"My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward"
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Fitzgerald admits what a lot of “timeless” artists won’t: he’s chasing the living, not the marble pedestal. “Reach my generation” is a commercial and emotional target, a writer’s version of catching the room’s voltage. It’s also a quiet flex: the only way to be read later is to be read now, by people who can recognize themselves on the page without footnotes.
The line’s elegance is in its three-tiered time bomb. Youth first: not innocence, but appetite. Young readers are the quickest to grant a work its citizenship in the culture, because they’re looking for language that matches their speed and disillusionment. Then come “the critics of the next,” a sly acknowledgment that prestige is often delayed, awarded by people who inherit a work after its original scandal or shimmer has cooled into “importance.” Finally, “the schoolmasters of ever afterward” is Fitzgerald’s most barbed stroke. He imagines the canonizing machinery - syllabi, lectures, moral lessons - embalming what began as urgent, messy, contemporary feeling.
Context matters: Fitzgerald wrote with the acute self-awareness of a novelist who was both celebrity and craftsman, a man watching the Jazz Age marketize youth even as he mythologized it. The subtext is pragmatic and faintly bitter: writers don’t control their afterlives. If you’re lucky, you get critics who dignify you; if you’re really unlucky, you get teachers who sanitize you. The joke lands because it’s true, and because Fitzgerald can’t resist writing for posterity even while warning you what posterity does.
The line’s elegance is in its three-tiered time bomb. Youth first: not innocence, but appetite. Young readers are the quickest to grant a work its citizenship in the culture, because they’re looking for language that matches their speed and disillusionment. Then come “the critics of the next,” a sly acknowledgment that prestige is often delayed, awarded by people who inherit a work after its original scandal or shimmer has cooled into “importance.” Finally, “the schoolmasters of ever afterward” is Fitzgerald’s most barbed stroke. He imagines the canonizing machinery - syllabi, lectures, moral lessons - embalming what began as urgent, messy, contemporary feeling.
Context matters: Fitzgerald wrote with the acute self-awareness of a novelist who was both celebrity and craftsman, a man watching the Jazz Age marketize youth even as he mythologized it. The subtext is pragmatic and faintly bitter: writers don’t control their afterlives. If you’re lucky, you get critics who dignify you; if you’re really unlucky, you get teachers who sanitize you. The joke lands because it’s true, and because Fitzgerald can’t resist writing for posterity even while warning you what posterity does.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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