Flyover Blues: The Enduring Relevance of F. Scott Fitzgerald

“One hundred years after Fitzgerald’s great novels, we are living in the same world as Nick Carraway, Amory Blaine, and Jay Gatsby.”

“The lower classes are narrower, less pleasant and personally more selfish—certainly more stupid.’” F. Scott Fitzgerald, that great sage and cynic of American life, left to the country (and the world) a great treasure of Midwestern literary characters who are beaten down and defeated by the illusive allure of the “American Dream.” Now a century later, his writings seem prophetic of the very epoch we are restlessly struggling through.

As Nick Carraway laments near the end of the Great Gatsby, “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” His lament is the realization of the broken and defeated spirit of infinity that had drawn these Middle-West souls to the East Coast only to end in alienation, death, and defeat. Nick’s lament is symptomatic of another problem: waking up from the American Dream to realize it was only an illusion. The veneer of parties, cars, grotesque materialism, and café society—once peeled back—reveals a horror, a horror of decadence, lust, and murder.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a Midwesterner himself. Born in Minnesota, he was educated at Princeton, ventured to Paris and met Ernest Hemingway, returned to America and pursued his literary career, then died a pauper. His own life, sometimes vicariously reimagined in his literary characters, was emblematic of the blues now overwhelming the United States—especially the heartland of his birth which Fitzgerald continuously returned to, romantically and nostalgically, throughout his life and work.