Blog Entry #2

From Tender Is the Night page 12

She awoke drenched with sweat to find the beach deserted save for the man in the jokey cap, who was folding a last umbrella. As Rosemary lay blinking, he walked nearer and said:
"I was going to wake you before I left. It's not good to get too burned right away."
"Thank you." Rosemary looked down at her crimson legs.
"Heavens!"
She laughed cheerfully, inviting him to talk, but Dick Diver was already carrying a tent and a beach umbrella up to a waiting car, so she went into the water to wash off the sweat. He came back and gathering up a rake, a shovel, and a sieve, stowed them in a crevice of a rock. He glanced up and down the beach to see if he had left anything.
"Do you know what time it is?" Rosemary asked.
"It's about half-past one."
They faced the seascape together momentarily.
"It's not a bad time," said Dick Diver. "It's not one of worst times of the day."
He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently. Then he shouldered his last piece of junk and went up to his car, and Rosemary came out of the water, shook out her peignoir and walked up to the hotel.

Fitzgerald doesn't use a lot of dialogue. He usually focuses on the scenery and in the actual telling of the story. But whenever he does use dialogue it's simple and casual. It seems that in his writing he really uses dialogue as a way of simple, day-to-day expression but the important descriptive things he writes as narration.

Pgs. 3-12
Rosemary and her mother are vacationing in France. Rosemary is a new movie star. She is 18. She speaks French. Rosemary is a good swimmer. Some of the people on the beach call to her and she goes reluctantly. They like to be with her but she would prefer to be with the other beach goers, only she'd feel like a stranger because they have a pattern or ritual that she might break. Rosemary falls in love with Dick Diver.

For my paper I might want to analyze the effect dialogue has on Fitzgerald's books. Tender Is the Night is very much storytelling, and is that why he has less dialogue?

American Author Proposal

I have chosen Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald as my author. I have only heard about him. I have never read any of his books. In fact, up until recently, the only book I knew he wrote was The Great Gatsby. But that’s why I’ve chosen Fitzgerald as my author. I know pretty much nothing about him. But in researching him, I’ve found out more information and what I’ve discovered really intrigues me.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote some of his work during the Jazz Age. I absolutely love the Jazz Age. I really like it because it’s all about change and art and culture. So I think that that probably means that what Fitzgerald writes about is a little different than traditional writers before him. That makes for possible controversy in the style that he wrote or the topics his books were about. Because this paper I’m about to write is so long, it’s good that I find something that I can dispute about in my paper.

Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St. Paul Minnesota. So he was a natural-born citizen of the US. The fact that he was alive during several of the most important and transitional periods in US history, shows that he was a true American. He lived through World War I, the Great Depression, The Roaring 20s, and the Jazz Age. All of these changes in society forced a new kind of writing to start. The new writing was called Modernism. Fitzgerald is seen as a contributor to the great new way of writing.

I believe that there is enough of Fitzgerald’s work to write this paper. Even though he only finished four novels, they are good novels. I’m sure there is something in each and every one of the books that can help me support my thesis, no matter what I decide it will be. Also, Fitzgerald wrote many, many short stories. A lot of his writing is based on his real life experiences so there are possibilities for several links from Fitzgerald’s writing, to his real life. And it’s those kinds of connections that make good essays. There is a lot I can say about why his work was important, especially during that age and time. Fitzgerald was looked up to as a writer and looked up to others too. He had a lot of influence on the upcoming writers of that time.

Fitzgerald wrote these books: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby, and Tender Is the Night. He also wrote The Last Tycoon but he didn’t exactly get to finish that book. His friend later did, though. I think that I want to read Tender Is the Night first. This is because it is thought to be Fitzgerald’s closest writing to an autobiographical. Some people say that it is, others say not, but there are definitely a lot of similarities. If I read this first then I’d get a good idea of what his life was like when he was alive. Then after I’ll read This Side of Paradise, which talks about life after WWI, for a soldier. This was Fitzgerald’s first book. It won him a lot of fame. After that one I will most likely read The Beautiful and Damned, yet another book about Fitzgerald’s relationship with his wife. I won’t be reading The Great Gatsby, by myself, simply because we’re going to be reading that in class. I would love to, however, read a couple of Fitzgerald’s short stories to see how they differ from the novels he’d written. And depending on whether or not I feel that I have sufficient information I’ll read The Love of the Last Tycoon. I don’t think that after reading so much I would need to read something else but this is his last book. I hope to learn a lot.