Robert McCrum / All Time Top 10

 

Joseph Conrad

All Time Top 10

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

The 100 best novels / An introduction by Robert McCrum

Book Review

Robert McCrum
Sunday 16 August 2015 09.00 BST

Finally, we are left with the classics, often by dead white males, those books to which English language readers worldwide return again and again. Say what you like about my list (and thousands have merrily done so these past two years), the Anglo-American literary tradition, a source of some sublime and imperishable masterpieces, deserves to be celebrated for some astonishing achievements. Here, to provoke Observer readers just one last time, is my All Time Top 10 (chosen from this series, in chronological order):

007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)

Jane Austen’s Emma is her masterpiece, mixing the sparkle of her early books with a deep sensibility.

013 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) 

Emily Brontë’s windswept masterpiece is notable not just for its wild beauty but for its daring reinvention of the novel form itself.

017  Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851) 

Wise, funny and gripping, Melville’s epic work continues to cast a long shadow over American literature.

021 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-2)

This cathedral of words stands today as perhaps the greatest of the great Victorian fictions.

023 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884/5)

Mark Twain’s tale of a rebel boy and a runaway slave seeking liberation upon the waters of the Mississippi remains a defining classic of American literature.

032 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)

Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece about a life-changing journey in search of Mr Kurtz has the simplicity of great myth.

043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)

The Rainbow is perhaps DH Lawrence’s finest work, showing him for the radical, protean, thoroughly modern writer he was.

046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

This portrait of a day in the lives of three Dubliners remains a towering work, in its word play surpassing even Shakespeare.

050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

Woolf’s great novel makes a day of party preparations the canvas for themes of lost love, life choices and mental illness.

051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

Fitzgerald’s jazz age masterpiece has become a tantalising metaphor for the eternal mystery of art.

You pays yer money, and you takes yer choice.

THE GUARDIAN

Book Review 051 / The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

 

The Great Gatsby 

by F Scott Fitzgerald

1925

'The Great Gatsby is in many ways similar to Romeo and Juliet yet it is so much more than a love story'

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 51 / The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

The Pink Elephant
Thu 12 September 2013

There are many novels which claim that they are the greatest love story of all time. It is only in the case of this novel that that statement can be applied and be true.

The novel is set during the roaring 20s in America, narrated by Nick Carraway, a man from a well-to-do family just out of fighting the war and looking to sell bonds. He moves to East Egg, the slightly less grand area in comparison to West Egg, right opposite Gatsby's mansion. Gatsby is rich, mega-rich, and throws magnificent parties every weekend which the whole town attend. However the host is never seen during these parties, and is never completely known by any one person. Gatsby holds a dark secret about his past and how he became so great, a deep lust that will eventually lead to his demise.

Winter Dreams by Scott Fitzgerald

WINTER DREAMS 

by

F. Scott Fitzgerald 

Scott Fitzgerald / Sueños de invierno

I

Some of the caddies were poor as sin and lived in one-room houses with a neurasthenic cow in the front yard, but Dexter Green's father owned the second best grocery-store in Black Bear--the best one was "The Hub," patronized by the wealthy people from Sherry Island--and Dexter caddied only for pocket-money.

Crazy Sunday by Scott Fitzgerald

 

CRAZY SUNDAY

by 

F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

Scott Fitzgerald / Domingo loco 

 

It was Sunday--not a day, but rather a gap between two other days. Behind, for all of them, lay sets and sequences, the long waits under the crane that swung the microphone, the hundred miles a day by automobiles to and fro across a county, the struggles of rival ingenuities in the conference rooms, the ceaseless compromise, the clash and strain of many personalities fighting for their lives. And now Sunday, with individual life starting up again, with a glow kindling in eyes that had been glazed with monotony the afternoon before. Slowly as the hours waned they came awake like "Puppenfeen" in a toy shop: an intense colloquy in a corner, lovers disappearing to neck in a hall. And the feeling of "Hurry, it's not too late, but for God's sake hurry before the blessed forty hours of leisure are over."

Dearly Beloved by Scott Fitzgerald

 

Dearly Beloved

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Scott Fitgerald / Tiernamente adorables

O, my Beauty Boy—reading Plato so divine! O, dark, oh fair, colored golf champion of Chicago. Over the rails he goes at night, steward of the club car, and afterwards in the dim smoke by the one light and the smell of stale spittoons, writing west to the Rosecrucian Brotherhood. Seeking ever.

Scott Fitzgerald / A Freeze-Out

A FREEZE-OUT

by

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Scott Fitzgerald / El desprecio 

Here and there in a sunless corner skulked a little snow under a veil of coal specks, but the men taking down storm windows were laboring in shirt sleeves and the turf was becoming firm underfoot.

In the streets, dresses dyed after fruit, leaf and flower emerged from beneath the shed somber skins of animals; now only a few old men wore mousy caps pulled down over their ears. That was the day Forrest Winslow forgot the long fret of the past winter as one forgets inevitable afflictions, sickness, and war, and turned with blind confidence toward the summer, thinking he already recognized in it all the summers of the past--the golfing, sailing, swimming summers.

Scott Fitzgerald / Financing Finnegan

 

FINANCING FINNEGAN

by

F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

Scott Fitzgerald / Financiando a Finnegan

 

Finnegan and I have the same literary agent to sell our writings for us--but though I'd often been in Mr. Cannon's office just before and just after Finnegan's visits, I had never met him. Likewise we had the same publisher and often when I arrived there Finnegan had just departed. I gathered from a thoughtful sighing way in which they spoke of him--

The Lost Decade by Scott Fitzgerald

 

THE LOST DECADE

by 

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Scott Fitzgerald / La década perdida

  

All sorts of people came into the offices of the news-weekly and Orrison Brown had all sorts of relations with them. Outside of office hours he was "one of the editors"--during work time he was simply a curly-haired man who a year before had edited the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern and was now only too glad to take the undesirable assignments around the office, from straightening out illegible copy to playing call boy without the title.

Scott Fitzgerald / Boil Some Water-Lots of It

 

"BOIL SOME WATER-LOTS OF IT"

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Scott Fitzgerald / Pongan agua a hervir, mucha, mucha

 

Pat Hobby sat in his office in the writers' building and looked at his morning's work, just come back from the script department. He was on a "polish job," about the only kind he ever got nowadays. He was to repair a messy sequence in a hurry, but the word "hurry" neither frightened nor inspired him for Pat had been in Hollywood since he was thirty--now he was forty-nine. All the work he had done this morning (except a little changing around of lines so he could claim them as his own)--all he had actually invented was a single imperative sentence, spoken by a doctor.

"Boil some water--lots of it."

Scott Fitzgerald / The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

 

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Scott Fitzgerald / El curioso caso de Benjamin Button

---

James Montgomery Flagg illustration, 1922

1

As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home. At present, so I am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed that the first cries of the young shall be uttered upon the anaesthetic air of a hospital, preferably a fashionable one. So young Mr. and Mrs. Roger Button were fifty years ahead of style when they decided, one day in the summer of 1860, that their first baby should be born in a hospital. Whether this anachronism had any bearing upon the astonishing history I am about to set down will never be known.

 

One of My Oldest Friends

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Scott Fitzgerald / Uno de mis más viejos amigos

All afternoon Marion had been happy. She wandered from room to room of their little apartment, strolling into the nursery to help the nurse-girl feed the children from dripping spoons, and then reading for a while on their new sofa, the most extravagant thing they had bought in their five years of marriage.

Afternoon of an Author by Scott Fitzgerald

AFTERNOON OF AN AUTHOR 

by 

F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald / La tarde de un escritor

When he woke up he felt better than he had for many weeks, a fact that became plain to him negatively--he did not feel ill. He leaned for a moment against the door frame between his bedroom and bath till he could be sure he was not dizzy. Not a bit, not even when he stooped for a slipper under the bed.

Scott Fitzgerald / Babylon Revisited

BABYLON REVISITED
by
F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

"And where's Mr. Campbell?" Charlie asked.

"Gone to Switzerland. Mr. Campbell's a pretty sick man, Mr. Wales."

"I'm sorry to hear that. And George Hardt?" Charlie inquired.

"Back in America, gone to work."

"And where is the Snow Bird?"

"He was in here last week. Anyway, his friend, Mr. Schaeffer, is in Paris."

A New Leaf by Scott Fitzgerald

A NEW LEAF

by 

F. Scott Fitzgerald 

 

It was the first day warm enough to eat outdoors in the Bois de Boulogne, while chestnut blossoms slanted down across the tables and dropped impudently into the butter and the wine. Julia Ross ate a few with her bread and listened to the big goldfish rippling in the pool and the sparrows whirring about an abandoned table. You could see everybody again--the waiters with their professional faces, the watchful Frenchwomen all heels and eyes, Phil Hoffman opposite her with his heart balanced on his fork, and the extraordinarily handsome man just coming out on the terrace.

Scott Fitzgerald’s Asheville Days

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Asheville, 1935. He was 39, alcoholic and unsure of his talent.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Asheville Days

The 100 best novels / No 51 / The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

by Ray Hardee

May 2, 1989

By the time F. Scott Fitzgerald and his troubled wife Zelda reached Asheville in 1935, they were already in a period of serious decline. And not even the good mountain air nor the gentle setting at the Grove Park Inn could do much to change their fortunes.

F Scott Fitzgerald

The story behind F Scott Fitzgerald's lost short stories

Valuable insights into the troubled author’s life emerge from his meticulous scrapbooks of reviews, photographs, letters and ephemera, writes his editor

The 100 best novels / No 51 / The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

Anne Margaret Daniel
Friday 17 April 2017

I

n June 2015, the trustees of the Fitzgerald estate invited me to edit a collection of F Scott Fitzgerald’s last unpublished short stories. Scribner, his publisher for his whole career, would be bringing out the book.

Since 1994, when I was a graduate student at Princeton, I have worked often with the Fitzgerald papers at Firestone Library. Fitzgerald went to Princeton in 1913 and left in 1917 without graduating, going instead straight to officer training camp to prepare to serve in the first world war. The rare books and special collections division of the library, renamed in 1948 for Fitzgerald’s college friend Harvey S Firestone, class of 1920, received Fitzgerald’s papers as a gift from his daughter Scottie in 1950. His wife Zelda’s papers were later housed there too. It is one of the most extensive, and best preserved, collections of an American writer.

The Lost Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Lost Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

The 100 best novels / No 51 / The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

By Deborah Treisman
March 13, 2017

A conversation with Anne Margaret Daniel, the editor of “I’d Die for You and Other Lost Stories,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“The I.O.U.”—as well as another F. Scott Fitzgerald story that was published in The New Yorker, in 2012, “Thank You for the Light”—will appear in a new collection of Fitzgerald stories that comes out late next month, “I’d Die for You and Other Lost Stories.” How did the collection come about? How were the stories lost (and found)?

I was invited to edit a collection of fifteen stories by the Trustees of the Fitzgerald Estate. There weren’t enough unpublished stories to constitute a collection until very recently. Fitzgerald scholars had known of the existence of some of these stories, like “Thank You for the Light,” for decades, but others were rediscovered by Fitzgerald’s family only a few years ago. To these fifteen, I added three more that I uncovered as I worked on the edition, including a fragment that allows an intimate look at Fitzgerald’s creative process.

Scott Fitzgerald / The Last Tycoon

THE LAST TYCOON

by F Scott Fitzgerald

Covers

The 100 best novels / No 51 / The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

Scott Fitzgerald / Quotes

QUOTES

By F Scott Fitzgerald

The 100 best novels / No 51 / The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

‘I did not have a single feeling of inferiority, or shyness, or doubt, and no moral principles.’

‘All I want is to be very young always and very irresponsible, and to feel that my life is my own to live and be happy and die in my own way to please myself.’

‘Other people’s ideas of us are dependent largely on what they’ve hoped for.’

Tragic, fascinating, brilliant – life of ‘wild child’ Zelda Fitzgerald revisited

Two films and a TV series out soon portray the life of the jazz-age writer and wife of F Scott Fitzgerald

Sarah Hughes
Sunday 30 October 2016

Zelda Fitgerald and F.Scott Fitzgerald. 

Their marriage was flawed but deeply loving. 

Photograph: Alamy

She is thought of as the original wild child, a pearl-twirling party girl who died at the age of 47 after a fire broke out in the North Carolina sanatorium where she was a patient. Now Zelda Fitzgerald, the southern belle turned jazz-age heroine, dubbed “the first American flapper” by her husband and partner-in-drink Scott, is to have her own Hollywood make-over – two films are in the pipeline and a television series will air on Amazon Prime early next year.

All three projects have starry names attached: Jennifer Lawrence will take the lead in Zelda, a biopic directed by Ron Howard and based on Nancy Milford’s best-selling biography; Scarlett Johansson will bob her hair for The Beautiful and The Damned; and Christina Ricci will play the young and impetuous Zelda in the Amazon series Z: The Beginning of Everything. The title of the TV series comes from Scott’s awestruck comment on meeting Zelda: “I love her, and that’s the beginning and end of everything.”

Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda and Scottie

So what is it about Zelda that fascinates almost 70 years after her tragic end? In part it is that the upheavals the couple lived through find an echo in our own tumultuous times.

“Interest in the Fitzgeralds has definitely been on the increase – not only since Baz Luhrmann’s film of The Great Gatsby in 2013 but also from the many parallels between their lives and work and the period we’re living through right now,” says Sarah Churchwell, author of the critically acclaimed Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and The Invention of the Great Gatsby.