Aging & Wisdom Quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald is sketching a career arc with the cool fatalism of someone who’s watched reputations rise and rot in real time. “Write for the youth of his own generation” isn’t a sentimental nod to young readers; it’s a practical mandate. Youth are the culture’s early adopters, the ones who can recognize themselves in new language before institutions do. If you can’t catch that live wire, you’re not contemporary, you’re just decorative.

Then comes the sting: “the critics of the next.” Fitzgerald knows critics rarely reward what’s happening now; they reward what time has already certified as Important. He’s implying that serious writing has to survive its initial misreadings, trend cycles, and moral panics long enough to be reappraised by a later cohort with different anxieties and vocabularies. It’s a dig at criticism’s lag, but also a recognition that interpretation is a relay race, not a verdict.

The “schoolmaster of ever afterwards” lands with a mix of dread and ambition. Canonization is both immortality and imprisonment: your work becomes curriculum, excerpted, footnoted, and tamed into themes. Fitzgerald, the chronicler of glamour and self-invention, understands that posterity turns art into lessons, sanding down its scandal and heat. Coming from a writer who was celebrated, dismissed, and then resurrected by academics, the line reads like a prophecy and a warning: write hot enough for the present, structured enough for future arguments, and resilient enough to withstand being embalmed.