A little bit of literature

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. 

There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well rounded man.’ This isn’t just an epigram — life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.”

Vocabulary build-up

The transitive verb unfold means “to become clear, apparent, or known; to lay open to view; to set forth; explain; to develop.” 

The noun epigram means “a short, witty poem expressing a single thought or observation; a concise, clever, often paradoxical statement.”

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Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. As a member of the Princeton Class of 1917, Fitzgerald neglected his studies for his literary apprenticeship. The publication of “This Side of Paradise” on March 26, 1920, made the 24-year-old Fitzgerald famous almost overnight. He embarked on an extravagant life as a young celebrity. Fitzgerald endeavored to earn a solid literary reputation, but his playboy image impeded the proper assessment of his work. Literary opinion makers were reluctant to accord Fitzgerald full marks as a serious craftsman. His reputation as a drinker inspired the myth that he was an irresponsible writer; yet he was a painstaking reviser whose fiction went through layers of drafts. Fitzgerald’s clear, lyrical, colorful, witty style evoked the emotions associated with time and place. The chief theme of Fitzgerald’s work is aspiration, the idealism he regarded as defining the American character. Another major theme was mutability or loss. He wrote “The Great Gatsby” during the summer and fall of 1924, when he was living in France. The Great Gatsby marked a striking advance in Fitzgerald’s technique, utilizing a complex structure and a controlled narrative point of view. “The Great Gatsby” is considered Fitzgerald's finest work, with its beautiful lyricism, pitch-perfect portrayal of the Jazz Age, and searching critiques of materialism, love and the American Dream. Although “The Great Gatsby” was well-received when it was published, it was not until the 1950s and 1960s, long after Fitzgerald's death, that it achieved its stature as the definitive portrait of the "Roaring Twenties," as well as one of the greatest American novels ever written.