fitzgerald's own critical reputation. A celebrity and acclaimed literary figure at age twenty-three in 1920, when his first novel, This Side of Paradise, became a bestseller (it went through twelve printings in two years and sold 49,075 copies; Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, 137) his short fiction eventually commanded a price of $4,000 per story from the Saturday Evening Post (he published nineteen at that rate between June 1929 and April 1931; Mangum, A Fortune Yet, 179). But at his death on December 21, 1940, he had not published a book in five years, his fee for a story had dipped to $250 (Mangum, A Fortune Yet, 181), and during the last year of his life, seventy-two copies of his nine books were sold (Maimon, “F. Scott Fitzgerald's Book Sales,” 166). His letters to his longtime editor Maxwell Perkins during 1939 and 1940 were filled with ideas on how to resuscitate what he felt was his forgotten name with the American reading public. Typically and ironically, the last two sentences he ever wrote to Perkins, on December 13, were “How much will you sell the plates of This Side of Paradise for? I think it has a chance for a new life” (Letters, 291). Another revealing anecdote is Budd Schulberg's admission that when, in early 1939, as a fledgling screenwriter he was asked to collaborate with Fitzgerald (whose fiction he admired greatly) on a film about the Dartmouth Winter Carnival, Schulberg thought Fitzgerald was dead (Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, 454). In twenty years, Fitzgerald's career and reputation had literally gone from the top to virtual obscurity.

Harold Pinter is one of the premier dramatists of the twentieth century; he also is a master screenwriter. In spite of the fact that he has written twenty-four filmscripts and in the 1980s and 1990s his artistic attention was focused almost exclusively on his screenwriting, relatively little critical attention has been paid to this large segment of his canon.

Since his first scripted film, The Servant, appeared in 1962, he has had numerous cinematic successes, in terms of both popular acceptance and critical acclaim, and he has won several prestigious awards for his work. Besides being entered in major festivals, Pinter’s films have been listed among the year’s ten best consistently, and he received both the British Screenwriters Guild Award and the New York Film Critics Best Writing Award for The Servant (1963), the Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear and an Edinburgh Festival Certificate of Merit for The Caretaker (1963), the British Film Academy Award for The Pumpkin Eater (1964), the Cannes Film Festival Special Jury Prize and a National Board of Review Award for Accident (1967), the Cannes Film Festival Golden Palm for Best Film and the British Academy Award for The Go-Between (1970), and a National Board of Review Best English-Language Film Award for The Last Tycoon (1976). His more recent films, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), Betrayal (1982), Turtle Diary (1986), The Handmaid’s Tale (1990) and The Trial (1993) have received equal praise from reviewers. As a matter of fact, critics claim that Pinter’s distinctive style and unmistakable writing ability have been responsible for the best work done by several of his directors (as I documented in Butter’s Going Up well over twenty years ago).

The archive of the Tom Stoppard papers at the Harry J. Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Austin, Texas, has become the primary location for scholarly holdings relating to the playwright and his work. With an array of written and visual materials representing the writer’s work over a broad span of his creative life, this archive is both extensive in range and well contextualized, featuring holdings on related figures such as Stoppard’s contemporary David Hare, the absurdists James Saunders and N. F. Simpson, and others. The Ransom Center holdings document the creative process and reveal the responses of artists to forms and innovations that have gone before. For example, the Ransom Center’s Beckett papers, as well as the archive of the producer Sir Donald Albery, reveal much relating to the ground-breaking development of Waiting for Godot, just as the John Osborne papers, Royal Court papers, and others provide an equally significant context for other artists and historical moments.

A brief examination of the box and folder listings of materials held within the Stoppard papers suggests the variety of inquiry supported by this holding. The listings suggest materials from concept work, through production revisions, through variant treatments for alternate media, as well as the post-production commentary of critics and correspondents. One example that speaks directly to the archive’s capacity to yield evidence of the creative process derives from a meeting summary for work on Squaring the Circle: Poland 1980–1981. The summary records the company’s efforts to create “drama, not documentary.”

The double bill of The Room and Celebration at the Almeida Theatre in March 2000 provided a unique occasion on which to attempt to obtain some view or perspective on Pinter. Here were his first and his latest play, forty-three years between them, directed by the author, with an excellent cast, many of them experienced Pinter actors, four of them playing in both plays: The Room given an evocatively detailed 'period' setting, drab, utilitarian, a murky refuge warmed by a flickering gas-fire and filled with the depressing lodging-house furniture of the 1950s; Celebration took place in a smart, postmodern restaurant, all curved banquettes and ostentatious table-linen, a glance, according to some of the first-night critics, at 'The Ivy', but replicated in many of the smarter establishments in the streets outside the theatre. Private and public, domestic and social: nice weak tea and bacon and eggs in The Room, duck, osso bucco and Frascati for the ladies in Celebration. Even the names resonate differently: ordinary or formal in The Room: Bert and Rose, Mr Kidd, Riley; and a less specific, apparently classless fluidity in Celebration's Lambert, Prue, Suki, Richard. This was London, and Islington, then and now.

In the market revolution sweeping through Russia, theatre has played its own part. Musicals, foreign adaptations and zippy updated classics have long since replaced the stodgy orthodoxy of Soviet times. There is also a strong interest in the work of Harold Pinter. At first sight, the reasons seem clear: first, the advent of Glasnost in the mid-1980s liberated an interest in work which, though sometimes privately circulated, could not generally be seen onstage during the Soviet years; secondly, the pro-Western impulse, following major social and political reform, concentrated this interest on English-speaking writers; thirdly, in a time of rapid and bewildering change, Russians found in Pinter's work in particular a strong echo of their own situation. Yet, on closer analysis, these reasons raise further questions. Were Pinter's plays never to be seen in Russia before 1985? Was the 'pro-Western impulse' in itself sufficient to account for an interest in the work of Harold Pinter? What precisely in their own situation do Russians find echoed in Harold Pinter’s plays? In addressing these questions, this chapter falls into two parts. First, I will give a critical account of a number of notable Pinter productions which ran in Moscow between 1972 and 1994, focusing on one famous early production. Concurrently, I will try to set each production in the context of the tumultuous social and political events of the period. Secondly, I will examine the line of development which links these productions; that is, how they interrelate a particular understanding of Pinter’s work with changing attitudes to the unfolding events of recent Russian history.

The record of Stoppard’s engagement with Shakespeare shares the feature Stoppard values most in his own plays, “a series of conflicting statements made by conflicting characters.” In his nondramatic writing, interviews, and lectures, Stoppard himself may enact the conflicting characters who make conflicting statements. The simile of Shakespeare as decanter is reductive, an equivalent of the ashtrays and other inanimate objects to which Stoppard repeatedly compares inert play texts. But Shakespeare is also “World Champ,” an athlete who has defeated all competitors and attracted spectators like Stoppard, the cricket fan. In Stoppard’s plays, this ambivalence takes the usual form of conflicting statements by conflicting characters. During an argument in The Real Thing, for example, a similar analogy states the same type of contradiction. The playwright Henry will identify and defend his craft in terms of sport, an elaborate description of a cricket bat. His wife Annie, an actress, anticipates him with an image of Shakespeare outrunning everyone else in a foot race for an immaterial prize, “Eng. Lit.” In lecture and play, Shakespeare is both a winner and something less.