Winter Dreams: The Inspiration for The Great Gatsby Novel (Read & Co. Classics Edition)

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

This 1922 short story, ‘Winter Dreams’, encapsulates the Jazz Age. With themes of unrequited love and self-made success, F. Scott Fitzgerald used this elegiac short story as the basis for his masterful novel The Great Gatsby (1925).

Dexter Green is the son of a middle-class grocery store owner. To earn money, he starts working as a golf caddie and it is on the golf course that he meets the beautiful socialite Judy Jones. Several years later, after Dexter has graduated college and become a self-made financial success, he and Judy are reunited. Their turbulent romance begins and Dexter is given many opportunities to change the course of his life.

‘Winter Dreams’ was first published in Metropolitan magazine in 1922 before being collected in All the Sad Young Men (1926). Like much of Fitzgerald’s work, the story highlights the financial extravagance and eventual disillusionment of the Jazz Age. Fitzgerald’s characters are self-serving and, as a result, often regret their choices and long to recover their lost youth. Commenting on the frivolity of the upper class, Fitzgerald drew from his own experiences to breathe life into this realistic short story, which later became the basis for The Great Gatsby (1925).

This volume has been republished in a beautiful new edition, featuring an introductory essay on Jazz Age literature. Not to be missed by fans of The Great Gatsby, Winter Dreams would make the perfect addition to the bookshelves of fans of Fitzgerald’s work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read & Co. Classics
• Release date: Sep 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781528798341

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was an American novelist and short story writer. He is best known for his 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, the quintessential tale of the decadence and overindulgence of the Jazz Age. Born into an upper middle-class family in St. Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald was raised in New York. After dropping out of Princeton University in 1917 to join the Army, he was stationed in Alabama, where he met wealthy socialite Zelda Sayre. It was only after he achieved moderate success with his debut novel This Side of Paradise that Zelda agreed to marry him. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, propelled him to literary stardom, the volatile nature of which inspired his best-known work The Great Gatsby. Though it met with mixed reviews in Fitzgerald’s lifetime, The Great Gatsby is now considered by some literary scholars to be the “Great American Novel.” Haunted by alcoholism, declining popularity, and financial difficulties well into the 1930s, Fitzgerald died in 1940. An unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, was published posthumously in 1941. 

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Winter Dreams

Read & Co. Classics Edition

THE INSPIRATION FOR

THE GREAT GATSBY NOVEL

By

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

WITH THE

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY

The Jazz Age Literature of

the Lost Generation

First published in 1922

Copyright © 2022 Read & Co. Classics

This edition is published by Read & Co. Classics,

an imprint of Read & Co.

This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any

way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library.

Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd.

For more information visit

www.readandcobooks.co.uk

Contents

F. Scott Fitzgerald

THE JAZZ AGE LITERATURE OF THE LOST GENERATION

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA.

Born to an upper-middle-class family, Fitzgerald was named after his famous lawyer second cousin, Francis Scott Key, But was referred to as Scott. His early education was at two Catholic schools in Buffalo, New York, first the Angels Convent, where he attended lessons for only half of the school day (he was allowed to choose which half) and then Nardin Academy. At an early age he was recognised as being of unusual intelligence and developed a keen interest in literature.

In 1908, his family returned to Minnesota due to his father being fired from Proctor & Gamble. While in Minnesota he attended St. Paul Academy and began his career as a fiction writer, having his first story printed in the school newspaper at the age of 13. He then moved to a prestigious Catholic prep school, Newman School in Jersey, before graduating in 1913 and enrolling at Princeton University.

He became immersed in the literary culture at Princeton, making friends with future writers and critics such as John Peale Bishop and Edmund Wilson, and writing for university publications including The Princeton Tiger and the Nassau Lit. His studies, however, suffered due to his literary pursuits and in 1917 he dropped out of education to join the U.S. Army and fight in World War I. He had made a couple of submissions of novels to publisher Charles Scribner's Sons but both were rejected even though his writing style was praised. One of these was The Romantic Egoist, hastily written before reporting for military duty for fear that he may die in the ensuing fighting. This novel was later revised and accepted in 1919 under the title This Side of Paradise.

While serving as a second lieutenant in Montgomery, Alabama, Fitzgerald met his future wife, Zelda Sayre, daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court justice. When the war ended in 1918, he and Zelda wedded, and in 1921 had their first and only child, Frances Scott Scottie Fitzgerald.

During the 1920's Jazz Age Fitzgerald became enchanted with the expatriate community in Paris, visiting several times and making influential friends such as Ernest Hemingway. He continued his career writing short stories for magazines such as 'The Saturday Evening Post', Collier's