Chapter 1 - Youth, Maturation, and Adult Sexuality

Summary

This chapter explores the varied meanings of “youth” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels, short stories, and nonfiction. Traditionally, this theme has been examined to the writer’s disadvantage as evidence of his unfortunate investment in adolescence and young adulthood and his dread of senescence, which for him usually set in at the age of thirty. This survey argues that age consciousness was endemic throughout early twentieth-century American culture, with psychologist G. Stanley Hall in particular defining youth as a period of fiery intensity soon lost to the enervating compromises of middle age. Fitzgerald’s literary treatment of this issue helped rewrite the adolescent experience, but his fear of growing old created curious anxieties about sexuality and sex itself, which is why his fiction typically fixates on the kiss instead of coitus.