Fitzgerald at 100: great fiction, great history.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) one of the most influential and famous of American writers, left behind a body of work that defined an age - "the jazz age" - and a generation, and did much to illuminate the American character and probe the American soul. Because this September 24 was his hundredth birthday, there have been widespread celebrations of the Fitzgerald centennial throughout the year, including the reissuing of Fitzgerald's The Jazz Age (New Directions).

Rockville, Maryland, where Fitzgerald is buried in the family plot in Saint Mary's Cemetery, has held a year-long observance culminating on September 28 in a literary conference at Montgomery College, at which author William Styron was awarded the first F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Award and read from Fitzgerald's works. The observance will end with a memorial service at Saint Mary's Church in December.

Fitzgerald may lie among his father's ancestors in Maryland but he himself was formed and his view of life determined by his upbringing in Saint Paul, Minnesota, his birthplace. His mother's mercantile family was on the edge of the Saint Paul ascendancy, the scions of the traders, and the lumber and railroad barons who developed the city. He attended private schools with their young - Saint Paul Academy, Newman, Princeton - and his time at these schools served to intensify his feeling that he was always near, but never really of, great wealth. But he was of Saint Paul.

In The Great Gatsby, the novel most evocative of Fitzgerald's genius, the character who is his alter ego, Nick Carraway, writes that he comes from "a country of wide lawns and friendly trees." And in the end, Carraway concludes that he, and the other characters - Gatsby, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, and Jordan Baker - were "Westerners ... subtly, unadaptable to Eastern life."

One of my most vivid memories is of coming back west from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o'clock of a December evening with a few Chicago friends already caught up into their own holiday gaieties to bid them a hasty goodbye....

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour before we melted distinguishably into it again.

That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacement from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name.

Fitzgerald's feeling about the very rich, epitomized in the famous quotation "The very rich are different from you and me," began in his Saint Paul experience. Thus he wrote of Tom and Daisy Buchanan (Westerners by his definition),

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made....

Appropriately enough, the biggest celebration of the Fitzgerald centennial was organized in Saint Paul by radio personality Garrison Keillor of "A Prairie Home Companion." It stretched from September 24 through September 28 with a marathon reading of Fitzgerald's novels and short stories by actors and writers and Fitzgerald connections like his granddaughter Eleanor Lanahan and his wife Zelda's cousin, Robert Sayre. Among the writers-as-readers were E.L. Doctorow, Donald Hall, Bobbie Ann Mason, Jane Smiley, Michael Dorris, Patricia Hampl, etc.

The planned events ranged from the unveiling of a bronze statue of Fitzgerald, the issue of a Fitzgerald stamp, and a festive theater parade to a special live broadcast of "A Prairie Home Companion," featuring Fitzgerald and a Great Gatsby Ball.

There was an element of the prodigal son in the Saint Paul celebration. According to Keillor there was a time that "Saint Paul was wary of Fitzgerald's flamboyance and his alcoholism, and perhaps it was embarrassed by his burnout and all the small, mean anecdotes told about him, but now it's time to celebrate him as the magnificent writer and brave man that he was."

It is true that, after the halcyon days of American writers and artists in Paris, when Fitzgerald himself was wealthy enough so that he and Zelda moved among the rich with ease, Fitzgerald seemed to lose his compass and his gift. But at the end of his life his genius returned and was evident in the brilliant, unfinished novel The Love of the Last Tycoon. It was finally recognized that, as he himself said, his portrayal of life was essentially moral. When Cardinal William Baum secured permission for the interment of the nonpracticing Catholic Fitzgerald in a Catholic cemetery, he described Fitzgerald as "an artist who was able, with lucidity and poetic imagination, to portray the struggle between grace and death. His characters are in this great drama seeking God and seeking love."

As one writer asked to participate in the Saint Paul marathon, I reread Fitzgerald. What struck me most forcibly was the realization that, unlike many writers today whose books seem to come from a world apart and smell of academe, he wrote as a man of his own time about his time. Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli notes this in his introduction to Gatsby and adds, "great fiction is great social history." For example, The Great Gatsby is accepted as the defining novel of the twenties - the getrich-quick decade of opportunity, great possibilities, and hedonistic pleasure. It was also the decade of the beginnings of organized crime and unprincipled speculation in the stock market. "Although Fitzgerald joined the parties and chronicled them, he wrote in judgment," Bruccoli writes. His Gatsby rose and fell in the context of the realities and illusions of that era of which the author was a part.

In the same way, Fitzgerald as a screenwriter in his last years was part of the movie industry world. It is generally agreed that his The Love of the Last Tycoon, even unfinished, is the best novel ever written about the movie - the quintessential American industry of the twentieth century.

Fitzgerald understood his world. In the end he was uncompromising about writing its story well. Perhaps the best evaluation of his work is Fitzgerald's own, in a letter to his daughter at college: "I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur" (italics mine).