Winter Dreams By: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Born: September 24th, 1896 Died: December 21st, 1940

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. His namesake (and second cousin three times removed on his father's side) was Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to the "Star-Spangled Banner."

Fitzgerald's mother, Mary McQuillan, was from an Irish-Catholic family. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, had opened a wicker furniture business in St. Paul, and, when it failed, he took a job as a salesman for Procter & Gamble that took his family back and forth between Buffalo and Syracuse in upstate New York during the first decade of Fitzgerald's life. However, when F. Scott Fitzgerald was 12, the family moved back to St. Paul to live off of his mother's inheritance.

He attended the St. Paul Academy, and when he was 13, he saw his first piece of writing appear in print: a detective story published in the school newspaper. When he was 15 years old, his parents sent him to the Newman School. There, he met Father Sigourney Fay, who noticed his incipient talent with the written word and encouraged him to pursue his literary ambitions.

After graduating from the Newman School in 1913, Fitzgerald decided to stay in New Jersey to continue his artistic development at Princeton University. Although in 1917, he dropped out of school to join the U.S. Army. Afraid that he might die in World War I with his literary dreams unfulfilled, in the weeks before reporting to duty, Fitzgerald hastily wrote a novel called The Romantic Egotist. The publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons, rejected the novel, but the reviewer noted its originality and encouraged Fitzgerald to submit more work in the future.

Fitzgerald was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry and assigned to Camp Sheridan outside of Montgomery, Alabama. It was there that he met and fell in love with a beautiful 18-year-old girl named Zelda Sayre. The war ended in November 1918, before Fitzgerald was ever deployed, and upon his discharge he moved to New York City hoping to launch a career in advertising lucrative enough to convince Zelda to marry him. He quit his job after only a few months, however, and returned to St. Paul to rewrite his novel.

The novel, This Side of Paradise, was published in 1920 to glowing reviews and, almost overnight, turned Fitzgerald, at the age of 24, into one of the country's most promising young writers. One week after the novel's publication, he married Zelda Sayre in New York. They had one child, a daughter named Frances Scott Fitzgerald, born in 1921.

F. Scott Fitzgerald eagerly embraced his newly minted celebrity status and embarked on an extravagant lifestyle that earned him a reputation as a playboy and hindered his reputation as a serious literary writer. Some of his most notable short stories include "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "The Camel's Back" and "The Last of the Belles." Seeking a change of scenery to spark his creativity, in 1924, Fitzgerald moved to France, and it was there, in Valescure, that Fitzgerald wrote what would be credited as his greatest novel, The Great Gatsby. Although the book was well-received when it was published, it was not until the 1950s and '60s, 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.

After he completed The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's life began to unravel. Always a heavy drinker, he progressed steadily into alcoholism and suffered prolonged bouts of writer's block. His wife, Zelda, also suffered from mental health issues, and the couple spent the late 1920s moving back and forth between Delaware and France. In 1930, she suffered another breakdown and was treated at the Sheppard Pratt Hospital in Towson, Maryland, and that same year was admitted to a mental health clinic in Switzerland. Two years later she was treated at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

After another two years lost to alcohol and depression, in 1937 Fitzgerald attempted to revive his career as a screenwriter and freelance storywriter in Hollywood, and he achieved modest financial, if not critical, success for his efforts. He began work on another novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, in 1939, and he had completed over half the manuscript when he died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, at the age of 44, in Hollywood, California. F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure. None of his works received anything more than modest commercial or critical success during his lifetime. However, since his death, Fitzgerald has gained a reputation as one of the pre-eminent authors in the history of American literature due almost entirely to the enormous posthumous success of The Great Gatsby.

Fitzgerald’s writing style was inspired in large part by Joseph Conrad and fellow American authors like Sherwood Anderson. While Conrad’s style is extremely

dense, a series of puzzles wrapped in enigmas, it is includes a sense of mystery and the exotic. Sherwood Anderson is arguably another influence of Fitzgerald. Combining the clarity of literary naturalism and the psychological complexity of early 20th century literature. Fitzgerald puts a lot of his own life into his fiction, and many stories can be read for their allegorical qualities. Alcoholism, mental illness and marital issues factor into nearly every one of his novels, and they

aggressively contrast his glamorous public image.

Dexter Green is a fourteen-year-old caddy at the Sherry Island Golf Club in Black Bear, Minnesota. His father owns the second best grocery store in town, so Dexter is solidly middle-class—comfy, but by no means rich. One day, when he is caddying at the golf course, he meets the lovely Judy Jones. At the sight of Judy, he decides to quit his caddying job. He resolves to follow his "winter dreams" to become the kind of man who would fit into Judy Jones' wealthy world.

Years later, after college, Dexter invests in a laundry business in the city nearest to Black Bear. It's not the most luxurious job in the world, but he makes a boatload of money and starts hanging out with the wealthy families of Sherry Island. He meets Judy Jones a second time, when she accidentally hits one of Dexter's golf companions in the chest with a golf ball. Later that evening, Dexter bumps into Judy on a raft in the middle of Black Bear Lake. She asks him to join her for dinner, and Dexter eagerly accepts.

At dinner, Judy confesses that she is a bit blue because a man she really liked turns out to be poor. Oh, the horror! When Dexter assures Judy that he is well-off, she leans over to kiss him. Dexter realizes that he has wanted Judy Jones every since he was a teenager.

At this point, Dex is head-over-heels in love with Judy. Even though he knows that she has other lovers, he puts up with it. But after a year and a half, Dexter finally gets it: Judy doesn't actually care about him. At all. She will never return his feelings. So he gets engaged to Irene Scheerer, a nice (but slightly less attractive) girl with a friendly, welcoming family. But not so fast: when Judy turns up again asking Dexter to marry her, Dexter practically trips over Irene to begin, once again, his affair with Judy Jones.

Judy and Dexter's rekindled romance only lasts for a month. He moves east to New York the following year, and when the Americans join World War I, Dexter signs up for the Army. He is glad to have a distraction from his painful personal life. The heartbroken man actually prefers trench warfare to "webs of tangled emotion."

Flash forward seven years from Dexter's failed engagement to Judy. Dexter is thirty-two. He hears from one of his business associates that Judy Jones has become Judy Simms. Mr. Simms apparently drinks too much and cheats on her. Oh, and one other thing: she's not the beautiful, young woman she once was. Dexter is horrified to hear that Judy's beauty has faded. He understands that his "winter dream" has gone forever: he is no longer the idealistic young man who loved Judy Jones.

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Question 1:Reality and fantasy prove to be constantly at odds

with each other as Dexter and Judy search for stability and meaning in “Winter Dreams.” Dexter is the victim of his so-called winter dreams, adolescent fantasies

that he is never able to fulfill. As he searches for happiness and love, he unwisely focuses his quest

exclusively on Judy Jones. How does focusing on Judy hinder Dexter’s ability of finding happiness?

Question 2:Dexter has an ambiguous relationship with the bluebloods and idle rich who populate his social world. On one hand, he is proud of his self-made status and has no respect for the men for whom

luxury and wealth were a given. Still, the men are emblems of a world to which Dexter wants to belong.

In pursuing Judy, how is Dexter attempting to validate his claim as a member of the upper class?

Question 3:The theme of “winter dreams” in the story refers to the American Dream that Dexter comes to embody, but success brings a high cost, and social mobility restricts Dexter’s capacity for happiness. Dexter is from humble origins: his mother was an immigrant who constantly struggled with the language of her

adopted homeland. How does irony come into play for Dexter when he realizes the bleak rewards of the

American Dream?

Question 4:Judy Jones is shaped by men who view her as the ideal woman, as they must contort her to fit their

fantasy of this vision of feminine beauty and grace. Judy depends on these suitors’ attentions to give her life meaning. Just as Dexter seems out of his element

when he becomes part of Judy’s world, Judy too suffers from a kind of displacement. Where does this

hidden sense of displacement stem from?

Question 5:Dexter is desperate to validate his existence through

success and status, but he is also critical of his attempts to transcend his humble origins by blindly

pursuing wealth and sophistication. Dexter both celebrates and denies his middle-class background, and he himself ultimately becomes the obstacle that

stands in the way of the personal happiness he seeks. How does Dexter’s relationship with Judy stand in the

way of him achieving that happiness?

Question 6:

Dexter is blind to his emotional failings and personal shortcomings, seeing little distinction between the personal and professional. For him, love and money

are inextricably linked. How does Dexter’s persistence of Judy ultimately shatter his ideals and illusions of

her?

Question 7:

What will you take away most from this story? Why?