On the French Riviera in 1924, twenty-seven year-old Scott Fitzgerald struggles to breathe life into Jay Gatsby, the protagonist of his new novel. Eager to be viewed as a serious writer, more than the philosopher of the flapper, he wants to create ‘something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.’
Not only is his artistic reputation on the line, he is in a precarious financial position; near broke and living off advances received from his publisher. Scott’s struggle with the novel echoes his troubled life and fraught relationship with his Irish identity; justifying the self-invention of Midwest farm boy Jimmy Gatz into the nouveau riche Jay Gatsby, he writes, ‘what better right does a man possess than to invent his own antecedents?’
A dramatic, evocative and vivid narrative of the early life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, his search for identity in an evolving America and how he uses that journey to bring his most iconic character to life, climaxing with the revelatory Plaza Hotel confrontation: He looked – and this is said in all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden – as if he had “killed a man.”