Mark J. Schenker of Yale College will discuss F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life and work in the 1920s—a period he both depicted in his fiction and came to represent in his personal life—through the lens of Tales of the Jazz Age (1922). This program is part of Wilton Reads 2020.

Online registration required in order to receive a Zoom invitation.

The most popular of the four short story collections published in the author’s short lifetime (1896-1940), Tales of the Jazz Age reflects the eclecticism, exuberance and experimentation of the 1920s, also called the Roaring Twenties because of the high energy and even freneticism of the decade.The volume’s 11 stories—nine written in third-person narration and two as mini-plays—range from social satires to character studies, from historical vignettes to bold fantasies. Set variously in Montana and Maryland, Georgia and Illinois, Ohio and Kentucky, and NYC and London, they represent in fiction the kind of disruption of the expected that syncopation brought to jazz music. It is characteristic of Fitzgerald’s accomplishment that while he was writing this stories for the chief purpose of making money (he himself called the practice “whoring”), he was creating a portrait of his age, one that he popularized and helped to name. 

Mark Schenker has been at Yale College since 1990 and is currently a senior associate dean of the College and Dean of Academic Affairs. A former lecturer in the English Department at Yale, he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University with a concentration in 19th-century and early 20th-century English literature. For over 30 years, Dean Schenker has lectured on literature and film and has led book discussion series in more than 100 venues in Connecticut, including public libraries and retirement communities, museums and cultural centers.