NavDharmyug

F. Scott Fitzgerald With his Daughter, Scottiee I was, of late, putting together an article on the letters of Francis Scott Fitzgerald or FSF. I have always been enamored by his writing. Fitzgerald had a daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, whom he lovingly addressed as Scottie or Scottina. Scottie was borne in October, 1921, soon after Fitzgerald married Zelda, the daughter of a Judge, riding on the success of his first book, This Side of the Paradise. Scott Fitzgerald’s later life was fraught with difficulties, financial and otherwise. He lived apart from Zelda who mostly lived out of hospitals, searching for the cure for her chronic depression. His later work could not replicate the early success of The Tales of the Jazz Age, and The Other Side of Paradise,  and his slip into abject poverty could not even be arrested by The Great Gatsby, which could get its due only after his sad death at the age of 44. He lived away Scottie, and wanted to teach her all that he coul...

We are flooded with communications and a splurge of media is overwhelming our lives. The Social media is ubiquitous, addictive and imperiously intrusive in modern lives. It has fooled us to believe that it is a mode of communication, replacing something as humble and thoughtful as a letter. Communication is two people talking to each other, which is not the case with Social media. It talks at you. The letters, those humble things which arrived with promises and hope in the envelopes carried a little bit of the soul of the writer in them. When the reader read them, ran his or her fingers over the writings with ink smudged due to bad nib, damp weather or tears, we touched the other person. The fact that writing letters took time and effort made it impossible for one not to leave something of oneself on those pages. The letters tell you a lot about the person who wrote them and therefore reading letters of historical figures is a re-discovery of the great minds and souls as thinking, ...

It is a given that life is going to end in death. There is no other conclusion, no other end, no other answer possible to the eternal question of life but death. It takes magnificent madness or immense intelligence to invent happiness into an otherwise bleak undertaking, which invariably ends in dying. We are therefore so charmed by the stories which restore our faith in this ever-so doomed journey of life. The Great Gatsby is a mix of both- the madness and the intelligence. This is a rare book which doesn’t need a review but which one cannot stop analyzing and raving about. It is such an amazing work that one doesn’t even want to credit the writer about it. Such brilliant art is nothing if not an accident of nature. The writer is a mere conduit of an idea whose time has come. But then, that is very unjust to F. Scott Fitzgerald . The writer stands in stark contrast to his compatriot and sometimes friend Ernest Hemingway. While Hemingway had a stark writing where every wo...